A Brief History of Islam in Europe

Front matter

A

BRIEF

HISTORY.

Contents

Foreword - 11

1. The Link to Today - 13 Collective Memory - 15

2. ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’ - 17 A Methodological Framework - 17 Europe - 18 Islam - 19

Chapter One. Uncivilized Europe (700-1000 CE)

I. Setting the Stage - 35 1. Europe at the Dawn of the Muslim Conquests - 35 2. The Islamic Empire - 38

II. Physical Islam - 40 1. The Realm of Interaction - 40 Constantinople and the Byzantium Empire - 40 Al-Andalus: The Emirate and Caliphate of Cordoba - 41 Sicily - 43 2. Living with the Unbeliever: Christians under Muslim Rule - 44 The Issue of Conversion - 44 Religious Rule - 46 Tolerance and Social Tensions - 49

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3. Other Relations and Contacts - 52 Wars and Raids « 52 Religious War? - 55 The Battle of Poitiers - 57 Diplomacy and Trade - 59

III. Virtual Islam - 63 Myths, Legends and Ignorance - 63

Chapter Two. Crusading Europe (1000-1500 CE) L Setting the Stage - 69

1. Economic Revival - 69 2. Religious Revival - 71 3. The Crusades - 72

II. Physical Islam - 74 1. The Realm of Interaction - 74 Al-Andalus: Reconquista and Convivencia - 74 Sicily: Expulsion of Muslims - 77 Byzantium: The Loss of an Empire - 78 Latin Kingdoms: A Short-Lived Dream - 79 Tataristan and Lipka-Tatars - 80 2. Living with the Unbeliever: Muslims under Christian Rule - 81 Conquering the Lands of the Infidel - 83 From Tolerant Segregation to Forced Assimilation - 85 3. Social Tensions - 88 4. Conversion - 90 5. Other Relations and Contacts - 93 Commerce and Trade - 93

Slavery : 95

III. Virtual Islam - 97

1. The Study and Legends of Islam - 98 2. Polemics and Martyrdom - 100

3. Culture and Technology - 103

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Chapter Three. Divided Europe (1500-1700 CE)

I. Setting the Stage - 109 1. Europe: Reformation and National Self-Assertion - 109 2. Rise of the Ottoman Empire - 110

II. Physical Islam - 114 1. Living With the Unbeliever - 114 1.1. Lipka Tartars in the Christian Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth - 114 1.2. Ottoman Europe - 116 Settlement and Conversion - 116 Religious Rule - 119 1.3. Moriscos in Catholic Spain - 124 2. Other Relations and Contacts - 128 2.1. Wars and Raids - 129 Holy Wars Revisited? - 129 Vienna 1683 - 131 Raiding and Piragy - 133 2.2. Alliances and Treaties - 135 France and the Ottomans - 135 The Dutch Republic and the Moroccan Sultan - 137 2.3. Trade - 138 2.4. Slavery - 139

II. Virtual Islam - 142

1. The Image of the ‘Turk’ - 142

2. Dealing with the ‘Turk’ - 143

3. Islam: ‘Better Turkish than Papish’ - 144

Chapter Four. Powerful Europe (1700-1950 CE) I. Setting the Stage - 151

1. Colonialism and Imperialism - 151 2. The Demise of the Ottoman Empire - 153

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II. Physical Islam - 156 1. Living with the Unbeliever - 156 2. The Combustible Mix of Capitulations, Millets and Nationalism - 160 Capitulations As a Political Tool - 161 Nationalism - 163 Reforms (Tanzimat) - 165 3. Wars and Insurgencies - 167 Inter-State Conflicts - 167 Internal Conflicts - 168 The Role of Religion in Internal and Inter-State Conflicts - 169 Religious-Ethnic Cleansing - 171 4. Diplomatic Relations and Trade - 174 5. Muslim Sojourners: Students, Nationalists and Conscripts - 177

II. Virtual Islam - 180

1. Eighteenth Century: Turquerie and Inclusive Othering - 181 Turquerte - 181 Studying Islam - 182

2. Nineteenth Century: Orientalism and Exclusive Othering - 184 Vision of the Turk and Orientalism - 184 Studying Islam - 186

Chapter Five. Struggling Europe (1950-) L Setting the Stage - 193

1. A New Europe - 193

2. Islam in the New Europe - 195

3. Identity, Loyalty and Security - 197

1. Living with the Unbeliever - 199 Counting Muslims - 199 Muslim Identity - 200 Conversion - 203 Visibility of Islam - 204

