Comparing ‘Gaps’ Between Majorities and Muslims over Key Issues: Really so Different?

While there is significant research on the legal, institutional and policy accommodation of Muslims, there is relatively much less on people, i.e., the Muslims and non-Muslims who respond to and negotiate those contexts through interactions in their everyday lives. If Muslims are studied without reference to other people in their societies, there is a tendency to reify their cultural differences, rather than locate them within the set of social relationships that constitute socio-cultural distance. Also there are relatively few data-sources that allow indepth analysis on Muslims’ lives across different aspects of their socio-cultural integration and across several countries. The EurIslam survey behind this paper includes a sample of non-Muslim majorities. Without this (something surprisingly absent in a many surveys on ‘Muslims’) we lack a baseline against which to see or measure socio-cultural ‘gaps’ in analyses. This paper compares the views of Muslims and non-Muslims over key issues that are salient in the literature on socio-cultural differences (religion, gender, family values, democracy). This allows us to examine to what degree the two groups (Muslims and majorities) perceive that there are differences between them and the ‘other’. Is the gap perceived more from the Muslim or majority side, or both, or none? The EurIslam data is on the UK, Netherlands, France and Germany. It also allows differentiation between different Muslim groups of national origin (Moroccans, Turks, Pakistanis, Ex-Yugoslavians), that adds nuance to the question of whether there is a single ‘Muslim’ position.