"A mosque as wide as Europe": misunderstandings between Islam and Europe and the bravery of "Euroislam" theory

Abstract

By means of this work, I tried to depict the compound conflict between Islam and European society. Apart from the Introduction (in which I started from the conception of universalism and relativism of human rights) and the Conclusions (where I expressed my personal viewpoint on such cultural struggle), at the onset and end of the paper, this work may be divided into two parts. In the first, I have endorsed the main reasons for the aforementioned struggle: womens’ rights, freedom of thought and death penalty; for each topic, I described the Islamic textual references which have justified these features and the main Strasbourg Court decisions on such aspects of Muslim culture. In the second part I envisaged, through the words of several authors and the content of the interview that I carried out with Imam Pallavicini, the possibility of a new interpretations of Islamic sources. This would demonstrate how many interpretative misunderstandings are lurking in the liaison between Islam and Europe and how far Islam is able to answer several fundamental needs of our contemporary society