Salafist radicals constitute a tiny fraction of European Muslims

Evidence

But there is no convincing evidence that such groups enjoy a wide constituency. In France, for example, the director-general of the intelligence services Pascal Mailhos claimed that, out of 200,000 practising Muslims in France, only 5,000 belonged to fundamentalist Salafist groups, of whom only one in four had any involvement with ‘radical Islam’. The reformist Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan has similarly claimed that such ‘political and literalist’ Salafist groups represent less than 0.5 per cent of European Muslims. — Matt Carr, You Are Now Entering Eurabia, 63

Categorization

• QUESTION: Ramadan’s 0.5 per cent figure is asserted rather than sourced — worth chasing the underlying estimate.