Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and across Europe

Abstract

Through networks and media, European Muslims finally emerged as social and public actors in both European societies and the context of the broader ummah. This is the core subject of the book, an edited collection that examines the networks and ways in which Muslims engage in the public sphere. The discussion is supported with various case studies. According to two of the contributors, Mark Le Vine and Peter Mandaville, European Islam can develop alternative Muslim views that affect the native homelands of European Muslims and also contribute to the dynamic of self-perception and self-interpretation of Islam. European Muslims animate religious debates and contribute to developing a critical, pluralistic, and less conservative view of Islam. According to Mandaville, differences (viewed as positive elements) are negotiated and not negated. This demonstrates, as fellow contributor Valerie Amiraux argues, that there is the possibility within Islam to express different religious beliefs. Jorgen Neilson notes in his chapter that many networks (e.g., the Indian Deobandis, the Brelwis, or the Tabligh-i-Jama’at) have gained a space and an influence in Europe that they cannot achieve in their home countries. Many authors problematize singular conceptions of Islam. Unfortunately, quite often Muslim is taken for granted and regarded as self-evident and self-explanatory. Mandaville defines Muslims as “those who consider Islam and its regular practice to be a primary (although, as we will see, not necessarily as an exclusive one) component of self-identity” (p. 130), and considers those who fall outside this definition to be ethnic, non-universalistic, and cultural Muslims. Ironically, this definition looks similar to that of fundamentalists, who believe that religious identity is the Muslims’ primary essence, despite the fact that one of the book’s main aims is to demonstrate that European Islam is tolerant and pluralistic. In making distinctions between religion, culture, and society, Stefano Allievi emphasizes similarities and minimizes differences and conflicts in the construction of a pan-Islamic global and deterritorialized ummah. In examining the tensions between the universal and the particular conceptions of Islam and Islamic identification, Steven Vertovec, in particular, focuses on the contemporary emergence of disaporic realities as “new processes of localization” (p. 318) and the existence of specific national forms of religion alongside universalist claims ...