FETHULLAH GÜLEN, THE MOVEMENT AND THIS BOOK: AN INTRODUCTORY OVERVIEW PAUL WELLER AND IHSAN YILMAZ European context There has been a longstanding presence of Muslims in Europe – especially in the Balkan countries, but also in less widely known locations for smaller groups of longstanding Muslim presence, such as the Muslims of Tartar origin who settled in the territories of what in the sixteenth to seventeenth centuries became the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. But in the late twentieth and early twenty-irst centuries Muslim minorities in Europe have emerged more clearly into the centre of European public life and debate due to effects arising from a mixture of decolonization, labour migration, asylum from conlict, and the pursuit of higher standards of living. Thus today, 1 million or more Muslims live in each of France, England, Germany and the Netherlands, and they are also present in the rest of Europe. As a result, there are now approximately 13 million Muslims in Western Europe (Yükleyen, 2009: 292). This edited collection deals with the challenges and opportunities faced by Muslims and the wider society in Europe following the Madrid train bombings of 2003 and the London Transport attacks of 2007. In the wake of the ‘social policy shock’ (Weller, 2008: 195) brought on by these events, the ‘multiculturalist’ policy consensus that had shaped several Western countries’ public policy understanding for several decades had been subject to increasing criticism. Shared values and social cohesion were emphasized and the promotion of ‘moderate Islam’ and ‘moderate Muslims’ was advocated. However, as Paul Weller argues in the irst chapter of this volume, legitimizing simplistic distinctions between ‘good’ (understood as ‘liberal’ or ‘modernist’) and ‘bad’ or ‘suspect’ (understood as ‘traditionalist’, ‘radical’ or ‘fundamentalist’) Muslims and forms of 9781441120489_txt_print.indd 21 12/09/2011 10:33