Why the West Fears Islam

An Exploration of Muslims in Liberal Democracies

By Jocelyne Cesari

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http://us.macmillan.com/whythewestfearsislam/JocelyneCesari

"Based on several years of empirical surveys among Muslims in Europe and the US, the book states that the current political fear of Islam cannot be explained by Muslims' behaviors as citizens and believers. Actually, most of surveys show that Islam is a resource more than an obstacle in the social and political integration of Muslims in western societies. How then can we explain the increasing resistance to the presence of Islam in the West? Cesari identifies three main reasons that make Islam and Muslims the internal and external enemy of the West: the securitization of Islam due to the War on Terror, the specificity of European secularism that tends to reject religious manifestations from public space, and the increasing visibility of salafism, mistakenly taken as the "true" Islam by non Muslims by more and more Muslims as well".