Islam and Heritage in Europe provides a critical investigation of the role of Islam in Europe’s heritage. Focusing on Islam, heritage and Europe, it seeks to productively trouble all of these terms and throw new light on the relationships between them in various urban, national and transnational contexts. Bringing together international scholars from a range of disciplines, this collection examines heritage-making and Islam in the context of current events in Europe, as well as analysing past developments and future possibilities. Presenting work based on ethnographic, historical and archival research, chapters are concerned with questions of diversity, mobility, decolonisation, translocality, restitution and belonging. By looking at diverse trajectories of people and things, this volume encompasses multiple perspectives on the relationship between Islam and heritage in Europe, including the ways in which it has played out and transformed against the backdrop of the ‘refugee crisis’ and other recent developments, such as debates on decolonising museums or the resurgence of nationalist sentiments. Islam and Heritage in Europe discusses specific articulations of belonging and non-belonging, and the ways in which they create new avenues for re-thinking Islam and heritage in Europe. This ensures that the book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of heritage, museums, Islam, Europe, anthropology, archaeology and art history. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (see also http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).

A sweeping history of Islam and the West from the seventh century to today Europe and the Islamic World sheds much-needed light on the shared roots of Islamic and Western cultures and on the richness of their inextricably intertwined histories, refuting once and for all the misguided notion of a "clash of civilizations" between the Muslim world and Europe. In this landmark book, three eminent historians bring to life the complex and tumultuous relations between Genoans and Tunisians, Alexandrians and the people of Constantinople, Catalans and Maghrebis—the myriad groups and individuals whose stories reflect the common cultural, intellectual, and religious heritage of Europe and Islam. Since the seventh century, when the armies of Constantinople and Medina fought for control of Syria and Palestine, there has been ongoing contact between the Muslim world and the West. This sweeping history vividly recounts the wars and the crusades, the alliances and diplomacy, commerce and the slave trade, technology transfers, and the intellectual and artistic exchanges. Here readers are given an unparalleled introduction to key periods and events, including the Muslim conquests, the collapse of the Byzantine Empire, the commercial revolution of the medieval Mediterranean, the intellectual and cultural achievements of Muslim Spain, the crusades and Spanish reconquest, the rise of the Ottomans and their conquest of a third of Europe, European colonization and decolonization, and the challenges and promise of this entwined legacy today. As provocative as it is groundbreaking, this book describes this shared history in all its richness and diversity, revealing how ongoing encounters between Europe and Islam have profoundly shaped both.

Archaeology, Politics and Islamicate Cultural Heritage in Europe responds to the wishes of specialists in the history and archaeology of Islamicate societies in Europe to explore the integration of these societies into historical narratives. In order to deal with the multiple implications and wide ramifications of the subject matter, the book offers a collection of papers that cover a broad range of topics, including historiography, gender and family studies, material culture, historical and contemporary identities, historical heritage management, and archaeological theory, while paying attention to the peculiarities of the record in European regions in which Islamicate societies have played a major historical role (and others in which this role may not be quite so obvious, such as Scandinavia). These wide-ranging subjects find their commonality in the book's aim of challenging the dominant simplifying narratives and their stress on interruption and exception. The impact of historical narratives in national and social identities is reflected in a wide range of issues, including school curricula, heritage management, the organisation of academic departments, the presentation of Islamicate history and archaeology in the media and the politics of identity of majority and minority groups. The volume does not avoid these questions, but tackles them head-on, challenging the unwillingness of some academics to engage in potentially disruptive political issues.

"Archaeology, Politics and Islamicate Cultural Heritage in Europe responds to the wishes of specialists in the history and archaeology of Islamicate societies in Europe to explore the integration of these societies into historical narratives"--

Islam in Europe is a book full of striking images: the assassination of and the death threats against artists and intellectuals; violent demonstrations demanding Sharia [Koranic] law for Europe; acts of terrorism. Also detailed are European political initiatives and, in some cases, new laws that forbid the wearing of the burka in public spaces, the ban on minarets in Switzerland, and other efforts to keep Western culture "pure." But there is another reality, as Nilüfer Göle describes it from her own life experience: Muslims who are politicians in European parliaments; scholars teaching in European universities; artists who use this creative intercultural exchange as a theme in their art. More visible are the hundreds of thousands of students, workers, merchants, and professionals who participate in every aspect of public life without concealing their heritage. Göle sees the best hope for a modern and European Islam in the Muslim women who -- in contrast to the men -- demonstrate their commitment to their heritage by wearing head scarves while participating in modern Western life. In manifesting their professional and public experience in their own communities, they become the agents of change and modernism. Göle thus sees European Islam as "feminine," in contrast to the male-dominated traditional Islam. As she said on PBS' Frontline, "Modernity is ... shaped, invented by values that were not the values of Muslim countries. That is one of the basic reasons for the separation between the modern world and the Muslim world, this either/or partition. If you are modern, you can't be a Muslim. But now we are going beyond this division -- you can be both Muslim and modern." This edition is translated from the French by Stephen Rendall.

