Islam and space in Europe: the politics of race, time, and secularism

ABSTRACT

This introduction to the Special Issue “Rethinking Islam and Space in Europe” advocates for an analytical turn in the study of Islam in Europe by using space as a central conceptual lens. While spatial approaches are gaining traction in the study of religion, migration, ethnicity, and race, we argue that the critical potential of spatial approaches remains largely unexplored. This paper offers a threefold contribution. First, we show how combining spatial perspectives with local histories contributes to de-exceptionalising the contemporary study of Islam in urban contexts. Second, by “localising secularism” we can uncover concrete formations of exclusion and erasure, while also providing a more refined picture of the ways in which the agency of Muslims is negotiated. Third, we demonstrate how scrutinizing the nexus of time, race and Europe reveals colonial pasts and continuities that are disrupted and transformed by the movement of bodies through public spaces.

KEYWORDS:

• Space
• Islam
• Europe
• race
• secularism
• spatial turn

Beyond “Islam in Europe”

Some raindrops blur a hastily taken picture of a group of people happily smiling into the camera (Figure 1). At first sight it captures a familiar scene: many of us will have similar pictures in our private photo collection or have seen depictions of groups posing on the social media accounts of friends and family. However, a closer look reveals a series of surprising layers of contestation at the intersection of Islam, space, and Europe. The photograph was taken in January 2020 at the Place du Luxembourg, which faces the European Parliament’s main complex in Brussels. In the background of the picture, there are four figures around the pedestal of the statue of the Belgian industrialist John Cockerill. These figures – a glassblower, a puddler, a mechanic, and a coal miner – are “gagged” with a white fabric alluding to the muting of workers’ voices. This gagging was undertaken by the Flemish NGO collective 11.11.11, as part of an earlier protest that called for an end to poverty and worker exploitation. Their intervention is just one of many that frequently take place on the Place du Luxembourg, which has become a site of protest and petition in view of its proximity to key power-centres of the European Union (EU). The group pictured here gathered for a specific reason: they assembled to mark the UK’s departure from the EU with a playful “farewell party” as a symbolic way to address their disappointment over this rupture.

Figure 1. Photo taken by Chris Saunders.

Crouching in the front row, wearing a yellow cap and holding a heart-shaped balloon, is Magid Magid. At the time, Magid was a 30-year-old Member of the European Parliament (MEP), representing the Green Party of England and Wales. Magid, who self-identifies as a “black Muslim”, was born in Somalia and came to Europe as a child refugee. He frequently shares these biographical details, and they seem to shape his political engagement, such as on fighting racism. Scattered in the group behind him are members of his team, some of whom wear headscarves and might identify as people of colour, following a conscious recruitment policy by Magid to make EU-space less “white”¹ and hire people who otherwise “would have never had the opportunity to work in the European Parliament either because they were from Africa […] or because they wore a headscarf”.² The event staged by Magid and his team included poetry readings, live music, speeches and a satirical “marriage game”. In this game, British “refugees” who lose their residence status due to Brexit are able to enter into a sham marriage in order to gain an EU passport, with their marriage ceremonies symbolically presided over by Magid.

These activities temporarily transformed both the physical and the symbolic space – one deeply entangled with controversies on nationalism, empire, identity-framed accounts of territory, and practices of othering. Islam features prominently in these debates, passionately pursued not only by MEPs or followers of the European far right and their leading figures such as Orbán, Wilders, Farage, Hofer, and Le Pen, but across the whole political spectrum. Populist tropes of a catastrophic “replacement” and “Überfremdung” (superalienation) are frequently projected onto the bodies of Muslims, such as those depicted above. These fears are particularly intensified when visible signs of Muslimness – such as the hijab and mosques – appear in the European public space (Allievi 2009; Eade and Garbin 2006; Fadil 2013; Hopkins and Gale 2009; Müller 2019). While spatial references frequently feature in these academic and public debates, space is rarely employed in a rigorous and systematic fashion as an insightful lens of analysis in itself. This Special Issue seeks to do exactly that: it makes an intervention into the debates around “Islam in Europe” by using space as the analytical prism through which various configurations of Muslimness and Europeanness are interrogated. As the diverse range of spatial concepts featuring in this Special Issue reveals, a critical engagement with the spatial dimension of “Islam and Europe” offers valuable epistemic insights that can be applied beyond the more predictable sites of spatial inquiry such as mosque constructions and veiling practices in European public space.