2. Secular and Religious Rule - 207 European Secularism and Religious Freedom - 208 Tolerance: A Clash of Fundamental Rights - 211 3. Wars and Terrorism - 213 The Yugoslavian Civil Wars - 213 Extremism and Terrorism - 216 4. Europe and Its ‘Neighbourhood’ - 218 Exporting Stability? - 218 Importing Extremism? - 220 Turkey and the European Union - 222 International Actions Against ‘Defamation of Islam’ - 224

III. Virtual Islam - 226 1. Images of Islam and Muslims - 227 Criticism and Islamophobia - 227 The ‘Third Wave’ - 229 A Conflict of Values - 231 2. The Study of Islam - 234 European Scholarship - 234 European Muslim Studies of Islam - 236

Epilogue: Islamization of Europe or Europanization of Islam? - 239 Historical Patterns - 239 Patterns into the Present - 244 To Be Extrapolated into the Future? - 248

Notes - 251 Bibliography - 305 Index - 343

CONTENTS

Foreword

This book is the result of six years teaching my BA class entitled ‘The history of Islam in the West’ at Leiden University. I want to thank the students for their active participation and comments, which prompted me every year further to refine my arguments, dig deeper into Europe’s rich history with Islam, and to become more critical about contemporary references to ‘Islam.’ Annefieke Bonants was one of the first students who took that class, and she later became my assistant to do the research for this book. Her meticulous and painstaking work, and not least the friendly patience with which she reacted to the flurry of ideas and orders I hurled at her were indispensable to the finishing of the writing of this book. Anniek Meinders, the publisher of the newly established Leiden University Press, was courageous enough to take on this project that did not fit neatly into an academic category. Finally thanks to the advisory board of Leiden University Press and the three peer reviewers who spent their precious time reading the manuscript and dispensing helpful comments: Prof. M. Schrovers of the History department at Leiden University, Prof. J. Nielsen of the Theology Faculty at the University of Copenhagen, and a third reviewer who preferred to remain anonymous.

The Hague, May 2014

Introduction

Islam’s recent arrival in Europe by means of migration, violence and media images has kindled a wave of interest in Europe’s past and present relations with Islam. Publications on these subjects are prolific, so why another book on ‘Islam in Europe’? There are three reasons: to provide the first comprehensive overview of the entire thirteen-century history of Islam in Europe from 7oo cE until now (most existing literature covers only a part of this history); to identify the role of ‘Islam’ during this period; and to look into the impact of this long history on the current discourse and situation of Islam in Europe. My endeavour is to present a framework by which we can conceptualize the notion of ‘Islam in Europe’ in time (the eighth to the twenty-first centuries CE) and space (‘Europe’), and that will allow us to sample and interconnect the enormous corpus of existing knowledge on Islam in Europe and to put it in chronological and thematic order. This framework should provide the reader with novel insights into the history of Islam in Europe.

Given the comprehensiveness of this book, its approach is by default multidisciplinary. The secondary literature used to write it is that of specialists of regions (Europe, Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire, the Mediterranean), periods (Middle Ages, Renaissance, colonial period, modern Europe), and specific disciplinary subjects (religion, economics, social sciences, political sciences, law, art, agriculture). The ambitious set-up that squeezes thirteen centuries into a single volume requires a clear perspective on what story this book wants to tell, how that story is told, and why it needs to be told in the first place. These questions will be addressed in the following.

1. The Link to Today

In discussions nowadays on the role of Islam in Europe, direct or indirect references are often made to events of the past that allude to a history of perpetual conflict whereby ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’ stand for entities that collide because, according to some observers, they represent different value systems or, in the eyes of others, because Islam is by nature aggressive and has put Europe on the defensive ever since the Arab Muslims rode out of the Arab Peninsula in the seventh century in search of conquest. To the proponents of these views the current presence of large numbers of Muslims in Europe is a reason for concern, and they justify their anxieties with references to history.! There are also other observers, however, who hold a much more positive historical view on Islamic-European relations, referring to the knowledge that has passed on from the medieval Islamic civilization to Europe: their emphasis is on the intellectual interaction between the two realms rather than on their belligerent relations.’

Such opposing views are not reserved for political debates, but have also permeated academic discussions. Two eminent contemporary scholars of Islamic history, the American professors Bernard Lewis and Richard Bulliet, provide a case in point? Bulliet argues that Islam and Christianity share the same cradle of a common civilization from which they parted “as siblings” in the sixteenth century, while Lewis asserts that the two civilizations have always been at loggerheads. Bulliet stresses the similarities in the developments and experiences of the two civilizations, while Lewis emphasizes their differences. Bulliet refers to religion as only one of the many factors that shaped Muslim identity, while Lewis puts religion at centre stage for understanding the Muslim. And Bulliet argues for a legacy of a Christian-Islamic heritage, while Lewis differentiates between an Islamic civilization, on the one hand, and a Judeo-Christian civilization, on the other. Lewis’ view has gained popularity since the attacks of 9/11 in 2001 and the subsequent terrorist attacks in Europe, and seems to be corroborated by the mounting reports on the apparent lack of integration of Muslim migrants in Western European societies. Bulliet’s view, on the other hand, is shared particularly by many historians of the Middle Ages who point to the parallels between the two civilizations and the ways in which Europe is indebted to Islamic civilization.

