It is certainly quite normal that, during the first decades of their new presence in the West, Muslims should have sought principally to protect themselves; they had no choice, and it was as much about the survival of their religious identity as about the preservation of the richness of their culture.<\/p>\n

This is how all the initial steps toward adaptation undergone by all immigrant populations should be understood. For Muslims, the process went from the building of mosques to the establishment of Islamic associations via the elaboration of a way of thinking, a discourse, and, little by little, a legal reference framework in the various continents and countries.<\/p>\n

The various meetings of `ulamaa\u2019<\/em> \u00a0(religious scholars) in the West (from the 1980s in the United States to the beginning of the 1990s in Europe), which tried to address the new questions faced by Muslims in industrialized societies, were part of this trend. The institutionalization of this dynamic with the establishment of the Fiqh Council (Council of Islamic Law and Jurisprudence) in the United States and the European Council for Research and Fatwas, in 1997, made possible the formulation of a series of legal opinions in step with Western societies and available to the public.<\/p>\n

There was then talk of a \u201cfiqh al-aqalliyyat<\/em>\u201d (law and jurisprudence of minorities), which was to allow Muslims in the West to live their faith and religion more peacefully.<\/p>\n

These achievements were, without a shadow of doubt, fundamental and particularly necessary; they constituted a new and important stage in the establishment of Muslims in the West. We must nevertheless be aware that it was just a stage and that we should rethink our presence in the West more comprehensively.<\/p>\n

Indeed, our own sources come to our aid and press us to go beyond three staging posts, which are in the long term to be considered as traps: the dualist approach, minority thinking, and integration thought of only in terms of adaptation. Doubtless the coming generations will be better equipped to understand and take up these challenges, but the need to reformulate from the inside is already being felt.<\/p>\n

To think of our belonging to Islam in the West in terms of Otherness, adaptation to limitations, and authorized compromise (rukhas<\/em>) cannot be enough and gives the impression of structural adjustments that make it possible to survive in a sort of imagined borderland but that do not provide the means really to flourish, participate in, and fully engage in our societies.<\/p>\n