The picture above indicates the direction of one such a critical rethinking of Islam and space in Europe. It depicts a scene that might not immediately meet the reader’s expectation of a relevant site of inquiry for a discussion on “Islam and Space in Europe”: a group of young people, some visibly Muslim, engaging in a political intervention at a public space in Brussels. However, as this Special Issue demonstrates, thinking about Islam in Europe requires us to go beyond that which is immediately accessible to the observer’s eye, unearthing spatial archives, tracing colonial genealogies, and interrogating unmarked power/knowledge formations. What do we actually mean when we talk about Europe? How do Muslims across Europe engage in the socio-political fabric of European public space, a space often marked as variously secular, Christian, and white? Which spaces – beyond the much-studied mosque space – provide us insights into new configurations of Muslimness? How do Muslim youth navigate a social reality that tends to racialise and religionise their modes of identification? What registers and strategies of resistance can be observed? And what role do bodily and sonic performances play in these efforts to partake in space-making in Europe? Along the themes of “de-exceptionalising Islam: Europe and the city”, “localising secularism, negotiating agency” and “time, race, Europe”, the following sections reflect on the key contributions of this Special Issue as a whole, and, by combining the analytics of space, religion, secularism and race, it proposes a novel perspective on some of the most significant and intensively debated topics in European societies today. It sets out with a brief introductory exploration of the Islam and space nexus, which provides the guiding coordinates for the following arguments.

Analytical turns and the nexus of Islam and space

In recent decades, space has become an increasingly important category for the understanding of religion and social life more widely. However, it seems that many academic engagements with space lack specificity with regard to two questions. First, what are the theoretical underpinnings that inform their spatial analysis? Second, based on their respective theory of space, what are the objects of study they propose to focus upon? Some of the earliest investigations into the making, taking and claiming of Muslim spaces have focused on mosque buildings as one of the clearest manifestations of the presence of Muslim inhabitants across Europe (Gale 2004; Kuppinger 2011). More recent contributions on mosque conflicts have also highlighted the importance of looking at the various scales at which these contestations take place (Astor 2016; DeHanas and Pieri 2011). Others have advocated for relational understandings of space that go beyond accounts of spaces as “containers” and instead argue for space as multidimensional ensemble of discourses, networks, materialities and affects (Müller 2019). However, mosque buildings are only a fraction of the myriad of ways in which Islam manifests itself spatially, which is why it is necessary to diversify our understanding of the objects of analysis at the intersections of Islam and space. As Teo Benussi illustrates in his contribution to this Special Issue, we need to go “beyond the scholarly box of Islamic ‘sites’”. He investigates practices of halal living in Russia through the analytical prism of “pietaskscape”, thereby placing “subjectivity, performativity, teleology, and materiality in resonance with each other”. This account exemplifies how a thorough engagement with the implications of the spatial turn goes beyond exploring “new fields of inquiry”. As Bachmann-Medick (2016, 16) argues, at its core, a “turn” functions as a “medium of knowledge” generating new categories and tools of analysis. Looking at Islam in Europe through a spatialized lens thus provides a refined analytical toolbox as well as new empirical insights when discussing Islam in Europe.

