Religious and ethnic diversity have become crucial and pressing concerns in Europe: in particular, the presence of Muslims, their integration, citizenship, and how to deal with the influx of refugees. Can we draw on the resources of religions and their leaders for models of peaceful coexistence or do religious identities constitute obstacles to cooperation and unity? This volume treats “Islam, Religions, and Pluralism in Europe” based on a 2014 conference in Montenegro. Experts analyze Islam and Muslim issues as well as Christian perspectives and state social policies. Case studies drawn from Western and Eastern Europe including the Balkans, constructively review and interrogate diverse theological, philosophical, pedagogical, legal, and political models and strategies that deal with pluralism.

Combining theoretical and empirical research, these 12 essays examine the role of religion and its prospects in Europe. On the one hand, the volume discusses growing Islamic presence in Europe as a reminder of enduring religious pluralism, not least in view of the high prominence given to Islamic experience in arguments against over-generalised notions of secularisation. On the other hand, it explores the question of Christian motivated extremism and religious nationalism. Against this background, the contributors discuss the role of religion in other countries throughout the world including China, Japan, Russia and the MENA region.

Public manifestations of Islam remain fiercely contested across the Global West. Studies to date have focused on the visual presence of Islam – the construction of mosques or the veiling of Muslim women. Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape is the first book to add a sonic dimension to analyses of the politics of Islamic aesthetics in Europe. Sound does not respect public/private boundaries, and people experience sound viscerally. As such, the public amplification of the azan, the call to prayer, offers a unique opportunity to understand what is at stake in debates over religious toleration and secularism. The Netherlands were among the first European countries to allow the amplification of the azan in the 1980s, and Pooyan Tamimi Arab explores this as a case study embedded in a broader history of Dutch religious pluralism. The book offers a pointed critique of social theories that regard secularism as all-encompassing. While cultural forms of secularism exclude Muslim rights to public worship, Amplifying Islam in the European Soundscape argues that political and constitutional secularism also enables Muslim demands for amplifying calls to prayer. It traces how these exclusions and inclusions are effected through proposals for mosques, media debates, law and policy, but also in negotiations on the ground between residents, municipalities and mosques. This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by the Religious Matters in an Entangled World program, Utrecht University.

This book paves the way for a more enlarged discussion on religion and migration phenomena in countries of Northern and Southern Europe. From a comparative perspective, these are regions with very different religious traditions and different historical State/Church relations. Although official religion persisted longer in Nordic Protestant countries than in South Mediterranean countries, levels of secularization are higher. In the last decades, both Northern and Southern Europe have received strong flows of newcomers. From this perspective, the book presents through various theoretical lenses and empirical researches the impact mobility and consequent religious transnationalism have on multiple aspects of culture and social life in societies where the religious landscapes are increasingly diverse. The chapters demonstrate that we are dealing with complex scenarios: different contexts of reception, different countries of origin, various ethnicities and religious traditions (Catholics, Orthodox and Evangelical Christians, Muslims, Buddhists). Having become plural spaces, our societies tend to be far more concerned with the issue of social integration rather than with that of social identities reconstruction in society as a whole, often ignoring that today religion manifests itself as a plurality of religions. In short, what are the implications of newcomers for the religious life of Europe and for the redesign of its soul?

Islam, Europe and Emerging Legal Issues brings together vital analysis of the challenges that Europe poses for an expanding Islam and that Islam poses for Europe, within their ever-evolving religious, legal, and social environments. This book gathers some of the best thinking on Islam and the law affecting current and contested issues that can no longer be ignored, particularly as they have found their way before the European Court of Human Rights. Contributors include leading authorities who are working at the heart of this generation's law and religion questions in Europe and across the world. This book outlines implications for all those who look to Europe-from both within and without-for models of human rights implementation and multi-cultural accommodation.

In honor of the life and work of Sheikh Zaki Badawi, OBE, KBE, and in recognition of his noted public contribution in championing the vital role of religious faith and values in the life of the nation, the AMSS has established the annual Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture. The lecture series is dedicated to Dr. Badawi’s vision to foster pluralism, inter-faith dialogue, inter-cultural understanding, and social cohesion. ‘He who controls the past controls the present.’ In this third Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture, Martin Rose argues that history is as often a polemical weapon as a dispassionate exploration of the past. It can, at worst, support entrenched positions and inhibit understanding – but it also offers solutions to difficult questions of identity and belonging in today’s Europe. Seeing both Muslim and traditional European accounts of their own history as teleological and springing from their respective cultures, he argues for a thoughtful and open-minded approach to the writing of an intercultural history that explores much more fully the role of the Muslim East as a contributor to the ‘modern’ European mind; and at the same time acknowledges the shared, inescapable and potentially creative legacy of common imperial histories for today’s Europe.

In honour of the life and work of Sheikh Zaki Badawi, OBE, KBE, and in recognition of his noted public contribution in championing the vital role of religious faith and values in the life of the nation, the AMSS has established the annual Zaki Badawi Memorial Lecture. The lecture series is dedicated to Dr. Badawi’s vision to foster pluralism, inter-faith dialogue, inter-cultural understanding, and social cohesion. In this, the second Memorial Lecture in honour of Sheikh Zaki Badawi, Dr. Mustafa Ceric, Grand Mufti of Bosnia- Hercegovina, examines one of the most important issues facing Muslim communities in Europe today “How to participate actively and faithfully in modern European society?” Dr. Ceric introduces the concept of a Muslim Social Contract theorising on its value, philosophical and religious foundations, as well as wider implications for Muslims in Europe. It is in essence a theory of mutual obligations advocating positive engagement by Muslims on a socio-political as well as intellectual level in wider European society. AMSS UK

This timely volume discusses the much debated and controversial subject of the presence of religion in the public sphere. The book is divided in three sections. In the first the public/private distinction is studied mainly from a theoretical point of view, through the contributions of lawyers, philosophers and sociologists. In the following sections their proposals are tested through the analysis of two case studies, religious dress codes and places of worship. These sections include discussions on some of the most controversial recent cases from around Europe with contributions from some of the leading experts in the area of law and religion. Covering a range of very different European countries including Turkey, the UK, Italy and Bulgaria, the book uses comparative case studies to illustrate how practice varies significantly even within Europe. It reveals how familiarization with religious and philosophical diversity in Europe should lead to the modification of legal frameworks historically designed to accommodate majority religions. This in turn should give rise to recognition of new groups and communities and eventually, a more adequate response to the plurality of religions and beliefs in European society.

This book brings together international scholars of Islamic philosophy, theology and politics to examine these current major questions: What is the place of pluralism in the Islamic founding texts? How have sacred and prophetic texts been interpreted throughout major Islamic intellectual history by the Sunnis and Shi‘a? How does contemporary Islamic thought treat religious and political diversity in modern nation states and in societies in transition? How is pluralism dealt with in modern major and minor Islamic contexts? How does modern political Islam deal with pluralism in the public sphere? And what are the major internal and external challenges to pluralism in Islamic contexts? These questions that have become of paramount relevance in religious studies especially during the last three-four decades are answered as critically highlighted in Islamic founding sources, the formative classical sources and how it has been lived and practiced in past and present Islamic majority societies and communities around the world. Case studies cover Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia, and Thailand, besides various internal references to other contexts.