This article focuses on the perceptions of Muslim immigrants regarding what might constitute 'successful integration' into two Western European countries: Germany and the Netherlands. I conducted qualitative interviews with representatives from Muslim umbrella organisations and reviewed their publications to analyse their definitions of 'integration'. The results support the assumption that differences in political opportunity structures derived from specific integration policies, as well as national regimes of religious governance, affect the views of Muslim organisations acting in these contexts. In the Netherlands, the Muslim representatives still support a policy of multicultural integration and, first and foremost, the right to preserve their original identities. In contrast, their counterparts in Germany occasionally consider moderate forms of acculturation, including the creation of 'hybrid' identities, within the country that receives them. Understanding areas of concordance between immigrant and state representatives within the same national context could pave the way for more constructive and less polarised dialogue between the two groups and might serve as a model for facilitating other types of integration.

This article focuses on the question of how national integration policies and regimes of religious governance in Germany and the Netherlands shape political opportunity structures for organized Muslim migrants. The impact of these opportunity structures is analyzed by looking at the self-portrayal of (primarily Turkish) Muslim organizations in the two countries and the strategies they apply. It is shown that Muslim organizations in the Netherlands present themselves as cultural organizations while their German counterparts present themselves as religious organizations. The study suggests that these different strategies can be explained with different national political approaches to govern ethnic and religious diversity.

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This paper deals in a qualitative discourse analysis with the role of Islamic organizations in welfare delivery in Germany and the Netherlands. Referring to Jonathan Fox's “secular–religious competition perspective”, the paper argues that similar trends of exclusion of Islamic organizations from public social service delivery can be explained with discourses on Islam in these two countries. The analysis, first, shows that in the national competitions between religious and secular ideologies on the public role of religion, different views are dominant (i.e., the support for the Christian majority in Germany and equal treatment of all religions in the Netherlands) which can be traced back to the respective regimes of religious governance. However, and second, when it comes to Islam in particular, in the Netherlands, the perspective of restricting all religions from public sphere prevails which leads to the rather exclusivist view on Islamic welfare that dominates in Germany, too.