2021 marks twenty-five years since the publication of “Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe” (Metcalf 1996), an important edited volume that was one of the first attempts to make the lens of space useful for the study of Islam in Euroamerica. The key intervention that helped advance the spatial turn in the study of religion more broadly was Kim Knott’s book “Locating Religion” (2005), which greatly inspired this Special Issue. As we build upon these accounts, it is important to note how academic and political debates pertaining to Islam and space have been fundamentally transformed in recent decades. First, on an empirical level, we have seen intensified mobility and migratory movements, deeper institutionalization of Muslim civil society, increased racialization of the presence of Muslims, heightened securitization of the category of Islam, and strengthened nationalist discourses, all of which have helped to transform the current socio-political landscape of “Europe”. Second, within the academy, theoretical reflections on socio-cultural lifeworlds have undergone several generative developments. For example, the spatial turn of the 1990s now has to be placed alongside the material, post-colonial (Taleb in this issue), affective (van den Bogert, Williams and McMurray in this issue), and ethical (Benussi in this issue) turns. While spatiality remains a valuable analytical tool, we now need to consider it in relation to insights gained from other major analytical shifts that have reshaped academic inquiry in the arts, humanities, and social sciences. “Rethinking” spatiality by putting it into conversation with epistemological registers generated by these key analytical turns lies at the heart of this Special Issue. The lens of space in conjunction with the reflective and analytical repertoire offered through the post-colonial, affective, material, and iconic turns promises new perspectives on the study of Islam in Europe. Conversely, the critical study of secularism and Islam offers new insights into the power asymmetries that shape the possibilities of religious and non-religious life, and how that shapes and is shaped by different European spatial formations. The following three sections offer the reader a range of perspectives on underlying configurations that shape the space-Islam-Europe nexus and present cross-cutting themes relating the nine papers of this Special Issue.

De-exceptionalising Islam: Europe and the city

In the case of mosques, the question whether a space or a building is Islamic is largely uncontested. However, if a mosque or an Ashura procession are distinctively Islamic spatial phenomena, how should we characterise the space within which they unfold? What experiences are erased when we talk about European urban space as secular, and shaped by a “Judeo-Christian” tradition, given the new manifestations and intensification of religious configurations fostered by increased mobility, urban tourism, migration, conversion, and general population churn? A series of recent publications argue that the city should better be understood as “post-secular” (Beaumont and Baker 2011), drawing on the much-debated term popularized by Jürgen Habermas (2005). Others have suggested that, borrowing Bruno Latour’s phrase, “we have never been secular” (Milbank 2010). Viewed in this way, the imperatives and demands of religious, non-religious and secular projects have been co-existing in European cities for decades. European cities are spaces where narratives of the nation as secular are produced, while at the same time they are also loci where these very narratives are challenged. Cities are insightful fields for a spatialized analysis, because of these specific tensions marking them as sites of power struggles. While less urban contexts might facilitate equally intriguing dynamics, the papers collected in this Special Issue are mainly focused on urban European settings.

Throughout European history, cities have been spaces of deviation, contestation, heterodoxy, and religious innovation. Indeed, the scientific ethos driving industrialization, technologization and rationalization – in the Weberian sense – was engaged in a mutual “vertical transfer” of knowledge that was critical to innovation and transformation of religious traditions in what has been called Europäische Religionsgeschichte, or European History of Religion (Gladigow 1995). In this way, the interweaving of religion and secularism in the reconfigurations of urban space in Europe is neither a novelty nor an exceptional “challenge” presented by “Islam”. Contestations about competing systems of meaning and the power of interpreting key concepts that determine the ontological position of spatial categories such as home, city, state, or the Earth should be seen rather as a continuity than as a novel phenomenon in European history. Thus, combining geographical and historical perspectives on assemblages of urban diversity allows us to avoid the pitfall of exceptionalising Islam. At the same time, the responses evoked by the presence of Muslim inhabitants, for instance in the much debated “banlieues” of Paris, provide telling insights into the “contradictions of secularism” (Fernando 2014). These contradictions are not “brought” by Muslim immigrants, but instead are deeply rooted in what Max Weber called the “polytheism of values” that characterises modern European life (2012, 348).

