A struggle over religious rights? How Muslim minorities and natives view the accommodation of religion in six European countries

Many European countries accommodate their Muslim minorities by increasingly extending their religious rights. Such accommodation, however, does not always go undisputed. Vigorous debates between Muslim spokespersons and non-Muslim actors in the public arena have preceded the settlements reached over most rights until now. Yet, analyses of the debates over religious accommodation remained mostly on the macro and meso level, studying public institutions or public claim-making; they do not necessarily reflect individual needs and opinions. Particularly since previous research indicates that minorities do not feel well represented by minority organizations or politicians, it is overdue to link the political macro and the micro level and analyze whether characteristics of claims-making in public debates on the meso level are reflected on the individual level. This also entails testing the macro-level effects of inclusive approaches to immigrant citizenship rights and church-state relations on individual evaluations of group rights. In countries where nation states strongly support all religious groups (or pose barriers to none of them) and pursue inclusive immigrant citizenship rights, minorities are expected to have fewer difficulties with claiming cultural group rights and to be more successful in obtaining these rights. The paper focuses on individual evaluations of the extensiveness and quality of these rights. It compares the opinions expressed by native majority members to those of individuals belonging to a Muslim minority of former Yugoslav, Turkish, Moroccan and Pakistani descent. For the analysis we draw on the novel EURISLAM dataset with more than 7.000 respondents living in Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland.