Immigration, Sociology of religion, Islam, Europe

Reviewing a ‘some-years-old’ book can sometimes be an useful experience. It can be the case when it serves to rediscover something that passed unfortunately unnoticed, and can offer new light to present times (offering the intellectual pleasure of discovering that someone have seen things before them happening, or with prospective and insightful understandings). Or, on the contrary, when it shows how rapidly society has changed, and to which respect we are now undergoing a rapid social change, that has make the situation very different from the past, if not hardly recognisable. In this case, the book is a sort of mirror that reflects more the importance of the social processes at work than reality itself.

It is the latter the case for this book, originally published in Dutch under the more respondent to reality title of Nederland en zijn Islam, i.e. The Netherlands and its Islam. And, indeed, we will consider the book as such, as an analysis of the Dutch situation, being the reference to Europe, here, limited to a short introductory chapter, and to a comparative analysis referring to Belgium and the United Kingdom, that quite obviously do not necessarily represent Europe. From this point of view, the comparative effort does not seem to represent the core part of the book, included in quantitative terms.

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