Contestations around religion and culture should therefore be seen as a constant pattern of urban life in Europe as much as the unremarkable ways of going about everyday life to which scholars usually pay less attention. At the same time, cities are also the locus of one of the most vital transformations of European societies, namely the pluralization and diversification of systems of values, affects and ultimate meaning. In his article on “superdiversity”, Steven Vertovec (2007) suggests that increasingly complex migration patterns have produced an unprecedented confluence of markers of difference such as country of origin, language, religion, immigration status, space/place, and transnationalism, and particularly so in European cities. He encourages us to investigate new patterns of prejudice, inequality, segregation, cosmopolitanism and, significantly, the relation between space and interpersonal contact. While we agree that focusing on the complex patterns of superdiversity of cities helps to avoid binary reductionisms such as Islam/West or migrant/non-migrant, in Vertovec’s article the category of “space” seems to be mainly restricted to the question of “where”, in which districts and neighbourhoods, “newcomers” gather. This perspective, which became prominent through the heightened political significance of research agendas exploring the empirical realities of “multiculturalism” is insufficient to grapple with the multidimensionality of the space-religion-nexus in urban settings (Amin 2002; Keith 2005). Temporary transformations of buildings, bodies, and boulevards for various performative, ethical and political projects require as much scholarly attention as the number of maternal languages spoken in a particular urban area.

The literature on superdiversity frequently considers immigration and difference as a “policy challenge” that needs to be addressed, and migrant or minority populations as groups that need to be understood, monitored, and effectively integrated into the existing structures of government and society. This perspective leaves three power structures that are prerequisites for an understanding of superdiversity out of the equation: secularism, whiteness, and the state. The statistical study of the transformations of populations that is familiar within scholarship on “diversity” necessarily lacks the ability to scrutinise the ways in which religiously, racially or culturally marked populations experience living in their urban habitats. What secularist assumptions and desires are enshrined in and mobilized through legal statutes, city politics and identity struggles? How is whiteness as a social norm that is “chained to an index of unspoken privileges” (Nayak 2007, 738) configured in different urban contexts? How is it adapting and changing, and with what spatial implications? Are cultural-religious urban formations in Europe shaped after the ideal of the “Open City” (Sennett 2018) or rather by something similar to the “White Christian Nationalism” at the heart of US American civil religion (Gorski 2017)? Are our traditional accounts of the state as a centrally organized bureaucratic structure adequate to understand the exercise of power in the age of neo-liberal governmentality, “nudge theory” and “surveillance capitalism” (Zuboff 2019)? In this sense, Islam and space in European urban settings is our object of observation, and our empirical point of departure. However, our objects of inquiry are power/knowledge formations that we seek to critically assess, ranging from the possibilities of contemporary urban lives, including divine desires, hidden prayers and transgressive bodies, to how they are situated in intersecting systems of oppression.

Localising secularism, negotiating agency

Spatial analyses, as deployed in this Special Issue, both build upon and further refine the mode of inquiry pioneered by the critical secularism literature that has emerged in response to the seminal work of Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood and their interlocutors. The powers of secularism can neither be merely understood as a mode of separation between religion and politics, or church and state, nor as a purely cognitive or institutional relationship between more or less discrete entities. Instead, secularism mobilises desires and fears about nation, religion, race, class and gender across multiple spatial dimensions. It does so by inscribing affects into bodies, and positionalities into a thus stratified citizenry. In this sense, secularism does always both; it claims universality and global ascendancy, but it also always manifests in a local, embodied, and vernacular way. It becomes visible through the power/knowledge formations it creates in everyday life, and in the ways in which it is reconstituted and resisted in everyday practice.

Griera and Burchardt’s contribution to this Special Issue, drawing on an empirical study of collective religious rituals in the streets, parks and squares of Barcelona, shows how unofficial images of the city and perceptions of normality shape what they call, following Erving Goffmann, “interaction orders” and “urban regimes”. The racialised character of these access regimes is demonstrated by municipal officials’ differential treatment of Muslim and Sikh processions when compared to Buddhist public meditations. Making sense of these differences, they suggest, requires a multidimensional concept of urban regimes involving bureaucratic regulations, the interaction order of the city and the attached emotional registers, and imaginations of public space. Religious parades, they argue, should be understood as “acts of interpellation that challenge taken-for-granted notions about the location of the religious and the secular in contemporary cities”.