As every historian will confirm, history can provide source material that may lead to very different interpretations. In the case of Islam, however, historical facts and terminology are not always a source of academic interplay between rival historians, but are sometimes rewritten in public discourse or, worse, become a demagogic tool against Muslim Europeans. One example is the claim that Europeans are part of a ‘Judeo-Christian civilization’ (sometimes with the addition of ‘Humanist’) which, as we have seen, is used as a premise by Bernard Lewis but is a notion challenged by Richard Bulliet. In 2005, however, this academic debate spilled over into political reality when, in the final drafting phase of the new European Union Convention, known as the ‘EU constitution’, there was deliberation about introducing this term in the preamble.‘ The implicit aim of this political manoeuvring was to put up a wall against the alleged Islamicization of Europe by its expanding Muslim population. The proposed amendment did not come to pass, which was probably the smart thing to do, because such an identity-marker would not only deny the influences of Islamic civilization, but also the value of Greek, Roman, Ottoman and all other non-Judeo and non-Christian elements that have contributed to European civilization.

Collective Memory

The history (by which I mean the amalgam of transnational and transcultural, political, social, economic, intellectual and other forms and disciplines of history) of ‘Islam in Europe’ provides, from the perspective of current European affairs, therefore, an interesting example of what has been called ‘collective memory.’ This term received much attention from historians in the 1990s and consequently developed into multiple meanings, but for the purpose of this book we will use this notion to mean the ways in which people construct a conception of the past, and from which they derive an awareness of their present sense of unity and peculiarity.’ A collective memory provides a people with a common identity that can be traced back into history, regardless of the accuracy of the historical events or the causal connection of these events to the identity of the people holding the collective memory. The concept of a Judeo-Christian heritage to underpin European unity isa perfect illustration of this. Ina similar vein Tony Judt analysed how the memory of the wartime experience in continental Europe was “distorted, sublimated, and appropriated, [and] bequeathed to the postwar era an identity that was fundamentally false, dependent upon the erection ofan unnatural and unsustainable frontier between past and present in European public memory”.

An important aspect of this collective memory, therefore, is the distortion of history into mythology or imagery. Several contemporary medieval historians have made interesting compilations and analyses of the European medieval image of Islamas a threat, whether as a religion, a belligerent ideology or a dominating culture, and argued how this imagery has continued into the present age.’ The argument these historians by implication make is that present-day Western (and in particular West European) anxieties about Islam are related not only to the recent phenomenon of Muslim immigration and Islamic terrorism, but also to a perpetuating image that is centuries old, an image that often has little to do with reality but all the more with the perception of the Muslim as the embodiment of everything that the Westerner is not.

What, then, are the historical experiences that Europe has had with Islam, and, more importantly, in what form are they lodged in today’s collective memory? An example is the Frankish victory at Poitiers against one of the many plunder raids conducted by Spanish Moors: in European collective memory this battle has acquired the historical significance of halting the Muslim onslaught on Europe and consequently saving Europe from Islamic domination. In chapter one we will discuss the historical evidence that proves this analysis to be incorrect. Equally interesting is the obverse of this same question: what are the ‘memory holes’, or those historical experiences that have been erased from or not admitted into European collective memory? An example is the ample study of the six centuries of Muslim life in Catholic Spain as opposed to the near lack of such interest in the six centuries of Muslim life in Catholic Poland and Lithuania.’ Another example is the European collective memory of the Barbary corsairs and the hundreds of thousands of Christian slaves they kept, while neglecting the fact that enslavement of Muslims by means of piracy was conducted ona similar scale by the Christian European side.’ This is not to say that such omissions in our collective memory or in our academic interest happen deliberately; but it is in itself interesting to note that one is selective when discussing ‘Islam in Europe’. In this book we therefore want to provide a story of Islam in Europe that is as comprehensive as possible. The purpose is not to single out the distortions and the omissions in our current collective memory of Islam in Europe; the endeavour to give the full story will itself highlight these omissions as the reader may be surprised with events, facts and numbers that were hitherto unknown to him or her.

