Starting from this premise, we can safely say that Europe and the Muslim world shared a common existence around the Mediterranean Sea basin with their territories overlapping in many parts of Eastern Europe, the Black Sea region and the Eurasian States. Besides geography, the Islamic World shared with Europe two major cultural components: their spiritual and moral legacies which hail from the Abrahamic traditions, while their scientific, philosophical and intellectual references, among other things, are derived from the Greek civilization.
Today’s globalized world, and the age of intertwined interests induces the two sides to have greater understanding, interaction and cooperation in many fields.
Europe stands in dire need for a safe and steady supply of energy, considered today as the mover of the economy. A secure and long—lasting supply of this commodity can be found mainly in the Muslim world, especially when we consider the fluctuation in supplies coming from the Russian Federation to Europe, particularly in the aftermath of the recent developments of hostilities in Georgia.
The Muslim world is the store of a fabulous investment source. Its reserves of energy are abundant and are expected to be so for decades to come. Due to the scarcity of sources elsewhere, oil prices are bound to rise, and the Muslim world’s financial resources will also rise, which means that Muslim investment capacities will grow and increase.
The Muslim world, with its almost 1.78 billion souls, will be the largest consumer market in the world, and the natural outlet for European products in the face of the pervasive flood of Chinese and Indian commodities. Apart from secured energy supplies, investment capability and a huge market, another factor will prove to be of strategic and vital importance to cement the relationship between the Western and Muslim worlds.
It is the factor of human resources, labor and workforce. In this context, it is an established and inescapable fact that Europe’s population is growing older by the year for social and cultural considerations. Maintaining Europe’s comfortable standard of living by keeping its economic fundamentals at the same level of today, necessitates a strong and skilful workforce to generate the revenues needed to pay for the retirement of the aging European population as well as to keep the aging European economic machinery rolling. It is estimated that besides the tens of millions of Muslim immigrants working in Europe today, the Old Continent will be inviting more than twenty million foreign workers in the next thirty years; most of them will come from the neighboring countries of the Ms, bring the two sides closer together, reduce the cultura