Exhibitions of Islamic artefacts in European museums have since 1989 been surrounded by a growing rhetoric of cultural tolerance, in response to the dissemination of images of Islam as misogynist, homophobic and violent. This has produced a new public context for exhibitions of Islam and has led to major recent investments in new galleries for Islamic artefacts, often with financial support from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia. This Element addresses contemporary framings of Islam in European museums, focusing on how museums in Germany and the UK with collections of Islamic heritage realise the ICOM (International Council of Museums) definition of museums as institutions in the service of society. The authors find that far too often the knowledge of Islamic cultural heritage is disconnected from contemporary developments in museum transformations, as well as from the geopolitical contexts they are a response to.

This volume provides an overview on the history of the Muslim Brotherhood and the ways its heritage is appropriated by its European members today. They define themselves as the “community of the middle way”, in the centre of Islamic orthodoxy, proposing an ethos and an ideology. However their heritage is composed of many different intellectual strata and these inputs are in tension. The current movement is both powerful and fragile as certain fundamental principles remain respected while many other themes are currently being cautiously questioned. By analysing private interviews and public discourse, this book fills in an important gap in scholarly research. No other in-depth study exists about this little known and reserved but important reference for European Muslims.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, theorising on modernity has entered a new stage. The former dichotomy between an active West exporting its successful model of modernity on a global scale and passive non-Westerners gratefully implementing this model in their own societies has been challenged by critical anthropology and postcolonial studies, and further elaborated upon within social theory. This volume focuses on Europe and the Islamic world as two historically constructed geo-civilisational domains, and shows that modernity was not achieved in splendid isolation in Europe, but in the tensions and conflicts within the «transcultural space» between Europe and Islam. The impact of Islam as a complex civilising tradition on the making of Europe, and vice versa, impinged on the building of political, religious and scientific institutions and discourses. These sustained a continuous process of drawing, adjusting and transgressing symbolic and geo-political boundaries between the two civilisational realms, from medieval rivalries to present-day migration-related conflicts. This volume assembles seven contributions by historians and sociologists covering the whole of the modern era and focusing on the notion of a transcultural space and the discussion of revised concepts concerning the genesis and shape of modernity. In so doing, they try to escape both the apories of cultural relativism and the militancy of the «clash of civilizations».

TAS - please do not use this blurb in its raw form ????? Arriving in Europe in the 14th Century, the Qipch?q Tatars are the longest surviving Muslim people in Europe. They form the historical core of the Muslim community in the Baltic States, Belarus and Poland where the Muslim communities in these countries are small compared with those in other parts of the European Union and in Russia. Here Harry Norris investigates the earliest contacts between the Baltic peoples and the World of Islam in the Middle East. He surveys their history, their Islamic beliefs, their culture, their literature and their life in New Europe today. He draws contrasts and similarities between other Muslim communities in Europe, including the diverse Muslim groups in the Nordic countries that border the Baltic Sea; Finland, Sweden and Denmark. This book is of vital interest to those studying the rich cultural heritage of minority groups of European Muslims and their position in Europe today. It examines the trade routes of the Vikings and the early Slavs and Balts who had commercial relations with Arab merchants and where the currency of the Caliphate is evidence for the trade in amber, furs and Middle Eastern silks and other luxury goods. The Tatars and the Jewish Qipch?qs arrived in these countries during the 14th century. They were brought here by the Grand Duke of Lithuania, Duke Vytautas (Witold)(1396-1430). During the Jagellon dynasty and centuries later the settlement of these Muslim Tatars was to continue. They became farmers and soldiers and they rose to a high status in the royal estates of Poland. Despite this assimilation, they resolutely retained their Muslim identity. For centuries these Tatar communities, in size, were second only to the large Jewish communities in this part of Europe. But from the 19th century, amidst wars, partition and genocide their numbers declined. During the age of the Soviet Union other Muslim communities have come to settle in these lands and they now threaten to outnumber the Tatars who have lived there for centuries. This book describes the Tatars and these other Muslims. It surveys their history, their Islamic beliefs, their culture, their literature and their life in New Europe today. There are, of course, other Muslim communities, larger in number and more diverse, in Nordic countries that border the Baltic Sea; Finland, Sweden and Denmark. These are also discussed in the contents of this book revealing contrasts and similarities and past contacts between the Tatars and the Muslims of Scandinavia. This is the first book in English on this subject where sources of information elsewhere are in Polish. Russian, Byelorussian, and Lithuanian. Its author has travelled extensively in the region supported by grants and exchange agreements of the British Academy. This book contains a Glossary and an extensive Bibliography. Its content will be of interest to those whose studies are in the fields of Eastern European culture and history, Religious Studies, Islam in Europe, and the kindred Muslim communities that are to be found in Russia and in Central Asia, today.