Of paramount importance when telling these stories and histories is to be aware of who told them then, who tells them now, and who they are addressed to, because the collective memory of a people will resonate with certain stories, but not with others. To Catholics of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the ‘Turk’ was the great enemy, while many Protestants saw more similarities with Islam than with Catholicism and some Protestants even claimed to prefer Ottoman rule to that of the Catholics. Nowadays, on the other hand, most Protestants will feel closer to Catholicism than to Islam. In the seventeenth century, the fall of Vienna might have been a disaster for the Holy Roman Empire, but such event would have been applauded by the Empire’s enemy France. Nowadays, on the other hand, Frenchmen may concur with the view that the breaking of the Ottoman siege of Vienna saved Europe from Islamic domination.

This coexistence of different collective memories in the past is recurring again in present-day Europe, not only because of different experiences in the various geographical parts of Europe, but also because of the presence ofa relatively large number of immigrants of foreign origin, many of whom are Muslim. Even those among them who are born, raised and educated in Europe have inherited a collective memory that has stored different images, events and notions from that of their fellow Europeans. For instance, when mentioning the battles of Poitiers and Vienna where respectively Moorish and Ottoman armies were defeated, many of my students of Dutch origin nod their heads in recognition of these names, while my Dutch Muslim students of foreign origin will give me blank stares. Conversely, when I mention the battle of Hittin, where Saladin brought defeat to the Crusader armies, my Muslim students look up in recognition while the others do not. The different reactions are remarkable given the fact that all these students have taken the same Dutch state exams, and none of these historical events is part of the Dutch school curriculum. Collective memory, therefore, is powerful, perhaps even more so than acquired knowledge.

2. ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’

A Methodological Framework

Based on these considerations, the topic of ‘Islam in Europe’ is more than a story told by stringing together historical events. It is a story about us, Europeans, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, of native or foreign origin, and how we struggle with our past and our present in the continent called Europe, how we shape our identity and, particularly, the uneasy relationship between who we are and who we want to be. In the many years of studying this topic and engaging in public and academic debates on it, I became convinced that the only way to conceptualize the notion of ‘Islam in Europe’ is to apply a strict framework of notions set within certain timelines that allow us with each event in each epoch to ask ourselves the basic questions: What is the nature of the interaction between ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’? What do we mean by Islam in this particular instance? To what extent do Muslims or Islam play a role in the events before us? What is real and what is imaginary? The aim of this framework is, in short, to structure our thoughts and arguments when discussing ‘Islam in Europe’ and to avoid being drawn into the myriad of events and details of thirteen centuries of interaction between Europe and Islam.”

In brief, the structure of the framework is as follows: we limit ourselves to the European perspective on Islam, and from that perspective look at thirteen centuries of interaction between Europe and Islam, whereby we can divide this long period into five periods, and for each period provide an analysis of that interaction based on certain categories of interaction and on a limited number (three) of approaches. This all sounds quite abstract, so let us elaborate these different composites of the framework.

First and foremost, it must be emphasized that the object of inquiry in this book is the European perspective on its history with Muslims and Islam. We will, so to speak, pitch our camera on the European continent and from that angle look at European interactions with Muslims and Islam. The Muslim reactions and experiences with Europeans, although equally interesting, will be a story left for others to tell." Also, we will take the ‘in’ of Islam in Europe quite literally: European relations with Muslims and Islam will be discussed only insofar as they take place on the European continent. European experiences during colonial times with Muslim societies in North Africa or Asia will play only a minor role in this book.

Next we need to be very clear on the terminology that we will use. So far we have used the terms ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’ because they have become quite common in political and public debates of today: ‘Europe’ is under threat of ‘Islam’, ‘Islam’ is an obstacle to integration, ‘Islam’ is anathema to ‘European culture’, ‘Europe’ is indebted to ‘Islamic civilization’, etc. Even the title of this book alludes to a self-evidence that is actually unwarranted, because the use of the two terms ‘Europe’ and ‘Islam’ as individual entities or notions is a highly problematic representation of the interaction (or confrontation) between the two. A clarification of these two terms is therefore in order.

Europe

Defining ‘Europe’ is the typical headache hurdle for every politician or academic. If one conceives Europe as the heir to the Christian commonwealth of the later Middle Ages, then the question arises how one is to consider Christian Orthodoxy and its geographical realm that extends into Russia and the Middle East. If, on the other hand, one is to conceive of Europe in a modern setting, one may consider an economicallegal entity like the European Union or the geographical and political-legal Council of Europe. Both have their disadvantages for what we want to do here, however: the European Union is geographically too narrow as it does not contain countries like Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Albania, Serbia or Bosnia-Hercegovina; and the Council of Europe as a frame of reference for ‘Europe’ is geographically too wide because it includes countries as far east as Turkey, Azerbaijan, Georgia and the Russian Federation.

