Islam in Europe

In 37 bijdragen schetsen de auteurs een caleidoscopisch
beeld van de stand van zaken op gebied van beeldvorming,
geschiedenis, rituelen en feesten, moraal, politiek, islam als
levensstijl, kunst en cultuur.
De bijdragen zijn van Joseph Alagha, Edien Bartels, Carmen
Becker, Maurits Berger, Nicolet Boekhoff-van der Voort,
Gert Borg, Marjo Buitelaar, Henk Driessen, Dick Douwes,
Annemarie van Geel, Martijn de Koning, Khadija
Kadrouch-Outmany, Christian Lange, Nina ter Laan, Roel Meijer, Karin van Nieuwkerk, Thijl Sunier, Rachida Talal-Azimi, Claudia Venhorst en Joas Wagemakers. 
Deel 2 in de gelijknamige serie Islam in verandering behandelt een breed scala aan onderwerpen en maakt ingewikkelde
thema’s begrijpelijk voor wie zich in de publieke discussie
wil mengen.

Pędziwiatr, K., (2012) Imigranci bliskowschodni i północnoafrykańscy a odrodzenie  islamu
we współczesnej Polsce. [w:] Czy Polska leży nad Morzem Śródziemnym?, red. R. Kusek, Sanetra-Szeliga, J., 240 - 265. Kraków: Wydawnictwo Międzynarodowe Centrum Kultury, 2012]

The theme of politics and religion, its relationship and consequences, is perhaps one of the most popular topics in both public and scholarly discourse today. The factors that led to this state of affairs are not the subject o f my research, although they serve as a necessary context. Based on an analysis of official documents, interviews with leaders of the Ukrainian Ummah and their public statements and publications in the media, this article traces the evolving forms o f political activism among Muslims in Ukraine.

Europe's Transforming Identity. Part 1 of the book Islam and Tolerance in Wider Europe (ed. Pamela Kilpadi) including the articles:
* 'What Values for Europe?' by Michael Emerson
* 'The Role of Islam in Europe: Multiple Crises?' by Amel Boubekeur and Samir Amghar
* 'The Southern Gate to Fortress Europe' by Rutvica Andrijasevic

Questions de communication [En ligne], 33 | 2018,  URL : http://journals.openedition.org/questionsdecommunication/12107 
Redefining the Boundaries of Public Space due to the Controversies over Islamic Scarf: The Rise of a “Respectable” Segregation?

In the current context of generalized Islamophobia and the proliferation of anti-discrimination organizations, this article aims to analyze the willingness of Muslims to participate in some kind of common initiative, focused or not on the fight against discrimination. The objective is to find out if among Muslims in Madrid a common awareness of subalternity exists, based on their Muslimness, which structures any expression of claims-making, whether collectively organized or not. We investigate the nature of such claims by applying Fraser’s status model (2000) to the materials obtained from six discussion groups held in October 2016.

In this chapter I present two major divergent lines of thought that read European Islam differently, though this difference has hardly been problematised and remarked before, nor has it been put face to face in a scholarly debate. This chapter then presents the views of two major scholars of Islam and Muslims in Europe: those of the French scholar Olivier Roy, and those of the Danish scholar Jørgen S. Nielsen. My own reading of European Islam makes me stand with the latter on his position: European Muslims are making their own theology; it is a pluralist theology in progress. It may even be inspiring to the Arab-Islamic world.

L’articolo offre un’analisi puntuale dei versi che Dante dedica a Maometto nel ventottesimo canto dell’Inferno, al fine di precisarne le finalità poetiche e ideologiche; il passo viene poi collocato nel contesto costituito dai numerosi riferimenti al profeta dell’Islam presenti nella letteratura italiana duecentesca e primo-trecentesca, qui raccolti, analizzati e organizzati in maniera sistematica. Gli elementi connotativi riconosciuti nell’episodio infernale e in altri riferimenti alla civiltà islamica che si leggono nel capolavoro dantesco, pur nella loro geniale eccezionalità artistica, risultano così coerentemente inseribili in un più vasto e articolato panorama culturale, nel quale, all’ostilità per l’Islam inteso come entità religiosa e politica, si affianca la curiosità per il mondo musulmano percepito invece come comunità culturale, rilevabile anche presso fasce inaspettate del pubblico medievale.

