Introduction

In Britain and France Islam is a faith encompassing many cultures, which has created very significant political issues in terms of the visibility and number of Muslims. The most recent official United Kingdom Census of 2001 estimated that there were 1.6 million Muslims in the UK, mainly of South Asian origin, representing 3% of the total population (Summerfield and Baljit 2005: 182). Sean McLoughlin and Tahir Abbas reported that the Office for National Statistics estimate was 2.4 million Muslims in 2009 in the United-Kingdom (McLoughlin and Abbas 2010: 545). This places Islam, as in France, as the second main religion in the country. In France, where Muslims are mainly of North-African descent, it is more difficult to evaluate the exact number of Muslims since any census of the population on religious or ethnic criteria is forbidden. Despite this, one estimate has given a potential number of 4.1 million, and in 2007 the National Institute of Statistics estimated that Muslims represented 7.1% of the total population (Zwilling 2010: 184). At a European level, these figures place British and French Muslim communities as the third and the first largest in western Europe respectively.