What we call “localising secularism” also means exploring situated modes of agency and registers of subversion. Muslims across Europe, as this collection illustrates, challenge and transform the racial-secular-liberal matrix. For example, McMurray’s study of Ashura processions in Berlin describes “a kind of reshaping of the urban through sonic and spatial practices”, which he sees as a process of remediation. Meanwhile, in van den Bogert’s paper on Muslim girls playing football in Dutch public playgrounds, the body is identified as a key locus of resistance. In her analysis, van den Bogert illustrates the struggle of young, female Muslim footballers who seek to escape the totalizing gaze of a white male majority constantly reading them as Muslim and thus fixing their possibilities of identification to the category of religion. The analysis further shows how by claiming public space and transforming playgrounds into spaces for expressing their passion for football these young Muslim girls act as “space invaders” (Puwar 2004), disrupting a secular white script that often denies their bodies access. This example shows how focussing on the religious, ethical and personal projects of individual Muslims helps avoiding the frequently politically motivated fixation on the relation between Islam and secularism. For instance, the epistemological prioritization of the religious/secular lens can be resisted by focusing on the explicit preferences of our interlocutors. In van den Bogert’s paper, the girls’ passion to play football on public playgrounds in their neighbourhood might be an equally important lens to understand subjective meaning-making as the challenge to the secular, nationalist, white and gendered assumptions of the space where they play. In the same way, the ethical projects of halal lifestyles in Tatarstan might require attention to visual, gustatory and embodied performances as much as a reflection on local regimes of religious diversity (Benussi in this issue).

Scholars of religion and race need to pay closer attention to the way in which architectural landscapes and built environments play a central explanatory role in the characterization of urban space. At the same time, geographers and sociologists need to grapple with the ways in which public space in Western Europe is frequently uncritically conceptualized as secular, white and male-dominated (Balibar 2013). Whether through unquestioned convention, by remaining unmarked, or through racialised prejudice against certain religious groups, Christianity is frequently the normative background against which minority or newer religious groups have to emancipate themselves (see Griera and Burchardt in this issue). However, it would be mistaken to base any analysis of European urban space on the assumption that its normative white, male, secular and/or Christian character is the predominant factor influencing Muslim striving and creation. Doing so would limit Muslim experience to the oppressive systems they face, thereby not only effacing differences in terms of class, race, gender and sexualities among Muslims, but also remaining stuck in the binary of oppressor and oppressed. This conundrum is not unlike the stickiness of colonialism in postcolonial critique: How can one produce accounts of the world that are attentive to oppression without limiting the experiences of those on the receiving end of these power-asymmetries to the oppression they face, thereby binding their identity to the very racial-secular-liberal matrix that constrains their possibilities of being human? Sunier’s contribution grapples with this question by investigating how forms of collaboration between local leaders and municipal administrators depend strongly on intergenerational dynamics within Muslim organizations, the disruptive dynamics of urban renewal and the local knowledge acquired by various local elites. This local knowledge, or metis, borrowing from James Scott, is different from the abstract and systematic knowledge prevalent in most policy and academic discourse. By localising secularism through thick descriptions of specific contexts, we can uncover how agencies are navigated and reclaimed in ways that remain hidden to more conventional perspectives on power and boundaries.

Time, race, Europe

The heightened academic and political interest in Islam should not lead to ignoring the central role of deep contextual histories, administrative regimes and local political economies and moral imaginations to understand the fortunes of establishing different institutions (Moses in this issue). Designating a historiographical account as “local” is challenging with most objects of study. However, in the field of Islam in Europe the spatial extensions across different scales open up a variety of research avenues that scholars can no longer ignore. Trying to understand the history of Islam in Europe needs to be critically assessed in light of centuries of exoticising discourses of Orientalism and the “duress” of colonial entanglements. As Ann Stoler illustrates, colonial pasts continue to mobilise “unspoken distinctions” and “affective charges” (Stoler 2016, 5) by being woven into the fabric of Europe (Taleb in this issue). Europe’s streets and squares are not only crowded by the iconography of Christianity, but they also include the remnants of colonial empires, at times glorifying regimes of oppression and exploitation in plain view of parliament and government buildings embodying the very promises of democracy and liberty that Muslim-majority societies are often accused of lacking. In most studies of “Islam in Europe”, the latter remains unmarked, as if it was only the geographic frame of reference within which multireligious and multicultural lifeworlds unfold, and not also a central normative, ontological and epistemological apparatus that has been mobilized against the shifting images of its currently most salient “Other”. “Europe”, therefore, cannot be seen as a term that is more stable than “Islam”.