The absent of a hierarchical structure within Islam and the heterogeneity that characterizes Muslim community located in the EU, gave the opportunity to the most important international Islamic trends to appear as major players in the institutionalization processes developed in Europe. Among those, we have to emphasize the role adopted by the groups close to the ideological current of political Islam, and specially by those linked to the informal network of Muslim Brotherhood whose constant activity allowed them establish supranational structures which in recent years have showed a pragmatic discourse committed with democratic values. As consequence of this position, the political Islam formations have reached an important institutional acknowledgment. In the other hand, we must highlight that together with the presence of Islamic groups in Europe focused in the strengthen of European Islam, we observe the existence of Arab political forces that, due to the restrictions found in their own countries, saw in the EU the appropriate place to extend their ideology and to design the democratic discourse that permitted them appear as a political force to the international community and to the local population. So, during these years they have been working abroad with the aim of delegitimize the totalitarian regimes and emerge as the most important democratic alternative, leaving their print in the democratization process.

"Although negative reactions accompanied the reception of Darwinism in the Islamic World from the beginning, a full fledged Islamic creationist movement did not appear before the 1970s. Originally it was restricted to Turkey, where Islamic
groups attempted to undermine the materialist foundation of Marxism and Kemalism. From the late 1990s onwards the subject became popular among Muslims in the diaspora. This was due to the efforts of Adnan Oktar alias Harun Yahya, a
hitherto marginal figure in Turkey, to propagate his ideas via the Internet. The Internet allows him to adapt his propaganda constantly to new issues and creationist and anti-creationist publications and to recruit volunteers willing to translate his
books. Thanks to the combination of a neglected subject with the innovative use of new media Oktar gained the opinion leadership in this field. Even movements, the founders of which had attacked Darwinism, now refer to Oktar as main authority on this issue. However, he failed to gain an equal degree of attention for topics like conspiracy theories and eschatology. In these fields he had to compete with a bulk of
existing material in conventional media. The success of his former disciple Mustafa Akyol shows that using the Internet as main means of propaganda may restrict the political impact. He became the chief Muslim ally of Christian creationists in the
USA by managing to get published by respectable “old media”. For him the Internet only fulfils an auxiliary function."

This article investigates the narratives of people moving out of Islam in contemporary Europe. In particular, it focusses on the potential performance of non-belief in the form of speech. By critically examining the function of testimony in conversion and deconversion narratives, this article problematises the assumed boundaries of belief, non-belief, and the function of the performance of identity. It does so by investigating contemplations over private and public performances, since the performance of speech was thought to have different effects in both spheres. Whilst public discourses on leaving Islam and speaking freely were always weighed, in private these were related to familial bonds, love, and belonging. On the other hand, considering speaking out in public was often contextualised with reference to potential secularist appropriation of their stories as 'native testimonial'. As such, my interlocutors show that testifying of one's religious transformation in the case of moving out of Islam was neither central nor conditional. Speech was mostly considered a 'step beyond' not believing.

"This book features chapters that examine the various ways of belonging in the Middle East. Belonging can mean fitting in, feeling at home, feeling a part; this kind of belonging is profoundly social. Belongings can be possessions, objects closely associated with one’s deepest notions of identity. Both kinds of belongings pertain to people and the kindreds, ethnic groups, and nations (and/or states) they call their own. Belongings of both kinds are, more often than not, emplaced and territorialized.

All of the chapters treat Middle Eastern collectivities as sites of anguished cultural projects. All use metaphor: national territory as woman, national resolve as cactus, and so on. None is reductionistic; belonging is rendered in its complexity, with its agonies as well as its joys. All could be identified with a growing genre of work on belonging. At the heart of each are the bonds that comprise belonging. Each one conveys both belonging’s messiness and its joys, and touches as much as it argues and elaborates."

In several European countries the authorities have sought to institutionalize and regulate the Islamic or Muslim presence in their countries through Islamic Representative Councils (IRCs) that can function as interlocutors between Muslim communities and the state. Many of these organizations have been marked by instability, defection, conflict, or splits. This thesis asks why, through a detailed case study of the trajectory of one such IRC – the Islamic Council of Norway (IRN).

Existing research on IRCs has not delved deeply into the question of why so many IRCs have been unstable, but three broad perspectives can be found. One perspective is that there are internal reasons for the conflicts: it is argued that Muslims and Muslim organizations are simply too different from one another, and this may make cooperation difficult. Another perspective is that these conflicts have been caused by external reasons: external conditions or the policies of the authorities made it difficult for these organizations to function well. A third perspective is that the conflicts were caused by a combination of internal and external factors – it is about the competing expectations they face, and the difficulties of dealing with these competing expectations.

