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This paper brings attention to the notion of 'religious affects', namely, the affects, emotions and feelings related to religion and religious experience. It is argued that educators and students have a lot to gain from paying attention to and exploring the meaning and role of religious feelings in the context of controversies and debates surrounding Islam in the West. In particular, the paper suggests that by exploring the affective dimensions of religious injury (e.g. irritation, dishonour, insult, injury, offense, outrage), educators and students can enhance their understanding of how religious emotions are involved in religious controversies such as the recent cartoon controversies in several European countries. It is argued that a richer comprehension of affective dimensions of religious controversies will help promote inter-religious understanding and respect, an important educational aim in contemporary times, especially in school subjects such as religious education.

This paper is a non-conventional academic paper based on a live discussion organized by the Polish expert on Saudi women's issues, Professor Anna Odrowaz-Coates (2015, 2016), which took place in The Maria Grzegorzewska University in Warsaw, in June 2018. Two participating experts are known for their conflicting points of view on issues of security and integration of Muslims in Europe. In this exchange of viewpoints, they focussed on the issue of conversion to Islam in Poland and the UK, drawing upon multiple field research experiences they encountered. The main points of reference deal with the conversion of British prisoners whilst in prison and that of Polish women of diverse backgrounds. The impact of new media on the formation of public opinion, dissemination of faith and radicalization is also considered. The expert debate makes a significant contribution towards the socio-cultural and political discussion on culture clash versus coherence, integration and stability in a European context. It also concerns the use of new communication technology for the preservation of peace, radicalization and the elevation of moral panic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid growth of the population in the last 70 years has been constantly accompanied by increasing migration flows. From 1950 to 2020, the population of Europe grew from about 547 million to 741 million, while the Muslim share in this population quadrupled from10.7million to 42.7million people. Such an exponential growth of the Muslim population could pose political challenges for Europe, especially for the countries of Western Europe, which are often the final destination for migrants from various parts of the world, primarily from North Africa and the Middle East. This paper aims to analyse trends in migration and the rate of natural increase in order to roughly estimate whether Europe’s demographic outlook will undergo a major change in the next 50 years. It also attempts to determine what kind of political challenges might arise as a result. Using the method of quantitative content analysis, it is estimated that the Christian population will decrease by about 25 million due to the ageing of the population and declining birth rates, while the Muslim population will increase by about 200 million due to migration and the rate of natural increase. The conclusion is that there are indications that migrations will change not only the demographic outlook, but also the European political and security identity in the worst case. However, in the case of government controlled migration-induced changes, they will lead mostly to minor changes in the emigration policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper forms the introduction to a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies on 'Islam, Transnationalism, and the Public Sphere in Western Europe'. Taking as its starting point the seminal volume edited by Gerholm and Lithman-- The New Islamic Presence in Western Europe (1988)--the paper reviews continuities and changes in European Muslim communities and their relationship with others. Drawing extensively on case studies based on anthropological research in four European countries (Britain, France, Germany and Italy), the paper first examines the problematic character of the category 'Muslim', and identifies ways in which Islam in a European context can be considered transnational. It then explores how the question of living as a Muslim in Europe is being addressed in the context of transnationalism, considers whether there is an emergent 'European Islam' or 'European Muslim' identity, and ends with consideration of the problems and prospects for Islam in European public spheres. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the concept of symbolic boundaries and ethnic boundary-making is well established in social research, the direct consequences of these boundaries for the integration of migrants have not received much attention. This paper thus analyses whether religious and secular boundaries of national belonging among the majority population have an impact on perceived discrimination among Muslim minorities in Western Europe. To analyse this linkage, data from the International Social Survey Programme measuring the importance of religion as a symbolic boundary of national belonging among the majority have been aggregated as a regional context condition and combined with a Muslim minority subsample from the European Social Survey. The results of the multilevel models reveal that the salience of religious boundaries is associated with less perceived discrimination among Muslim