“Provincializing Europe” (Chakrabarty 2000) and scrutinizing it as a shifting political concept highlights the importance of acknowledging the complex intersection between the temporal and the spatial. Rethinking the way Islam manifests in Europe in the 21st century benefits from tracing the various ways in which the past and the future tend to merge into the present as imaginaries of a time yet to come and as echoes of a time not yet absent. This polyvalence of the temporal manifesting in spatial configurations is also apparent in the different orders of time present in Europe today. For instance, the comparatively novel emphasis on the lunar calendar through which the month of Ramadan and the Shi’a holiday of Ashura are determined are now an irreducible part of the spatio-temporal realities that shape how “seasons” are experienced in neighbourhoods where Muslim presence is more recent than the communities of the Balkans and Russia (McMurray in this issue). Grasping these instances of “experiencing” time through space-making draws our attention to embodiment and performance. The movement of bodies through spaces where they have been previously excluded does not only mean the crossing of an ontological threshold or creating “third spaces” (Soja 1996). It also implies feelings, sounds, and smells (Hirschkind 2006). These emergences of vibrant activity, colourful clothing, and fragrant food are repurposing urban infrastructures through visual, olfactory, tactile, gustatory and “sonic remediations” (McMurray in this issue). McMurray’s conception of “remediation” in the context of Ashura processions in Berlin and the analytical tool of “palimpsest” employed by Taleb to read EUrope “against the grain” unsettle spatio-temporal analysis that follow the serial, linear script of “secular time” (Mas 2011). Analysing Islam in Europe through a spatial lens equally draws our attention to temporality and the selective processes of collective remembering that follows mechanisms of classification and hierarchization. Race, gender, and nation constitute a powerful metre in the rhythm of secular time.

What the papers in this collection show is that if we want to investigate the ways in which the intersections of race, gender, nationality, class and religion structure public space, a sole focus on the immediate built environment is clearly insufficient. Rather, investigating the ways in which people who happen to be Muslim move through space, and the types of racialization, religionization, othering and exceptionalization they experience, enables us to uncover the deep power-asymmetries that govern European spaces such as prisons, playgrounds, and supermarkets (see Williams, van den Bogert and Benussi in this issue). This perspective allows us to attune our analytical apparatus through the various ways in which affective and gendered regimes are built into different “local secularisms” (van den Bogert, Müller in this issue) and how they are being challenged and reshaped. Diversifying our understanding of space into various dimensions such as transnationalism and geopolitics (Williams in this issue) territory, place, scale and network (TPSN), and body, mobility and positionality, also enables us to achieve a much richer understanding of the strivings and challenges of Muslim lifeworlds (Müller in this issue; see Jessop, Brenner, and Jones 2008).

Critical contributions

The constituent papers of this Special Issue offer fresh perspectives on key issues within the study of ethnicity, race, religion, politics, and space: relationships between the state and minority communities, the role of the secular, assertive agency and resistance, imaginations and transformations of tradition and identity, and discursive strategies of belonging. Shifting our attention to spaces less frequently studied, the contributions investigate the performance of gender, Islam, and the secular in Dutch playground spaces, the role of sound in Ashura processions to remediate urban spaces in Berlin and Kars, and the practices that transform ordinary spaces in an English prison into battlegrounds of ethno-religious and geopolitical tension. We make the case for the crucial importance of spatial approaches to the study of Islam in Europe, and, more generally, to key social fault lines, discourses of power, and the realities of everyday life in European societies.