The thesis employs a process-tracing approach to explore the trajectory of the Islamic Council of Norway. The organization was created in 1992/1993 and grew stronger for the next couple of decades. The IRN’s performance during the cartoon crisis in 2006 led the government to provide public funding to the organization from 2007 onwards. In the 2010s a conflict began to emerge. One faction advocated a dialogue path, with an emphasis on soft rhetoric and external outreach. Another faction advocated a community path, which aimed at strengthening the internal solidarity in the Muslim communities. Those who were in favour of the community path won the internal power struggle and were able to secure an independent source of funding through a successful system for certification of halal meat. After a prolonged conflict the advocates of the dialogue path decided to break out and create a competing organization. The government took away the IRN’s funding, and the system for halal certification broke down. Following the split, the IRN continued to exist, but now without funding and with a close competitor.

The thesis relies on analysis of different sources of data – primary archival records, secondary literature, oral interviews, and media items – in order to ascertain why these events occurred. Perspectives from earlier scholarly literature indeed point to relevant factors, but the concepts are clarified and the actual mechanisms are unpacked in detail. What earlier researchers have referred to as diversity on the Islamic field is in this thesis conceptualized as multipolarity. Multipolarity played a role since different member organizations in the IRN had different goals. During its phase of consolidation the organization was able to work through these differences. But when the conflict erupted in the 2010s, the multipolarity among the members made it more difficult to find solutions.

Throughout the organization’s history external actors also had an impact. Whereas existing literature mostly talks about the relationship between IRCs and the state, the case of the IRN indicates that intermediary third-party organizations can also be important. In the first couple of decades these organizations acted as stabilizing forces. These organizations helped actors in the IRN to find ways of dealing with the demands from different sectors of Norwegian society. When the organization was beset by stormy weather these organizations were there to help the IRN. In the final phase, however, these organizations did not publicly support the IRN, giving the authorities carte blanche to remove funding from the organization. It was a consistent challenge for the IRN to deal with the competing demands placed on the organization. The thesis details how such competing demands can create challenges and conflicts. The organization mostly tried to deal with such competing demands through balancing solutions which to a certain degree could satisfy all stakeholders. The major difficulties for the organization arose when different factions in the organization wanted to pursue different and conflicting strategies for dealing with these competing demands.

In addition to these existing perspectives from the literature, this thesis also shows that organization matters. The challenges IRN experienced are not unique to IRCs as Islamic or migrant-dominated organizations. In the thesis the IRN is conceptualized as a meta-organization: an organization whose members are organizations themselves. Meta-organizations often have weak central hierarchies and are therefore ill-suited to deal with conflicts and deep disagreements.

Crucially, the thesis shows that all of these factors interacted with one another. When a meta-organization is placed in a politicized environment that frequently requires it to take a stand on controversial issues, when it has a multipolar membership base and faces external actors that place difficult demands on the organization, conflicts and difficulties easily arise.

This thesis is the first study to explore in depth why IRCs seem prone to conflicts and splits. The main factors identified – the multipolarity of the Islamic field, the influence and meddling of external actors, the multiple demands the organizations are facing and disagreements about how to relate to these demands, the difficulties of solving conflicts due to the weak hierarchy of meta-organizations, and the interplay between these factors – have probably played a role in the conflicts in other IRCs as well. For the research fields of political science and Islamic studies on the one hand, and authorities and Muslim organizations in Europe on the other, this dissertation brings new conceptual and empirical knowledge. It elucidates why it remains a challenge to ensure that relations between authorities and IRCs can be beneficial both to society at large and to the Muslim communities themselves.

