Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Christians and Muslims: memory, amity and enmities
- 3 The question of Euro-Islam: restriction or opportunity?
- 4 Muslim identities in Europe: the snare of exceptionalism
- 5 From exile to diaspora: the development of transnational Islam in Europe
- 6 Bosnian Islam as ‘European Islam’: limits and shifts of a concept
- 7 Islam in the European Commission's system of regulation of religion
- 8 Development, discrimination and reverse discrimination: effects of EU integration and regional change on the Muslims of Southeast Europe
- 9 Breaching the infernal cycle? Turkey, the European Union and religion
- 10 Afterword
- Index
- References
4 - Muslim identities in Europe: the snare of exceptionalism
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of contributors
- List of abbreviations
- Preface
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Christians and Muslims: memory, amity and enmities
- 3 The question of Euro-Islam: restriction or opportunity?
- 4 Muslim identities in Europe: the snare of exceptionalism
- 5 From exile to diaspora: the development of transnational Islam in Europe
- 6 Bosnian Islam as ‘European Islam’: limits and shifts of a concept
- 7 Islam in the European Commission's system of regulation of religion
- 8 Development, discrimination and reverse discrimination: effects of EU integration and regional change on the Muslims of Southeast Europe
- 9 Breaching the infernal cycle? Turkey, the European Union and religion
- 10 Afterword
- Index
- References
Summary
Muslims are currently the largest religious minority in western Europe. This presence of Islam in Europe is a direct consequence of the pathways of immigration from former western European colonies in Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean that opened up in the early 1960s. Since the official end of work-based immigration in 1974, the integration of such immigrant populations has become irreversible. Concerns regarding integration are connected with an increasing number of policies on family reunification that contribute to a noticeable increase in family size ‘within the Muslim communities in’ Europe. In such a context, asserting one's Islamic faith becomes a major factor in population sedentarisation. In each country, this increasing visibility of Islam is at the origin of many questions, doubts, and often violent oppositions.
We no longer seek to grasp, as certain culturalist-based approaches have sought to do, the traditional attributes that define an individual or group essence. Our aim here is to understand the practices of differentiation used by individual Muslims in certain social circumstances. Identity is to be conceived not as a structure, but as a dynamic process. Accordingly, it is more relevant to talk about identification than identity, and it is important to emphasise the fact that the ways an individual defines him-/herself are both multidimensional and likely to evolve over time.
When studying religious practices and the formation of identities of European Muslims, one must take into account relationships of domination which tend to impose a reference framework that permanently places Islam and the West in opposition.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Islam in EuropeDiversity, Identity and Influence, pp. 49 - 67Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
References
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