Sean Martin
December 24th, 2004, 08:00 PM
Many of them have rejected civilized behavior, and the word "adopted" is completely inappropriate. The word "invasion" is much more appropriate. New laws on citizenship across the world, besides changing laws on immigration, will have to be something that Western countries will have to consider to protect civilization.
Butchered piglets hang in tidy rows at the open-air market, and shoppers haggle over cheese and oysters in a scene hardly altered since the last Bourbon king was buried at the Gothic church on the corner.
But slip out of the market on a Friday, and a quarter-mile up the road you will find a very different France: Hundreds of Muslims squeezed hip to hip into an unheated canvas tent, bowing in sacred silence toward Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, which few of them have ever seen.
The worshipers at this makeshift mosque on the edge of Paris are men and women, dressed in the latest fashions and traditional robes, Arab, European and African. They are moderate, conservative and fundamentalist. They are first-, second- and third-generation immigrants. They are content and they are enraged. They are the future that Europe is straining to handle.
What is happening in Europe may provide a partial preview of what lies ahead for the United States and its fast-growing Muslim population.
For the first time in history, Muslims are building large and growing minorities across the secular Western world--nowhere more visibly than in Western Europe, where their numbers have more than doubled in the past two decades. The impact is unfolding from Amsterdam to Paris to Madrid, as Muslims struggle -- with words, votes and sometimes violence--to stake out their place in adopted societies.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/chitribts/20041219/ts_chicagotrib/islamshapinganeweurope
Butchered piglets hang in tidy rows at the open-air market, and shoppers haggle over cheese and oysters in a scene hardly altered since the last Bourbon king was buried at the Gothic church on the corner.
But slip out of the market on a Friday, and a quarter-mile up the road you will find a very different France: Hundreds of Muslims squeezed hip to hip into an unheated canvas tent, bowing in sacred silence toward Mecca, the birthplace of Islam, which few of them have ever seen.
The worshipers at this makeshift mosque on the edge of Paris are men and women, dressed in the latest fashions and traditional robes, Arab, European and African. They are moderate, conservative and fundamentalist. They are first-, second- and third-generation immigrants. They are content and they are enraged. They are the future that Europe is straining to handle.
What is happening in Europe may provide a partial preview of what lies ahead for the United States and its fast-growing Muslim population.
For the first time in history, Muslims are building large and growing minorities across the secular Western world--nowhere more visibly than in Western Europe, where their numbers have more than doubled in the past two decades. The impact is unfolding from Amsterdam to Paris to Madrid, as Muslims struggle -- with words, votes and sometimes violence--to stake out their place in adopted societies.
http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/chitribts/20041219/ts_chicagotrib/islamshapinganeweurope