minorities, while secular orientations among the majority seem to be more decisive for subjective perceptions of feeling discriminated against. Overall, the results thus challenge the role of religion as an ethno-religious demarcation and point to the relevance of secular boundaries of belonging for immigrant integration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the patterns of ethnic intolerance in European societies based on data from the 1999/2000 wave of the European Values Survey. We analyze the differences in intolerance targeted toward Muslims, Jews, immigrants, Gypsies, and persons of different race, using modernisation theory and 'competition for scarce resource' theories as our point of departure. Furthermore, we focus on the differences in the levels of intolerance in Western Europe, Eastern Europe, and Turkey. The present paper builds on previous empirical research, especially findings of recent multilevel analyses. Our larger and more extensive data material enables us to introduce two important improvements in this line of research. Theoretically, we are able to test if there are differences in the patterns of intolerance targeted toward specific minority groups. Methodologically, the number of countries in our data material is much larger, allowing us to apply multilevel models in a more statistically appropriate setting. Our results show that Gypsies stand out as an ethnic group particularly exposed to intolerance. The level of intolerance is lowest in Western Europe and highest in Turkey. In addition, the level of intolerance against Jews is particularly high in Turkey. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper investigates the multiple dimensions in the identity constructions of the daughters of the Muslim migrations to Italy. It focuses on the transformations in the way girls and young women relate to religion, in the transition from the generation of mothers, who emigrated from countries with a Muslim majority, to the generation of daughters, who grow up in a European context where Islam is a minority religion. It discusses ‘transmissions’, ‘translations’ and ‘betrayals’ in the migration experience, from a standpoint which highlights the specificities of gender and of generation. The article is based on an intersectional analysis of biographical accounts by Muslim girls and young women of Bengali and Moroccan origin who were born and/or grew up in Italy. Intersecting religious identity with other identity lines such as national belonging (to the parents’ country of origin and to the country where they were born or grew up), gender, class, color and age, multiple reactions and positions emerged. In this context, the religious dimension inherited/experienced/reinvented/called into question by the daughters of migrations appeared to be in constant evolution. Indeed, the stories contained herein of young Muslims tell of the emergence of European Islam. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

The Iranian Revolution, the 9/11 attacks, the Arab Spring, the appearance of the Islamic State movement and other similar events have caused a shift in inter-faith engagements such that inter-religious dialogue, maintaining a balanced politico-religious discourse, has become imperative in international relations. This imperative is reshaping world politics. We observe that inter-religious engagements in response to such political events have had a steady katechontic character. The katechon, originally a biblical concept, refers to political institutions and cultural mechanisms used by sovereign actors, be they religious bodies, churches or states, to restrain [apocalyptic] chaos. Katechontic mechanisms essentially diffuse messianic zeal within a given community while redrawing how its members imagine the shape of things to come. Given the current trends in global culture, the katechontic character of inter-faith dialogue makes it most likely that, in the future, the world will be mainly animated by numerous simultaneous inter-cultural and inter-faith relations and modes of engagement, while the major political players seek to formulate a new vision for the future of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author's of this paper analyze the objectivity of a perspective on the Romanian territory supposedly split by a boundary separating the Western and the Eastern civilization. The starting point of the study is Huntington's statement that the eastern limit of Europe is, in fact, the boundary between the Western Christian world, on one side, and the Orthodox and the Muslim world, on the other. Relying on historical, statistical, demographical, and geographical data, which prove the non-existence of such a boundary across the Romanian territory, the authors bring counterarguments to this theory. The analysis of these data reveals, in fact, the existence of a Romanian territorial reality unitary from the ethnic, the religious, and the cultural point of view, a reality characterized by two essential ligatures: its Roman heritage and Orthodoxy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, scholarship on Islam in Europe has highlighted the many attempts to govern Muslims and Islam. Concerned with discussions about secularism, security, integration, or national sentiments more generally, Muslims and Islam have become a target of governmental power. However, the effects of such governmental discourses, practices, or strategies are rarely analysed. In filling this lacuna, we turn to the scholarship on Muslim ethical self-making and specifically ask how configurations of a liberal-secular paradigm govern Muslim subjects in Europe. Focusing upon the