Make integration your goal, Muslim leaders told

European Muslims are not content to remain “separate and isolated” and moderate Islamic leaders must make greater social and political integration their main goal, the head of Austria’s Islamic community urged at the opening of a conference of imams and religious advisers.

“The Muslims of Europe want to be an active and central part of the societies they live in,” Anas Schakfeh, president of the Islamic Authority in Austria, told the gathering in Vienna. “They don’t want to build a separate and isolated society.”

Schakfeh appealed for bolder strides toward the overall theme of the two-day conference: developing a clear identity for European Muslims that could preserve traditions but embrace Western values.

“To find ways to co-exist is essential and important for Islam and Europe,” Schakfeh told more than 150 imams and Muslim leaders.

The conference also seeks to forge new alliances to confront issues of cultural isolation, youth anger and worries about growing radical movements among Europe’s estimated 33 million Muslims.

“This is a critical moment for Islam in Europe,” said Mouddar Khouja, one of the organisers of the meeting. “Muslims can integrate and participate, which is our goal, or remain on the fringes. This is where the danger lies.”

Muslim communities in Europe have been under intense pressure to work with anti-terrorism probes following the 2004 Madrid train bombings and the blasts last year on London’s transit system.

European views towards Muslims also hardened after last year’s riots in France and the worldwide fallout from caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad first published in a Danish newspaper.

The challenge for moderate Muslim leaders was to encourage a brand of Islam that rested comfortably in the West and no longer defined itself solely as extensions of homelands in the Arab world and south Asia, organisers said.

“We remain Muslim, but our point of reference must be Europe. This is our home,” Khouja said.

Some steps have been taken. Centres have been established in France and the Netherlands to train new imams with a European perspective.

But the conference may also look at difficulties in some European nations for Muslim immigrants – and even their native-born children – to obtain citizenship. Polls across the European Union, meanwhile, continue to show widespread reservations about possible membership by mostly Muslim Turkey.

Resistance to the Turkey’s EU bid is among the highest in Austria, which currently holds the presidency of the 25-nation bloc.

“Modern life comes to us without any instructions,” Austrian foreign minister Ursula Plassnik said. “We must not give in to fundamentalism, radicalism and fatalism. We must promote the voices of moderation.”