Islam in Europe - Out now!

Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks
Spyros A. Sofos and Roza Tsagarousianou
Published by Palgrave Macmillan (October 2013)
ISBN 9781137357779


Islam in Europe delves into the daily routines of European Muslim communities in order to provide a better understanding of what it means to be a European Muslim today. Instead of positing particular definitions of being Muslim, this volume invites and encourages a diverse body of 735 informants from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the UK to reflect on who they are and on the meaning and place Islam has in such considerations. Drawing upon extensive fieldwork and suggesting novel ways of seeing the phenomenon of European Islam and the continent's Muslim communities, Islam in Europe examines how through their practices, discourses, face to face and mediated interaction, European Muslims construct notions or identity, agency, solidarity and belonging, or how they negotiate and redefine religion, tradition, authority and cultural authenticity. Theoretically and methodologically innovative, Islam in Europe makes a significant contribution to better understanding European Islam and Europe's Muslims.


Contents: Introduction - Chapter 1. Muslims in Europe: balancing between belonging and exclusion - An overview - Clashing timeless monoliths? - The construction of European Muslims - Chapter 2. Islam in Europe: a genealogy – Geographies – Trajectories - Imagining Islam and Muslims - Towards the twentieth century - From Islam and Europe to Islam in Europe - Making sense of the presence of Islam in Europe: Muslim perspectives - Chapter 3. Who are the European Muslims? - Conceptual issues – Perspectives - Counting and naming - A way forward? - Methodological remarks - Chapter 4. Space, Place and Social Action: European Muslim Geographies - The construction of locality - The production of translocality - Translocal and transnational phenomenological geographies- Chapter 5. The politics of contestation and the construction of injustice frames - From connectivity to consciousness - Articulating and sharing grievances - Injustice, identity and agency: Muslim charities, Jihadi websites and their audiences - Chapter 6. Spaces of agency and identity and the reconfiguration of Islam - From injustice to identity and agency - Veils, fashion, agony aunts and finding Mr Right: reconfiguring Islam - Who does Allah listen to? - The quest for authenticity and the idiom of ‘choice’ - Chapter 7. Is there a Space for European Muslims?

Praise for the volume:In this volume the authors take us beyond analysis of society and politics. Their focus is the complex and tense field of the conceptual: in what ways are Muslims in Europe European Muslims; what do events and related discourses do to affect the formation of European Muslim identities? A valuable pointer to future lines of research.
Jørgen S. Nielsen, Danish National Research Foundation Professor, 
Center for European Islamic Thought, University of Copenhagen, Denmark


The authors:
Spyros A. Sofos is Research Fellow at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Lund University, Sweden. His publications include Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe and Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey. He is co-editor with Umut Özkırımli of the Islam and Nationalism series published with Palgrave.
email: spyros.sofos@cme.lu.se

Roza Tsagarousianou is Reader in Mass Media and Communication at the University of Westminster, UK. She is convenor of the Diaspora and the Media working group of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. She has co-edited Cyberdemocracy: Technology, Cities and Civic Networks and authored Diasporic Cultures and Globalization.
email: tsagarr@westminster.ac.uk

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Muslim associations in Malmö and Lund - a snapshot [part 1]

Image
translated from 'Muslimska föreningar i Malmö och Lund – en ögonblicksbild'  originally published in islamologi.se on December 2nd, 2010 and translated by Spyros A. Sofos By Erica Li Lundqvist & Leif Stenberg During a visit to the urban district of Rosengård in Malmö in order to photograph the "cellar mosques", we suddenly got lost in the suburban jungle. A group of children and young people noticed us wondering and asked us what we were doing. "We are looking for a mosque", we said, after which they replied in chorus: "There are many!" And they pointed in all directions. The development of Muslim neighbourhoods in Malmö and Lund has been gaining momentum since the first Muslim community was established in Malmö in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, Islam is a natural, albeit controversial, part of Swedish society. Nevertheless, very little commentary on Islam in Sweden is premised on comprehensive empirical investigation. [1] A prob
Read more

The voice behind the veil

Image
The debate about the face veil, and more generally the acceptability of other forms of female Muslim attire in the West, is not a novel one. Muslim notions of modesty, have often been subverted and colonized by patriarchal practices seeking to restrict women's autonomy. As such, the veil issue has mobilized social forces inspired by liberalism and feminism and generated valuable criticisms of patriarchy in Muslim communities. On the other hand, the 'out of place' look of veiled women in European public spaces has provided fertile ground for the transformation of the veil issue into a potent mobilizing symbol for xenophobic, right wing forces only too happy to jump into the bandwagon of the secular, liberal and feminist opposition to the veil and, often, to incorporate these discourses into their own arguments. In this way, for example, spokespersons of the conservative Spanish Partido Popular such as Alberto Fernandez, a Barcelona city councillor, shed crocodile tears about
Read more

Brown and white men and other stories ...

Image
Courtesy of Washington Post A cartoon that appeared recently in the Washington Post reminded me of a topic I have often discussed in classes and have written about in my book Islam in Europe , notably the construction of the Muslim woman as "subaltern". The cartoon powerfully points out the aporia of the woman over whose body two men, representing ‘Islamic traditionalism’ and ‘European secularism’ respectively are challenging each other. Gayatri Spivak has pointed out this aporia in her discussion of widow self-immolation in colonial India: "The relationship between the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is at least ambiguous. The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it. This is widow sacrifice… The abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of "White men saving brown women from brown men." White women-from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to M
Read more