nexus of governmentality and the (re-)making of an ethical self, we make visible the ways Islamic ethical and moral commitments are contested, negotiated, or even restructured through the liberal-secular powers of the modern state, its institutions, and its agents in different European contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Europe, where the hegemony of modern secular governance remains largely uncontested, how do minority religious communities – especially Muslims – negotiate the tension between religious duty and forms of secularised civic belonging? This contribution takes Twelver Shi'a Muslim activism in Europe as a starting place to interrogate the encounter between Islamic and secular values. In particular, I examine the emergence of what I call the discourse of 'Shi'a rights', through which Shi'a Muslims are seeking to gain minority recognition within the European context. Combining elements of Shi'a Islamic ethics with the language of secular humanitarianism, the discourse of 'Shi'a rights' is emancipatory and outward-facing while simultaneously being exclusionary and particularistic in the way it promotes specific understandings of what it means to be 'Shi'a'. Crucially, I argue that this ambivalent nature of 'Shi'a rights' is a product of the encounter with secular liberal governance, especially the secular ideal of religious equality. Rather than representing a natural division between religion and society, contemporary secularism cultivates particular ethical attachments that ultimately serve to problematise the status of religious minorities. A focus on 'Shi'a rights' in Europe thus serves to illuminate the fractures and fissures that contemporary secular discourse seeks to hide. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

As the Islamic State (IS) caliphate in the Middle East has collapsed, it is seeking to extend its influence elsewhere, particularly in Europe where there are existing inter-communal tensions to exploit. IS has deployed the management of savagery doctrine through acts of terrorism as part of its strategy to increase polarisation by exacerbating fear and distrust among communities, encouraging sympathies for far-right actors among non-Muslims and potentially alienating counterterrorism policies by governments, pushing Muslims out of what it terms the 'grey zone'. The desired outcome is to drain state resources and showcase Europe as hostile to Muslims, promoting the notion of a 'war on Islam'. [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]

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Over the last decades, Europe debates on Islam have been framed increasingly through the lens of cultural difference. In this discursive climate, culture constitutes a crucial terrain of investment for European Muslims in their struggle for inclusion and recognition. Based on two different ethnographic research projects among European Muslims, this essay examines two distinct types of culture discourses. One employs an Islam-versus-culture trope that serves to disconnect Islam from certain patriarchal practices perceived to exist within Muslim communities. The other discourse defends the intrinsic and symbiotic link between Islam and culture, especially in order to elevate the place of artistic practices within Muslim communities. To make sense of these seeming contradictions, I explore the multivalent meanings contained in my interlocutors' uses of the culture concept by tracing the respective genealogies of these meanings. This includes an investigation of culture's conceptual histories, formulated successively by Enlightenment thinkers, Romanticists, and early anthropologists, as well as by Islamic reformers and their more recent successors. My investigation into these conceptual histories exposes broader concerns about individual freedom and agency on the part of cultural theorists, which have furthermore enabled various claims about modernity and backwardness. While European Muslims creatively integrate various articulations of the culture concept into their world-making projects, I argue that the ontological assumptions underpinning the culture concept continue to haunt and render precarious efforts to demonstrate Muslim belonging to Europe via culture. [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]

Even though rarely acknowledged, approximately one fourth of all European Muslims live in the Balkans. These Muslims, as well as women of the Balkans, are seldom in the focus of scientific research on Islam and Europe. This article discusses themes related to the women’s movement and feminism in the Balkans and within Islamic framework from women’s point of view. The research context is located in the Republic of Macedonia and ethnographic material builds on thematic interviews with Albanian Muslim women. Four generally recognized orientations are distinguished (1) atheist or antireligious feminism, (2) secular feminism, (3) gender complementarity as an ideal and (4) Islamic/Muslim feminism(s), and used as analytical tools while ethnographic interview material is tackled. Article sheds light on Albanian-speaking women’s thoughts concerning Islam in the contemporary context, and tendencies of these thoughts to enlarge space that women occupy through personal interpretations of Islamic tradition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public events by immigrant religious organisations are a fairly new phenomenon in European societies. This article analyses and compares two such events: Diwali Mela, the Hindu festival of lights, and the Open Mosque Day organised by Muslim umbrella organisations. Using basic concepts of new