As Muslims have moved recently in large numbers to new countries, particularly in Western Europe and North America, they have adapted Islamic norms and traditions to new social and political spaces. As a result, Muslim institutions and orientations show marked differences across different Western countries; the challenge to anthropologists is to study in contrastive fashion these processes of adaptation. In this chapter, I take the example of Islamic divorce to illustrate how we can understand processes of Islamic adaptation by contrasting several country cases and then examining the mechanisms that can explain the contrasts.

Although the Muslim presence in Western Europe and North America is an old one, particularly in south-eastern and south-western parts of Europe, new streams of Muslim workers and their families arrived in Europe during the mid-twentieth century – earlier in some places, such as France and Britain, and later in others, such as Sweden and Spain. Most came from South Asia, North and West Africa, and Turkey, although increasing numbers have arrived more recently from other places (Bowen 2008). In the same period, new waves of Muslims came to North America from South Asia and the Middle East (Leonard 2003).