Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks.

• Author: Ichijo, Atsuko
• Position: Book review

Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks

By Spyros A. Sofos and Roza Tsagarousianou

Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 205 pages + xi, 68 [pounds sterling], ISBN 9781137357779.

Towards the end of Chapter 7 "Is there a space for European Muslims?" which is a concluding chapter of the volume, Spyros Sofos and Roza Tsagarousianou quote from E. P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class (1963): "... class itself is not a thing, it is a happening" (p. 167). After an extensive literature review and after speaking to 735 interviewees from Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the UK in search for the answer to the question "what does it mean to be a European Muslim today?" Sofos and Tsagarousianou have settled with what can be seen as a classical sociological insight: European Muslims do exist but there is no overarching identity to define them; they are a happening. European Muslims are those who are engaged with a variety of collective action driven by a realization that they share concerns with "people like them," be it Palestinians under Israeli occupation, scholars who are in search of the truth of Islam's teaching, the French school girls whose choice of attire have turned them into a political battle ground or "brothers" in the neighborhood who would stand by them in times of danger. '... the European Muslim identity, still a project in progress, can be seen as a process of imagining a community, a geographically and culturally dispersed set of political coordinates held together by a shared collection of narratives, identities and symbols"(p. 168).

This is a fascinating volume, which resolutely resists the lure of 'essentialisation.' Because of this, the reader might feel from time to time frustrated to be repeatedly told that European Muslims are diverse and that the terrain they act constantly shifts and changes its contour. Still, by paying close attention to what the interviewees tell them, Sofos and Tsagarousianou carefully delineate an overall outline of commonality found among them. One of the major contextual factors is the historical construction of Islam as "The Other of Europe." Another factor is a generally suspicious, if not downright hostile, tone of public discourse on Muslim migrants in Europe in the twentieth century. Interacting with this particular environment, Muslims in Europe have come to share particular perceptions of being marginalized in European societies. Sofos and Tsagarousianou...