Turning our focus towards the contents and structure of this Special Issue itself, the materials collected here offer a spatial approach along three theoretical gateways: governance, institutions, and performance. The first section, “Governing space: State interventions and Islamic practices” (Müller, Griera and Burchardt, Sunier) investigates the configurations, possibilities, and conditions of Muslim space-making in relation to local and national governments. The papers offer new perspectives on the role of political actors by providing an alternative to the “black box” understandings of the state prevalent in the literature, scrutinizing instead how allegedly neutral bureaucratic regulations of religious events in public spaces are infused with institutionalised racism, and arguing that collaborations between different religious and state actors depend on local charisma and mutual trust. The second section, “Islam and institutions: Spatial configurations of the secular and the religious” (Taleb, Williams, Moses), explores the power dynamics at play within three very different institutions. We examine the historical, geographical, and political structures that shape the lifeworlds of a neighbourhood-focused waqf (Islamic charitable endowment), a high security prison, and the European Union. We show how a spatial approach to each enables a unique series of insights into the dynamics around their organizing logics, considering matters such as Islamically-informed economics, geo-political conflicts, and colonial genealogies. Our third set of interventions, “Performance and space: Subjectivity, contestation and embodiment”, (Benussi, van den Bogert, McMurray) addresses the role of performativity and Muslimness across several spatial dimensions. We turn our gaze towards the ways in which individuals and groups pursue different ethical, religious and playful projects, including discussions of settings and locations where Muslim pietists carry out self-fashioning and participation in spatialized rituals and processions to articulate unique forms of Islam. Investigating these everyday public practices, agencies and resistances offers innovative insights into the construction, reproduction and resistance of European public space. The Special Issue concludes with an afterword by Kim Knott, one of the foremost scholars of religion and space. In this afterword, Knott reflects on how the field has developed in the last two decades, offers a constructive critique of the Special Issue, and lays out what she considers to be the most promising analytical innovations in the field.

Taken collectively, the papers offer five major contributions. First, they undertake a critical evaluation of “space” as an analytical lens for the study of Islam in Europe, demonstrating how it enables deeper understandings of the interplay of major identity categories, and emphasising the diversity of place-making and spatial interaction. Next, the papers draw attention to the theoretical challenges their research projects have negotiated, and consequently offer a series of analytical toolsets for future scholars. These include critical engagement with concepts such as “palimpsest” to interpret the specific “fabric” of the European Union (Taleb), “pietaskscape” to foreground and frame the three-dimensional, granular, ubiquitous, and subjective unfolding of ethical life (Benussi), “space invaders” to articulate resistance to the social norms that construct public spaces (van den Bogert), and “local secularisms” to denote how secularism can be constituted as an ensemble of vernacular practices (Müller). Third, they offer a range of methodological tools that will be of wider value to researchers, including sensory approaches to space (McMurray, Williams), the comparative “governance of religions” (Griera and Burchardt), and longer-form histories of space that are atypical of much research on Islam in Europe (Moses, Sunier, Taleb). Fourth, we offer a diverse series of detailed and focused case studies. In particular, the contributors’ range of disciplinary backgrounds (social anthropology, political science, sociology, musicology, religious studies, and Islamic studies) offers a creative breadth of perspectives, while empirical settings are marked by geographical diversity (Kazan to Catalonia) and conceptual breadth (local, translocal, and transnational dimensions, European colonial genealogies, and inter-continental comparisons). Finally, and perhaps most importantly for the readers of Ethnic and Racial Studies, the papers offer insights into how scholars might exploit the category of “space” as a strategy for understanding other theoretical and conceptual debates in the social sciences. Specifically, how does a spatial perspective on Islam relate to the state, ethnicity, race, secularism, gender, or post-colonialism? In doing so, we envisage that both scholars with an interest in Islam in Europe, as well as those working on wider themes raised by these papers, such as governance, community, institutions, ritual, or embodiment, will benefit.

