ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on one case-study, offering an insight into multi-culturalism from the perspective of a strikingly homogenous country. It has wider implications for current socio-cultural concerns about national and European identity and the place of the religio-ethnic other' in Poland. The Warsaw mosque was the first visible sign of a Muslim institutional presence on Polish territory in the post-9/11 world. The Muslim population in Poland, by contrast too many EU countries, is very small between 25,000 and 40,000, less than 0.1 per cent of the country's population of 38 million. Debates over mosque construction are about control over territory and symbolic imprinting, which is why they have become one of the most crucial points of contention in relation to Islam in Europe. The transplanted nature of the discourse is attested through the lack of sustained references to the autochthonous Islamic community of Poland, the Tatars or the existing mosques.
