European agencies focused on stimulating research that draws attention to the situation of minorities have signalled that if Europe is to benefit fully from the intellectual and creative potential of its minorities, including its Muslims, the assumption that they fail to integrate must give way to efforts to reduce the ‘disparities’ and ‘polarizations’ between them and the non-minority population (European Parliament, 2007: 71). (See also ECRI (European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance), 2000; European Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2007, 2009; EUMC (European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia), 2006.) Nonetheless, minority protection study agencies seeking to examine the circumstances of non-European cultural groups living in EU nations are hampered by the conflation of ethnicity, religion and citizenship in some states (cf. EUMC, 2006; Jackson, 2009). This blurring of ethnic, religious and national identities threatens to stymie the effort to benchmark minority integration in the European Union, initiated by the European Parliament (2007: 139) and intended to reduce disparities between Europe's minority populations of immigrant background and its ‘natives’ in the eight key areas of life specified by the Council of Europe (2003: 7): employment, housing, health care, nutrition, education, information, culture, and basic public functions (which include equality, anti-discrimination and self-organization).

We demonstrate the utility of measuring Muslim well-being following the definitions and guidelines put forward by the Council of Europe and the European Parliament. We start from the foundation provided by the European agencies that focus on scholarly examination and improved public awareness of the situation of minorities, especially as their research efforts relate to the practices, policies and concepts supporting the structural segmentation and reduced life chances of Muslim minorities in France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. The relative population size of Muslims in these four states (cf. EUMC, 2006) and the involvement of their governments in shaping the EU-wide debate (Jackson, 2009) render consideration of these cases important in understanding the ability of European Muslims to thrive. But to some extent, as we consider in the next chapter, the political salience of the presence of Muslims differs among these states because of their varying methods of coordinating ethnic and state identities (cf. Bleich, 2003; Brubaker, 1992; Buijs, 2006; Feldblum, 1999; Fetzer and Soper, 2005; Jackson, 2009), and their differing degrees of state primacy in stipulating the requirements of minority integration (cf. Haller, 2002; Jackson, 2009).