Islam in the Italian Multicultural Society

Italy transformed from an emigrant country, exporter of manual labor, into an immigrant country: a gigantic multicultural laboratory. One has to underline that foreigners’ presence has created also a process of demographic transformation that involves new challenges regarding the testing of possible ways of intercultural coexistence, whose main difficulties consist in discovering an essential stability between the right to diversity and the duty of integration. Foreign labour has proven indispensable for accelerating and sustaining the rate of economic development – resulting in the appearance of new minority groups, including a substantial number of Muslims.