ABSTRACT
While the topic of religion seemed to be gradually losing its relevance in the socio-political discourse in Europe over the course of the second half of the last century, since the mid-1990s it has re-emerged prominently in public debates due to the increasingly visible religious and cultural pluralism of Western societies. The process of religious pluralism in Europe is neither exclusively due to migration (Dubach et al. 2000: 19-52, Melton 2001: 47, Davie 2002: 63-66.) nor entirely due to the migration of people from societies of an islamic character (Behloul 2005: 145-150). And yet the increasingly observed relevance of religion as a public issue in the past few years is essentially bound up with the settlement of immigrants of an islamic character as the most populous nonChristian religious group in Western European societies on one hand, with the concomitant increase in visibility of islam in the public sphere on the other.