institutional theory, we will show how immigrant religious organisations adopt established event formats and translate them into their own context. Interestingly, different factors influence the way they present themselves and their religious tradition at the public event. Three of these factors are of major impact: the secular image of the role of religion in society, the discourse about Islam and Hinduism, and finally the organisations’ own religious concepts. We argue that the action generated out of this leads to the masking of two major aspects of religion: the rites and the believers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many experts underscore a firm difference between (US) American and European approaches to combating terrorism. Other scholars contend that, since 11 September 2001, European governments have emulated the USA by “securitising” immigration and trampling on the civil and human rights of immigrants of Muslim heritage. Still other analysts discern within Europe distinct national styles of counterterrorism such as French assimilation and deportation versus British multiculturalism and conciliation. This article finds neither a coherent policy strategy nor an unmistakable political consensus in Europe regarding counterterrorism. Instead, a comparative analysis reveals a jumble of ethically inconsistent and practically contradictory measures. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Islam has become the key site for demarcating boundaries between majority populations and individuals of immigrant origin across Europe. This article outlines a research agenda on the socio-cultural integration of Muslims in their Western European societies of settlement. Integration issues with regard to Muslims have especially tended to focus on cultural and religious aspects. This raises questions. First, does culture/religion matter in shaping Muslims’ relative disadvantage in the socio-economic domain? Alternatively, does Muslim social disadvantage result from majority society's discrimination and bias against religious/cultural difference? Second, religious and cultural difference seems to matter in its own right. Do Muslims identify with their countries of settlement and accept the core liberal democratic values and norms? Or do persistent socio-cultural ‘gaps’ between Muslims and non-Muslims result from intolerance by the majority population? The article outlines a theoretical approach and empirical research programme. The framework is cross-national comparative, including France, Germany, Britain, Netherlands, Belgium, and Switzerland. The main data source is a survey that includes four groups of Muslims from distinct countries of origin (Turks, Moroccans, former-Yugoslavians, and Pakistanis) plus a majority sample, which facilitates cross-group, cross-national comparison. This introduction concludes by introducing contributions that address a specific question embedded within the overall framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In contemporary Europe, Islam and Muslims are rightly or wrongly often perceived as the ‘other’. Among the central foci of concern in many Western European countries with a significant presence of Muslims, the law has featured prominently in recent years. What can anthropology tell us about the multiple ways in which European Muslims engage with liberal and secular laws and the state? Perhaps no other contemporary scholar in anthropology has written more extensively about these issues than Professor John R. Bowen. As part of an ongoing series in public anthropology, Professor Bowen engaged in a public conversation with Professor Oddbjørn Leirvik and Postdoctoral Fellow Sindre Bangstad at The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway on 27 September 2011. Due to technical failures, the conversation had to be re-recorded at the Grand Hotel in Oslo on 28 September 2011. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Scandinavian welfare context, the emphasis on cooperation between public authorities and the nonprofit sector continues to be a central institutional characteristic. But to what extent have the new Muslim congregations adapted to the Scandinavian tradition of organizational cooperation, and what circumstances—internal or external to these organizations—promote or disrupt the development of such cooperation? This study is based on a nationwide survey of local Muslim congregations in Sweden ( n = 105). No support was found for the widespread notion that European Muslim congregations tend to exist as separate enclaves. The powerful discursive emphasis on organizational cooperation in Scandinavia creates vital opportunity structures, but local variations in demographic and socioeconomic conditions also seem to have an impact. Among internal factors that influence willingness to cooperate is not least the degree of ethnic heterogeneity; openness to different Muslim traditions—a precondition for a multiethnic congregation—is seen to correspond to a greater openness to the wider society. [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]

