I'm a guy, born and (mostly) raised in Germany. I come from what I believe is a very average family.
My mom has catholic backgrounds, but the only time I have seen anyone of them go to church was when my great-grandmother died peacefully at the age of 94 and we went to a mini-church thing for the funeral. Effectively, I would say they are not really religious.
My dad's family is a bit different, they are large (we are almost 100 people at family gatherings, spread over four different countries at times). Originally a very religious family, with my grandfather even driving around trying to convert people, my dad was (I believe) one of the first of them to get fed up with the religion, but we can see that the two generations after him are less and less religious themselves, as everyone is becoming more and more secular.
So basically, I never really knew a lot about religion when I grew up. In school, we have a choice between catholic, protestant and ethics classes -- the latter being mostly for non-religious or minorities. When I was asked which one I wanted to join in high school, I didn't even know the different between them, so I picked catholic classes because that's where the cute girl went that I was interested in. I later changed to protestant because we had a teacher that didn't care if we showed up or not.
Maybe a year ago or so I decided to actually read up on religion, and my goal was to read three 'holy books' from different cultures. Turns out that's not that easy to do if you know absolutely nothing about any of the religions. Do you know what the holy book for Buddhists, Hindus or Jews is? Nope? Neither do I. That's when I realized just how little I know about any of the religions!
A while later, I was visiting Cologne with a friend. We were just strolling around the city, when we noticed some preacher-looking people at a stand, so we decided to check them out. We ended up talking a while to a really nice guy who turned out to be a muslim. We talked for a long time about each of our beliefs. And interestingly, even though we are quite different, as my friend aren't religious in the strict sense, we still have some things in common. If I remember correctly, my friend described her belief as something like "nature gives us this eternal beauty and resources, and the point of life is to give as much back as we can", to which he replied that "If you substitute 'nature' for 'allah', then that's basically what muslims believe, too."
Now, as you probably all know, currently there is a bit of a right-wing movement in politics in the EU. Countries are getting a bit more isolationist, people are getting concerned about "foreign" influences such as Islam. But I think that a lot of people don't even really understand Islam.
I've talked (and had extensive arguments with) my girlfriend about this. She's a bit smaller than me, grew up in a rather catholic family in Paris, which is why I didn't expect her to have some of the views she has. She seems to think that muslims want to force Europeans to "ban porn and alcohol", and in general she has a very negative sentiment towards (muslim) immigrants, blaming them for some of France's problems. And while I can understand her anger at some of the unfortunate incidents that have plagued France in the past, I don't think it's fair to put all "immigrants" or "muslims" in the same basket.
From my experiences as a German, you can tell that we don't really know anything about religions (including Islam) because it's not really taught in school. If you take ethics classes, you don't really learn about religions at all. And as the general shift in Europe is away from religion, that means that most younger people today have no idea.
In Germany, less than 10% of the immigrants that came in the past few years have been settled in the east, and interestingly, the AfD, which is a political party that is anti-immigration and anti-islam, got most of it's votes from the east.
The more people actually engage with muslims, the more they will realize that muslims are humans like everyone else and that the 'dangers' of Islam are being overhyped in the media. But there is one huge problem.
Apart from the guy I talked to in Cologne, I have never had a muslim come up to me to chat. I know that there are a lot in my city, because for a year or so we converted a large gymnasium to a refugee camp, and took on more than a thousand. But they segregate themselves from us Germans: they mostly shop at Turkish supermarkets, and the only place they all go to is the old building in the industrial area that they converted into a mosque.
I sometimes hang out with the people in the flat under me, they are refugees from Africa (they are not muslims, tho). You should have heard some of the stories they told! They fled through the Sahara, some of their best friends died of thirst. They came here with nothing. I think almost all refugees have crazy stories to tell. And I realize that it's not easy, learning German is hard and navigating the bureaucracy is a pain, even for us Germans who grew up with it. Even my French girlfriend gets fed up here sometimes and asks me to explain to her some things. But the only way that Europe can grow closer with some of the people that we are taking care of is if we communicate, hang out with each other, share our stories!
How can we ('while people'/'Europeans'/'the 'West') engage with Muslims? What can we do better to facilitate it and what can muslims do, and most importantly, why aren't we already doing it?
I hope I didn't bore you with my long post and cheers from Germany!
TL;DR: most people in Europe know nothing about Islam, and they don't know any muslims, which I think is the major reason for some of the miscommunication. What can people do to actually engage with one another?
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