Islam and Social Democrats: Integrating Europe’s Muslim Minorities

The first serious divergences between Muslims and the left in Europe began with the fatwa issued by Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini against Salman Rushdie in 1989 and religious demands to censor his novel, The Satanic Verses. The split widened later that year, when France began to restrict the wearing of girls’ headscarves in schools.Until then, parties on the left had embraced the mostly working-class minority as a natural ally. Migrants from Muslim-majority countries first began settling permanently in Western Europe in the 1970s and ’80s. .