PhD thesis,  BGU, 2015.
Modern daʿwa (the “call” or “invitation” to Islam) comprises a wide range of activities and manifests itself in various contexts. Salafi daʿwa in Germany established in the early 2000s as a key activity of a new social religious movement known as the German Salafi movement. From early on, Salafi activists set themselves the ambitious goals of “bringing Islam into every house in Germany” and bringing German Muslims back to the “pure Islam,” and they engaged intensely in daʿwa. Initially comprising a small number of imāms and their followers and located in a few cities, the Salafi movement has rapidly grown and spread across Germany during the last fifteen years. It is considered to be the fastest growing Islamist movement in Germany and a very successful agent in the conversion of Germans to Islam.
The present study represents a systematic attempt to identify the characteristics of Salafi daʿwa in Germany, explore its origins, and show how and to what extent daʿwa has been adapted by German Salafi preachers to the German context. It is based on an analysis of several hundred Salafi publications and lectures, interviews with German Salafi duʿāt, and fieldwork conducted in a Salafi mosque in Berlin. The study examines how German Salafi daʿwa is shaped by various factors, including references to daʿwa in the Qurʾān and the Sunna, daʿwa strategies developed by Salafi ʿulamāʾ from Arab countries (especially from Saudi Arabia) and by global Salafi preachers, classical and modern daʿwa motifs that were previously applied by non-Salafi preachers, and strategies and motifs that have been developed by German Salafi preachers as a result of their interactions with their specific socio-political environment and target groups.
In order to grasp the Salafi daʿwa phenomenon in its complexity and diversity, it is studied from different perspectives. The first chapter provides an introduction to the history, doctrine and concept of contemporary Salafism and its three main strains (purist or quietist Salafism, political Salafism and jihād-Salafism) as well as a distinct quadripartite typology of the German Salafi movement, which I have developed during my research. Next is a chapter on the German Salafi daʿwa movement. It describes and analyzes the history, anatomy, sociology and logistical dimensions of this social-religious movement. Chapter three explores Salafis’ definitions of daʿwa and the main aims, means, methods and target groups of German Salafi daʿwa. The first section of chapter four elaborates on the styles and content Salafi preachers recommend for daʿwa to German Muslims and non-Muslims. The second section discusses recurrent motifs in Salafi daʿwa to non-Muslims in Germany. Chapter five is based on fieldwork in the al-Nur Mosque in Berlin. It describes and examines the theories and practices of Salafi dāʿiyāt (fem. pl. of dāʿī) and duʿāt in the specific setting of this mosque.                                                       
This study reveals the complex, changing and heterogeneous nature of Salafi daʿwa in Germany and shows that daʿwa is a key aspect of German Salafi thought and action. It is demonstrated that Salafi daʿwa is characterized both by pragmatic opinions and doctrinal rigidity, and by a tightrope walk between openness and courtesy towards “the other”, a target group of daʿwa, and dissociation from the “infidel” and “misguided” environment. Moreover,  it is shown that each tendency and each preacher of the German Salafi movement reacts differently to the challenges of preaching Islam in the German minority context and develops different daʿwa theories and practices.

Islam and youth culture have rarely been associated within and outside academia. Especially in the European context, young German, French or British Muslims are assumed to live a life entirely devoted to religion or to be secular and to consume European youth culture. In the 2000s, however, a new trend has emerged that combines Western forms of pop culture with Islamic substance, e.g. religious hip-hop, sports wear with Islamic slogans or media catering for "cool" religious Muslim youths.

The empirical basis of this research are qualitative data collected in Germany, France and Britain in 2008-2009, comprising in-depth interviews with producers of Islamic youth culture and ethnographies investigating the consumer side. The results will be discussed in light of the societal context of the movement and the tools for grasping it from a subcultural point of view.

The data suggest that there are five main types of motivation among the producers of Islamic youth culture: political, social, proselytising, artistic and (perhaps) business motives. Young Muslims are negotiating their having a say, confounding their own community by innovative forms of expression and bewildering subcultural scenes by strong moralistic values – which is why they could be referred to as a "conservative avant-garde".

Pour le Ramadan 2017/1438H se pose à nouveau la question de la longueur des journées de jeûne (environ 18 heures) pour les adolescent(e)s et jeunes adultes étudiant(e)s, en particulier celles et ceux qui sont en période d’examens. Alors que les risques pour la santé des plus jeunes, si ce n’est pour la réussite même de leurs études, ne sont pas négligeables, les clercs musulmans ne semblent pas vouloir se saisir collectivement de cette problématique, voire proposer de nouveaux seuils quant à la pratique de jeûne de Ramadan pendant la période solsticiale d’été.

Book Review of František Šístek (ed.), Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers and Exchanges (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books 2021) by Dejan Jović

REFERENCE: Jović, Dejan. "František Šistek (ur): Imagining Bosnian Muslims in Central Europe: Representations, Transfers and Exchanges." Tragovi 4, br. 1 (2021): 197-206.

