Introduction: Towards a Trans-Cultural History of Muslims in Interwar Europe (original) (raw)
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Muslims in Interwar Europe A Transcultural Historical Perspective. Leiden: Brill, 2015
Muslims in Interwar Europe provides a comprehensive overview of the history of Muslims in interwar Europe. Based on personal and official archives, memoirs, press writings and correspondences, the contributors analyse the multiple aspects of the global Muslim religious, political and intellectual affiliations in interwar Europe. They argue that Muslims in interwar Europe were neither simply visitors nor colonial victims, but that they constituted a group of engaged actors in the European and international space.
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© bekim agai, umar ryad and mehdi sajid, ���6 | doi �0.��63/978900430�979_00� This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported (CC-BY-NC 3.0) License. chapter 1
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The central place that Muslims and Islam are accorded in the European media and public debates today contrasts with their near-complete absence in parts of European historiography until recently. While right-wing demagogues campaign against refugees, Muslims and the supposed Islamization of Europe, their argument that Islam does not belong to Europe is, at least partially, supported by the rather patchy awareness of a continuous and multi-facetted Islamic history in European societies and, horrible dictu, even in some history departments. Recent research challenges this neglect, tries to overcome the "Othering" of Islam, and demands a new conceptualization of European history that leaves behind the Europe/Islam binary. As the construction of a European identity and a European space is based on "Othering"-a definition of what is not European-, the conscious and visible integration of Muslims into European history poses a systematic challenge to narratives of Europeanization. The article draws attention to the difficulties that spring from this challenge and discusses new approaches in scholarship that try to overcome them.
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He received his PhD from the University of Warwick where he studied ethnic relations and political philosophy under Professor Muhammad Anwar OBE, one of Europe's most prolific academics in this area of specialization. Dr Hellyer writes on minority-majority relations (including those in Europe, North America, Southeast Asia, and Africa), political philosophy and the interplay between religion and modernity. Presently he is completing work on his next book entitled Muslims on the Margins: Muslim Minorities in Southeast Asia, Africa and the West. The interchange between Muslims and Europe has a long and complicated history, dating back to before the idea of "Europe" itself was born, and the earliest years of Islam. There has been a Muslim presence on the European continent before, but never has it been so significant, particularly in Western Europe. With more Muslims in Europe than in many countries of the Muslim world, they have found themselves in the position of challenging what it means to be a European in a secular society of the twenty-first century. At the same time, the European context has caused many Muslims to rethink what is essential to them in religious terms in their new reality. European societies and Muslim communities, finding themselves in fascinating states of affairs, are trying to understand one another in terms of their own defining features, in the hope of finding a future of mutual benefit. These questions and issues are discussed in this work by way of progressing from one set of debates to another, as they relate to Europe, Islam, and pluralism. Each of the three parts of this work keeps in focus the dual concerns: European Muslims and Muslim intellectual perspectives; going from the general to the specific. In this direction, H.A. Hellyer analyzes the prospects for a European future where pluralism is accepted within unified societies, and the presence of a Muslim community that is of Europe, not simply in it. Hellyer argues that Europe must come to terms with all of her history, past and present and those Muslim communities should work to be integral to Europe. Divided into three parts, the book consists of seven chapters, preceded by Acknowledgements (pp. vii-ix) and followed by Notes (pp. 195-214); Bibliography (pp. 215-234); Glossary (pp. 235-237); and Index (pp. 239-246).
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This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC 4.0 license. chapter 1 Muslims in Europe, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries The Muslim presence in Central and Western Europe during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries was greater than had been thought, at least up to a few years ago. Eastern Europe, of course, was an entirely different case, especially in the Balkans, ruled by the Ottoman Empire-though it began to lose territory in the 1700s-and in large regions of southeastern Europe that were gradually absorbed into the Russian Empire. In certain areas of these territories Muslims either ruled or formed a majority, while in others they were a significant minority. Nor did they disappear from Balkan lands altogether, for there are still nuclei of Muslim populations outside the small area of European Turkey, as well as in much of southern Russia. We shall not be concerned with those cases here, however, since they are substantially different from those of Western Europe.1 As to Central and Western Europe, it has been and to some extent continues to be thought that the Muslim presence in the Early Modern period was scarce and brief, and therefore insignificant.2 But recent research has proved that it was much more significant than has been acknowledged until now. The step from seeing Muslims as a groupe invisible to regarding them as étrangers familiers represents a significant advance in our understanding of the matter. We now have monographs on a considerable swath of European territory that show a good number of Muslims either visiting or living there for varying periods of time and many different reasons.3 We also have overall views for a few countries, particularly France,4 Great