Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent
- 2 Some Europes in Their History
- 3 “Europe” in the Middle Ages
- 4 The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea of Europe
- 5 The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations
- 6 Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: The European Citizen According to Max Weber
- 7 The European Self: Rethinking an Attitude
- 8 European Nationalism and European Union
- 9 From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony
- 10 Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?
- 11 The Long Road to Unity: The Contribution of Law to the Process of European Integration since 1945
- 12 The Euro, Economic Federalism, and the Question of National Sovereignty
- 13 Identity Politics and European Integration: The Case of Germany
- 14 Nationalisms in Spain: The Organization of Convivencia
- 15 The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives
- Contributors
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
10 - Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 14 July 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Europe: Conceptualizing a Continent
- 2 Some Europes in Their History
- 3 “Europe” in the Middle Ages
- 4 The Republican Mirror: The Dutch Idea of Europe
- 5 The Napoleonic Empire and the Europe of Nations
- 6 Homo Politicus and Homo Oeconomicus: The European Citizen According to Max Weber
- 7 The European Self: Rethinking an Attitude
- 8 European Nationalism and European Union
- 9 From the Ironies of Identity to the Identities of Irony
- 10 Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?
- 11 The Long Road to Unity: The Contribution of Law to the Process of European Integration since 1945
- 12 The Euro, Economic Federalism, and the Question of National Sovereignty
- 13 Identity Politics and European Integration: The Case of Germany
- 14 Nationalisms in Spain: The Organization of Convivencia
- 15 The Kantian Idea of Europe: Critical and Cosmopolitan Perspectives
- Contributors
- Index
- Cambridge Cultural Social Studies
Summary
Simultaneously, and despite the parochialism of the governments at home, a sort of international solidarity was slowly evolving in the colonies. … Out of interest if not out of good will, an embryonic European understanding had at last been found in Africa. We could hate one another in Europe, but we felt that, between two neighboring colonies, the interest in common was as great as between two white men meeting in the desert.
Count Carlo Sforza, Europe and Europeans, 1936Muslims are present in Europe and yet absent from it. The problem of understanding Islam in Europe is primarily, so I claim, a matter of understanding how “Europe” is conceptualized by Europeans. Europe (and the nation-states of which it is constituted) is ideologically constructed in such a way that Muslim immigrants cannot be satisfactorily represented in it. I argue that they are included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way.
I take it for granted that in Europe today Muslims are often misrepresented in the media and discriminated against by non-Muslims. More interesting for my present argument is the anxiety expressed by the majority of West Europeans about the presence of Muslim communities and Islamic traditions within the borders of Europe. (In France, for example, a 1992 poll showed that two-thirds of the population feared the presence of Islam in that country.
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- Information
- The Idea of EuropeFrom Antiquity to the European Union, pp. 209 - 227Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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