Public Acceptance of Mosques in Contemporary European Settings

• In Event: "Looking for Freedom" and Other Democratic Values

Abstract

The controversies around building mosques seen many times over in Europe since the 1980s is a major challenge to Muslim inclusion as full democratic citizens. This paper contributes to understanding the nature and sources of this challenge by examining drivers of public opposition to and acceptance of mosques. The results obtained over a series of survey experiments conducted in Germany, Norway and Sweden are to our knowledge the broadest study of non-Muslims’ acceptance of mosque-proposals to date. We find that a lot of factors matter: which functions the mosque serves, whether the mosque has been approved through the ordinary local process, funding-sources. Size and aesthetic qualities also matter, but not in the way most readily assumed. Public acceptance is widest, in our study at least, for mosques that are mid-size and decent, rather than modest or grande. Our novel contribution is not in how we identify or take into account the hardline drivers of opposition to mosques among publics in Europe. Instead, we add insight into what affects mosque acceptance among those who believe they have an obligation as democratic citizens to include religious and ethnic minorities, such as, Muslims. We examine which proposals to build mosques are in line with their ideas of what they owe Muslim minority groups and which rub against them.

Authors

• Marc Helbling, University of Mannheim

• Elisabeth Ivarsflaten, University of Bergen

• Richard Traunmuller, University of Mannheim