Muslims in western countries are routinely depicted as non-liberal minorities through representations of homophobia, honour killings and forced marriage within their communities. This presents a practical challenge to face up to non-liberal practices where they do exist, but without demonising an entire faith community. It also raises conceptual questions about mainstream western values. In the context of forced marriage, liberal principles (such as an individual's right to choose their own marriage partner and to decide whether to marry) appear to clash with postcolonial sensibilities including a valorisation of multiculturalism (which might recognise the rights of minorities to practice different marriage customs). These questions are examined through a case study involving Stichting Platform Islamitische Organisaties Rijnmond (SPIOR), a Muslim-identified organisation that works against forced marriage. Based in the Netherlands and active in six other European countries, SPIOR has worked with people potentially affected by forced marriage and also communicated its projects – and the progressive vision of Islam they advance – to wider audiences. Its experiences suggest that tensions between secular majorities and Muslim minorities, and between liberal and postcolonial values and sensibilities, are less fundamental than they sometimes appear, and more navigable. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigration policies serve a number of functions for states. Governments may use policies as instruments of foreign policy, economic growth, population growth, and/ or national security. In this post-September 11, 2001 global environment, integration policies have become more assimilationist and immigration restrictions toward nationals from Muslim countries of origin have increased in the name of national security. While this trend is common among many Western states, Britain's immigration stance toward Muslim migrants remains unchanged. This study examines changes in policies toward immigrants--changes that make these policies de facto immigration policies though they may not have been conceived as such--in the Netherlands, Germany, France, and the absence of this change in the UK. It seeks to answer the question: what explains reforms in the Netherlands, Germany, and France while British immigration policy remained unchanged? In this effort, the article emphasizes the impact of these changes on potential migrants from predominantly Muslim countries of origin. Based on a comparative case study analysis using process tracing, findings indicate that Dutch immigration/integration policy choices influence government policy changes in other West European countries. Through a learning process, governments experiencing similar socio-political challenges observe overlapping societal responses to them and optimize in creating policy alternatives by using short-cuts and adopting policies implemented in comparable states and situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

European church-state relations are the result of a long democratisation process. The immigration of the Muslim population during the second part of the twentieth century to Western Europe and the democratic transition of the Eastern European political systems after 1990 raise questions on the importance of religious bodies in the public space and their influence on existing church-state relations. This article analyses whether these developments would continue the traditional separation of church and state or put the clocks back towards a new sacralisation of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until the middle of the twentieth century, Muslims living in European countries were mainly indigenous people, completely assimilated with the rest of the population. Both their religion and their representative organizations enjoyed legal recognition, sometimes centuries long. A significant influx of immigrants of Muslim origin to Europe began in the mid twentieth century and a need for legal regulations sanctioning the status of Muslims within largely Christian societies became apparent. Their situation in this respect differs from country to country, sometimes due to a lack of an organization that would represent all the Muslims in a particular country, sometimes because of legal technicalities. In some countries, it is not even possible for Muslim immigrants to become citizens. The legal situation of Islam and its adherents exerts an important influence on their attitude towards their new country of residence and towards Europe, as well as significantly influencing their loyalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past few decades Europe has changed its demographic composition, becoming home to more than 20 million Muslims. This change raises important issues regarding the definition of European identity, the nature of citizenship in a world of migrants, and social and cultural integration of diverse populations. The future of Europe, and the future of Islam within Europe, hinges on the degree to which these issues can be successfully resolved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presently, Islam in Europe has a weak and divided political voice. This article draws on collective action theory and the religious economies model to analyze Muslim interest organizations in democratic polities. The authors develop general theoretical propositions and apply them to a case study of mosque state relations in the federal state (land) of Berlin. The study shows that institutional features of the German polity and diaspora Islam make collective action difficult and provide opportunities for factions ("spoilers") to undermine broad-based collective action if they perceive centralizing organizations as compromising doctrinal and organizational autonomy. In addition, conflicts between organizations representing conservative Muslim interests and secularly oriented ones further complicate collective action. The result is narrow interest articulation by smaller, less diverse groups. Based on our study, the authors consider the general applicability of our propositions and their implications for European polities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]