Muslims in Europe and the preservation of their religious-ethnic particularitiesEveryday Life Practices of Muslims in Europe explores how Muslims give meaning to Islam on a day-to-day basis. The contributions look at concrete practices, identities, memories, and normalities in daily Muslim life and provide insights to the complexities of identities. They examine Muslims’ use of and construction of spaces, daily practices, forms of interaction, and modes of thinking in different areas, resulting in a thorough analysis and framework of Muslims’ day-to-day life through topical chapters on food, space, entertainment, marriage, and mosque, covering both extent of hybridity and preservation of religious-ethnic particularities. Contributors Rachel Brown (Wilfrid Laurier University), Mohammed El-Bachouti (UPF), Valentina Fedele (Università della Calabria), Diletta Guidi (École Pratique des Hautes Études), Ossame Hegazy (Bauhaus, University, Weimar), Ajmal Hussain (Aston University), Jana Jevtic (Central European University), Elsa Mescoli (University of Liège), Wim Peumans (KU Leuven), Sumeyye Ulu Sametoğlu (EHESS), Leen Sterck (The Netherlands Institute for Social Research),Thijl Sunier (VU University Amsterdam), Erkan Toğuşlu (KU Leuven)

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia and the cultural and economic dispossession caused by the collapse of socialism continue to force Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina to reconfigure their religious lives and societal values. David Henig draws on a decade of fieldwork to examine the historical, social, and emotional labor undertaken by people to live in an unfinished past--and how doing so shapes the present. In particular, Henig questions how contemporary religious imagination, experience, and practice infuse and interact with social forms like family and neighborhood and with the legacies of past ruptures and critical events. His observations and analysis go to the heart of how societal and historical entanglements shape, fracture, and reconfigure religious convictions and conduct. Provocative and laden with eyewitness detail, Remaking Muslim Lives offers a rare sustained look at what it means to be Muslim and live a Muslim life in contemporary Bosnia and Herzegovina.

This book offers a new direction for the study of contemporary Islam by focusing on what being Muslim means in people’s everyday lives. It complements existing studies by focusing not on mosque-going, activist Muslims, but on how people live out their faith in schools, workplaces and homes, and in dealing with problems of health, wellbeing and relationships. As well as offering fresh empirical studies of everyday lived Islam, the book offers a new approach which calls for the study of ’official’ religion and everyday ’tactical’ religion in relation to one another. It discusses what this involves, the methods it requires, and how it relates to existing work in Islamic Studies.

For many in the West, Islam has become a byword for terrorism. From 9/11 to the Paris attacks, our headlines are dominated by images of violence and extremism. Now, as the Western world struggles to cope with the refugee crisis, there is a growing obsession with the issue of Muslim integration. Those Muslims who fail to assimilate are branded the ‘enemy within’, with their communities said to provide a fertile breeding ground for jihadists. Such narratives, though, fail to take into account the actual lives of most Muslims living in the West, fixating instead on a minority of violent extremists. In The Daily Lives of Muslims, Nilüfer Göle provides an urgently needed corrective to this distorted image of Islam. Engaging with Muslim communities in twenty-one cities across Europe where controversies over integration have arisen – from the banning of the veil in France to debates surrounding sharia law in the UK – the book brings the voices of this neglected majority into the debate. In doing so, Göle uncovers a sincere desire among many Muslims to participate in the public sphere, a desire which is too often stifled by Western insecurity and attempts to suppress the outward signs of religious difference.

Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment. The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit. The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.

Five centuries after the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain, Europe is once again becoming a land of Islam. At the beginning of a new millennium, and in an era marked as one of globalization, Europe continues to wrestle with the issue of national identity, especially in the context of its Muslim citizens. Muslim Europe or Euro-Islam brings together distinguished scholars from Europe, the United States, and the Middle East in a dynamic discussion about the Muslim populations living in Europe and about Europe's role in framing Islam today. Working at the knotty intersection of cultural identity, the politics of nations and nationalisms, and religious persuasions, this is an invaluable anthology of scholarship that reveals the multifaceted natures of both Europe and Islam.

Drawing upon Muslim Europe's own voices, institutions, and experiences, this compelling work reframes the debates on European secularism, the historic role of Shari'a law in diverse European states, Muslims and Nazis, Muslims and Communists, and the contributions of Muslims to Europe today.

This book offers a unique transdisciplinary collection of essays written by highly renowned international scholars.

Nearly five million Muslims call France home, the vast majority from former French colonies in North Africa. While France has successfully integrated waves of immigrants in the past, this new influx poses a new variety of challenges—much as it does in neighboring European countries. Alarmists view the growing role of Muslims in French society as a form of "reverse colonization"; they believe Muslim political and religious networks seek to undermine European rule of law or that fundamentalists are creating a society entirely separate from the mainstream. Integrating Islam portrays the more complex reality of integration's successes and failures in French politics and society. From intermarriage rates to economic indicators, the authors paint a comprehensive portrait of Muslims in France. Using original research, they devote special attention to the policies developed by successive French governments to encourage integration and discourage extremism. Because of the size of its Muslim population and its universalistic definition of citizenship, France is an especially good test case for the encounter of Islam and the West. Despite serious and sometimes spectacular problems, the authors see a "French Islam" slowly replacing "Islam in France"–in other words, the emergence of a religion and a culture that feels at home in, and is largely at peace with, its host society. Integrating Islam provides readers with a comprehensive view of the state of Muslim integration into French society that cannot be found anywhere else. It is essential reading for students of French politics and those studying the interaction of Islam and the West, as well as the general public.

This book analyzes the place of the new Muslim minorities in society within the European Union. The authors explore the root causes of rising tensions and conflict between the new immigrant population and native Europeans over issues of Muslim identity, Islamist doctrines, and Islamophobia. They also provide integration models for the various EU countries and discuss the short- and long-range problems caused by socioeconomic discrimination against Muslims. Contributors include Imane Karich (International Crisis Group, Brussels), Isabelle Rigoni (Paris VIII University), Sara Silvestri (Cambridge University and City University, London), Valeria Amiraux (European University Institute, Florence), Chris Allen (University of Birmingham, UK), Tufyal Choudhury (Durham University, UK), and Bernard Godard (Ministry of Interior, Paris).