exploring muslim identities in europe & north america

There is a line separating Western and Eastern Europeans when it comes to public attitudes toward Muslims according to the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan organization that generates data on the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world .  The questions Pew Center asked related to the public's acceptance of Muslims in familial, and public contexts as well as to the association of religion to national identity.  The continental divide in attitudes and values can be extreme in some cases. For example, in nearly every Central and Eastern European country polled by the  Pew Research Center ,  fewer than half  of adults say they would be willing to accept Muslims into their family; in nearly every Western European country surveyed,  more  than half  say they would accept a Muslim into their family.  In a separate question, Western Europeans also are much more likely than their Central and Eastern European counterparts to say they would accept Muslims in their neighborhoods. F

An interesting article from the Sunday edition of the Greek newspaper, TO VIMA, traces the changes that one of the very few European societies that had a historical experience of coexistence with Islam is undergoing. Although Eastern Orthodox Christians living in the southern Balkans have lived side by side with Ottoman Muslims for over five centuries, today, Greeks are much more sceptical about the presence of Muslims and Islam in the country. According to some sources, there may be 830,000 to 1,000,000 Muslim residents and citizens in Greece. Whereas, in the past, the minority (Muslim citizens of Greece exempted from the Lausanne Treaty population exchange) were concentrated in Northeastern Greece, today the bulk of Greece's Muslims (primarily migrants from various Muslim countries, but also an increasing number of converts) live throughout the country but primarily in the Athens conurbation. Since the establishment of the Greek state in the 1830s, Orthodox Chr