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Innovative approaches to citizenship emerged in the 1990s. Post-national theory suggested that European minorities no longer needed national citizenship because supra-national political structures such as the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) offered them protections. Denationalized citizenship held that universal human rights were now available at the national level too as the Council of Europe's member countries had to incorporate human rights principles within their own jurisdictions. New forms of claims-making among European Muslims were cited as evidence of this trend as religious claims, especially relating to the hijab, began to be made through human rights litigation. This paper demonstrates the limits of post-nationalism through a discussion of the outcomes of such claims. While European Muslims are indeed mobilizing around human rights, there is no evidence – at the level of litigation – that this has helped them to win recognition of their religious or cultural rights. This paper explores the reasons for this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An emerging consensus among scholars of Muslim political and social identity suggests that Western Muslims live out an anti-essentialist critique of identity construction. Considering this view, this paper examines a cross-national comparison of British Bangladeshis in London and Spanish Moroccans in Madrid that solicits the perceptions of working-class Muslim men. While the results indeed reaffirm respondents' concomitant relationships to a variety of identity paradigms, interview content demonstrates that subjects' multiplicity is complicated by their desire to meet – not reject – the essentialist standards of belonging to the identity paradigms discursively available to them. Rather than defiantly cherry-picking preferred characteristics of religion, ethnicity and nationality, individuals' responses suggest that they are trying to fulfil perceived standards of authenticity. Such a contention helps explain the prevalence of Western Muslims' expressed and well-documented ‘identity crisis’, suggests the enduring relevance of identity essentialisms, and more broadly, complicates post-modern conceptions of identity formation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article explores how we might best understand the potential establishment of a waqf (plural: 'awqaf), or Islamic charitable endowment, in London. Drawing on ethnographic and archival data, it considers the waqf space from four angles that emerged as significant during fieldwork: Islamic quality, temporality, communities of interest, and local relationality. In doing so, the article offers a detailed account of an example of an under-studied Islamic institution, as well as a portable framework for thinking about Islam and space in Muslim-minority contexts. It draws on these explorations to offer conclusions about the fieldsite, arguing that "Islam" is a major structure for shaping this particular space, but not a totalizing presence. The conclusion considers how this case study about space might relate to a debate within the Anthropology of Islam, as well as providing additional reflections on studying space and Islam in Europe relevant to the Special Issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the happiness trajectory of Muslims living in European countries following the terrorist attacks on 11 September 2001, using six rounds of the European Social Survey (ESS). We find a decline, and then a subsequent return to average happiness among the general Muslim migrant population relative to others after 9/11. However, a small subgroup of Muslims, young male Muslim immigrants from Middle East, report a persistent low level of subjective well-being. This may be seen as a potential source of a threat on integration of Muslims and hence social cohesion and peace in European countries. Our findings persist after controlling for perceived discrimination, migrant status, and demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, as well as fixed effects for year and country of residence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The accommodation of Muslim religious practices is an increasingly salient political issue across Western Europe. Hitherto, most research has focused on how states accommodate Muslim religious practices, and sociological scholarship on workplace accommodation is still extremely scarce. This article fills the gap in the extant literature by presenting a qualitative analysis of over 300 requests for religious accommodation in the workplace in Belgium. The authors contend that turning the spotlight from state to workplace accommodation of Muslim religious practices allows the discovery of different answers to the “hows” and the “whys” of minority religious accommodation. Different than state accommodation, workplace accommodation is characterized by three “i”s: it is granted or refused on the basis of instrumental argumentations; it is regulated informally and resolved internally. This article proposes an institutionalist framework adapted to the world of work to explain the specific features of workplace religious accommodation of Muslim religious practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this contribution, I examine the Catholic political practice of "intercessions" (shtadlanut) as a means to control and manage relations between state power and Jewish communities by means of a privileged elite. While governmental techniques or mechanisms of minority management are only part of a broader question of majority-minority power relations, the theological-political roots of such "management" strategies are often overlooked because the problem is assumed to be secular. In my analysis of shtadlanut, I show how Jewish communities were internally divided between "good" and "bad", "managed" by the ruling powers, and homogenized. It is precisely this type of enforced collaboration with power, in combination with reduced agency and depoliticization, that I claim goes beyond the "Jewish Question". Rather, we must turn our gaze on Europe and consider how, and why, it continues to make 'others' into problems. By doing so, we can challenge the frame of the contemporary "Muslim Question". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article delineates a number of conceptual-normative, analytical and political concerns, characterized as matters of (1) ‘semantics’, (2) ‘scales’ and (3) ‘solidarities’, in the ways in which we can approach an understanding of the relationships between antisemitism and Islamophobia. As such it takes its cue from Goldberg's (2009) insistence that in addition to comparativist methodologies employed in the study of race and racism, we also need relational methodologies. That is to say that where the former compares and contrasts, the latter also seeks to connect. In so doing, the article harnesses the explanatory power of long-established organizing concepts within the study of race and racism, to explore how racial categories of religious minorities continue to be formed. Taking its cue from the introduction to this special issue (Meer this issue), this article explores what purchase the ideas of ‘cultural racism’ and ‘racialization’ can bring to bear on our conceptualization of each. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]