Spyros A. Sofos and Roza Tsagarousianou
Published by Palgrave Macmillan (September 2013)
ISBN 9781137357779
European Islam constitutes a veritable laboratory of identity, marked by polyphony, convergence and contestation. Muslims in Europe are looking for sources of inspiration, tradition and authority; they are developing meanings and repertoires of collective action that allow them to root themselves in societies that are often ambivalent about their presence in their midst while maintaining and developing their own distinctive values and voices.
This book is intended to shed light to processes of Muslim identity construction in contemporary Europe, examining in some detail aspects of the complex way in which European Muslims relate to each other, construct and populate spaces they call home and create spaces of dialogue and debate.
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: physical and mediated | |
| 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 | |
| The quest for authenticity and the idiom of “choice” | |
| Chapter 7 | Is there a Space for European Muslims? |
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