Tragovi : časopis za srpske i hrvatske teme, Vol. 4 No. 1, 2021, pp.

Since the late nineteenth century, France has been a destination for people outside its borders. In recent decades, most immigrants have come from outside of Europe, often from ex-colonies in Northern Africa, West Africa, and Indochina. The Parisian area has welcomed a disproportionate share of these immigrants and neighborhoods have been shaped and
reshaped to reflect their presence. This paper examines three neighborhoods in Paris—Belleville, the Triangle de Choisy, and the Goutte d’Or—which are each composed of and shaped by separate ethnic populations.  To a great extent, these neighborhoods are imprinted by commercial activity, often involving customers who come from well outside the
neighborhood and networks that extend beyond the nation. They also show patterns of multiethnicity which allows for difference between groups to be maintained, even as the space shared between them is effectively negotiated.

This brief analysis seeks an approach to one of the most widely and transnationally spread pietistic missionary Muslim movements, taking into account that less than a century has elapsed since its appearance. To do this, both its historical and doctrinal roots, and its connection with other movements within Islam, will be examined together with its structure, the methods used for the propagation of its teachings, the context of its international expansion, its establishment in Spain in particular, and the rising suspicions of links to extremism.

Sind antimuslimische Diskurse Ausdruck einer aktuellen Form des Rassismus?
Anhand von Fallbeispielen – darunter auflagenstarke Buchpublikationen, Zeitungsartikel, Webseiten und Zuschriften an muslimische Verbände – geht Yasemin Shooman den antimuslimischen Narrativen und ihren Funktionen nach. Sie untersucht die artikulierten Selbst- und Fremdbilder ebenso wie die Rolle historischer Bezüge und arbeitet das Repertoire dominanter antimuslimischer Stereotype und Topoi heraus. Die empirische Analyse trägt auch zur Theoriebildung in dem relativ jungen Forschungsfeld bei und zeigt, dass eine Rassifizierung religiöser Zugehörigkeit zu beobachten ist, die auf dem Ineinandergreifen der Kategorien Kultur, Religion, Ethnizität, Geschlecht und Klasse basiert.

In the last decade, as hip-hop has emerged as a political force among youth,regimes across the world have intervened to promote some sub-styles and sideline others, in an attempt to press-gang the genre to disparate political ends. In Venezuela, Hugo Chavez funds hip-hop schools around the country, and invites Bolivarian raperos onto his Sunday television show, “Aló, Presidente.” In the US, Michael Steele has tried to give the Republican Party a “hip-hop makeover” to bring its ideas to “urban-suburban hip-hop settings.” The US Army, in partnership with The Source magazine, has used hip-hop culture in its “Taking It to the Streets”campaign to recruit African-American youth.

Governments are also sending hip-hop culture to far-flung corners of the globe.  From its putative birthplace in the Bronx, hip-hop has traveled to become, at once, a means of protest and a tool of public diplomacy, counter-terrorism, democracy promotion and economic development. It is in the post-September 11 “war on terror” and in Western states’ dealings with Muslim-majority states and Muslims in Europe that government mobilization of hip-hop is most noticeable.  While European states are using the genre to integrate and“moderate” their Muslim populations, the US has made hip-hop part of its outreach to the Muslim world. The very music blamed for a range of social ills at home—violence,misogyny, consumerism, academic underperformance—is being deployed abroad in the hopes of making America safer and better liked. The officials behind the sundry hip-hop diplomacy initiatives invariably point to the success of jazz diplomacy during the Cold War as evidence of the “smart power” potential of music.

Rooted in the concepts of ‘theodicy’ and ‘alienation’, Peter L. Berger famously anatomised the social mechanics through which religion is projected from human consciousness into the cosmos as a ‘sacred canopy’ protecting against chaos and anomy.  Interweaving this with his more recent work on ‘Eurosecularity’, this chapter proposes that in Western Europe today, it is often secularity that is externalised, objectivated then internalised into subjective consciousness as taken-for-granted facticity.  The author further argues, drawing on fieldwork conducted with the British branch of the Islamic Revivalist movement the Tablighi Jama'at, that the conscious exercise of agency in ways which publicly affirm faith breaches the cognitive and normative presuppositions of the European collective conscience.  In classical Bergerian terms, such non-indigenous expressions of religion are intrinsically imbued with a disconcerting debunking potential by exposing the precariousness of the social fictions which together conspire to construct the ‘sacred canopy’ of contemporary secular actors.