The evasiveness of space

Returning to the picture of young people gathered in front of the European Parliament complex in Brussels, we are faced with both the duress and the volatility of socio-spatial formations. As this collection demonstrates, space is never stable but always transforming. It changes through ruptures such as Brexit, securitization and protests, and slow transformations such as cosmopolitanisation, neo-liberalization and normalization of the visible presence of non-white, non-Christian bodies. A procession (Griera and Burchardt, McMurray), a football game (van den Bogert), or a political gathering of youth (Taleb) in a public space in Europe mark the emergence of momentary spaces. Apparent failures to realise intended Islamic presences in spaces (Müller, Moses) point to their potentiality and uncertainty, too.

Together, these instances indicate the possibilities for Muslims to claim space, to escape and challenge mechanisms of reducing them to fixed identity categories, but they also bear testimony to the evasiveness of space. The Brexit event organized by MEP Magid might be read as a “third space” (Soja 1996) in which a set of power hierarchies are questioned, allowing an otherwise underrepresented and marginalized group within the political system of the EU – self-identified Muslim youth – to set the tone of the debate. However, with Magid leaving the EU-space, we might wonder about the extent to which his widely reported activities during his time in office will find resonance in Europe.

This example illustrates not only the evasiveness of space – pointing us towards the close link between space and time – but also the anthropogenic quality of space. While the production of space carries non-human components (such as particular architectural forms or public policies and regulations), people generate material and discursive spaces through their interactions. Space is created by their bodies moving in particular ways, bodies which in the case of Muslims tend to be racialised and point us towards hidden archives and unseen genealogies within the fabric of European space. As our contributions demonstrate, bodies constitute a reservoir of somatic registers that produce multi-sensual, affective, three dimensional spaces. Many of the interdisciplinary investigations into various scales and locales in this Special Issue include visual materials in order to allow us to see both the remarkable (rituals, built environments of particular note) and the more ordinary (shops, hidden corners, minute neighbourhood details) as equally important elements that constitute the lifeworlds of our interlocutors. Given the dramatic pace at which urban, digital and natural environments are changing, we hope the spatial perspectives introduced here, which are attuned to the complexities of secularism, race and agency, will spark critical interrogations of yet unknown presents and futures.

Acknowledgements

“Rethinking Islam and Space in Europe” began as a workshop at the University of Cambridge, and we would like to take this opportunity to thank all participants and sponsors (the DAAD-Cambridge research hub, the Cambridge Interfaith Programme, and the Cambridge Institute for Religion and International Studies) for their support. In particular, we would like to mention the fantastic Claire Dwyer (https://www.ucl.ac.uk/geography/claire-dwyer/), who sadly passed away in 2019; mosque architect and historian Shahed Saleem (https://historicengland.org.uk/images-books/publications/the-british-mosque/), for guiding us through the history of British mosque architecture; Kim Knott (https://iconicreligion.wordpress.com/portfolio/london/), for giving a public keynote that brought important research on religion and space to a wide audience; and Abdal Hakim Murad, for giving a tour of the Cambridge eco-Mosque (https://marksbarfield.com/projects/cambridge-mosque/) while it was under construction: an Islamic space in the making. We thank Schirin Amir-Moazami and Sarah Holz for extensive and valuable feedback on this introductory essay. Writing and conceptualizing a Special Issue requires time and space to think, and Adela Taleb would like to thank Marie-Claire Foblets for her invitation to the Department of Law & Anthropology, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology, which provided this space. We conclude by thanking our authors, Amanda Eastell-Bleakley, the supportive team at ERS, and the many anonymous scholars who provided constructive feedback for the review process.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by DAAD-Cambridge research hub; The Cambridge Interfaith Programme (CIP); Cambridge Institute for Religion and International Studies (CIRIS).

Notes

1 We use the term “white” to refer to a complex process in which modes of differentiation and hierarchisation classify people according to skin colour, religion, and ethnicity, amongst other categories. Whiteness as a constructed frame of identification is part of the process of “racialization” that produces white and non-white bodies and ascribes them with naturally attached abilities and qualities (Goldberg 2006; Wekker 2016).

2 Interview with Magid Magid, conducted by Adela Taleb, 15 October 2020.