ABSTRACT
Greece currently hosts a large number of immigrants (accounting for 1.1 million or approximately 10 per cent of the total population), a considerable proportion of whom are Muslim. Greece’s Muslim immigrants are in the most part Albanians (over 0.4 million) who are not particularly devout Muslims given their socialization for over 50 years in a totalitarian communist regime (see also Tsitselikis 2004b). Other Muslims in Greece include small immigrant communities of Pakistani, Bangladeshi and Egyptian origin. Alongside Muslim immigrants, there is a numerically small (around 85,000 people) native Muslim community in the north-eastern corner of Greece (Western Thrace), mainly of Turkish ethnicity, that enjoys a special status in terms of religious and cultural rights including the recognition of Sharia law, in derogation to Greek civil law (Tsitselikis 2004a, 2004b; Basiakou 2008).