For the purpose of this book we will first define Europe in accordance with the geographical area bordered by waterways, that is the Polar Sea in the north, the Atlantic in the west, the Mediterranean in the south and the Black Sea and the rivers Dnieper and Volga in the east. We will further use terminology like ‘western’ or ‘south-eastern’ Europe with the explicit mention that these are not political but mere geographical indications.

This definition has as a result that, on the one hand, we will restrict our discussion of the Byzantine and Ottoman Empires to their dominions in south-eastern Europe (the ‘Balkans’) and not those in the Middle East and, on the other hand, that we will include in our account the stories of north-eastern European countries like the Baltic states. These and other eastern European countries have had long encounters with Islam and Muslims, as we will see later, and we have already observed that these interactions have received little academic attention from Western historians. This shows that ‘Islam in Europe’ is mostly studied and reflected upon from a western Euro-centred point of view — a perspective that is in need of revision if we truly want to do justice to the concept of ‘Islam in Europe’.

In addition to Europe as a geographical area we will also consider Europe in its capacity as a single civilization, or a unity of values, or any other uniform identity for its inhabitants. However, as we will see in the following chapters, the unity of these values or identities was not always concrete, let alone existent, as they changed through the centuries. Europe has been perceived in the eyes of its inhabitants as a Christian Commonwealth, gradually transformed into the notion of a ‘European Commonwealth’ (a term coined by Edmund Burke in the late eighteenth century), and from the nineteenth century onwards Europe was equated by its inhabitants with the highest form of civilization in any sense if its meaning- legally, politically, culturally, technically. Rather than trying to come here to a definition of European identity, we will regard the situation and state of mind of ‘Europe’ in accordance with each epoch.

Islam

The term ‘Islam’ is as problematic as ‘Europe’, as it often includes several representations of Islam that may be different or even mutually exclusive. In this book we conceptualize the term ‘Islam’ in four meanings: its adherents, the Muslims; Islam as a culture and civilization; Islam as a religion; and Islam as an image.

First, Islam may represent its adherents, the Muslims, either as powers or as individuals and communities. The presence of Muslim powers within Europe has been longstanding: 800 years in Spain, 500 years in Greece, 300 years in the Balkans, and more than a century in countries like Sicily, Hungary, Romania. Muslim people have sometimes been present longer, for they often stayed on even when Muslim sovereignty had ended. As subjects under non-Muslim rule, Muslims lived in Spain for 800 years (and an additional 100 years in secrecy) and in Sicily 400 years, and they still live in Lithuania and Poland where they have been for over 600 years, as they do in most Balkan countries where they have lived for more than 500 years. In other places, such as Sicily and Spain, on the other hand, the entire Muslim populations have been expelled or forced to convert, while certain elements of their civilization and culture have remained after their disappearance (think of architecture, language, music, customs, food). Since the late sixteenth century very few - if any - Muslims have resided in the European region west of the line Warsaw-Vienna-Trieste (a region that we will hereafter refer to as ‘western Europe’). This changed with the large-scale immigration of Muslims in the twentieth century, particularly from the 1970s onwards.

It must be kept in mind that the notion of Muslim as used here is nothing more than an identity marker used by either the European or the Muslim, and does not necessarily relate to the degree of religiousness of that particular person. This brings us to yet another problem of terminology, since from a historical point of view the term ‘Muslim’ is a novelty. During the Middle Ages reference was made to Saracens, and in Spain more specifically to Moors.’ Europeans in the Middle Ages also used names like ‘Hagarenes’ or ‘Ishmaelites’, referring to the Arab-Muslim claim to be Abraham’s offspring through the line of Hagar and her son Ishmael. Later, with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the commonly used term was ‘Turk’ (‘turning Turk’ was the expression for conversion to Islam). During colonial times, Europeans sometimes referred to Muslims as Musulmans, but more often as Mohammedans, or followers of Mohammad, erroneously analogous to the term ‘Christians’ as the followers of Christ. And until twenty or thirty years ago, Muslims in Europe were spoken of, and spoke of themselves, in ethnic and national terms: Arabs and Asians, Turks and Pakistanis, Kurds and Berber. The term ‘Muslim’ is only of very recent date, and it is therefore historically awkward to use twenty-first century terminology to describe people five, ten or thirteen centuries ago, when in those times different, and

“While the etymology of Moors is ‘dark people’, the name Saracene has been given different origins, ranging from the Arabic ‘sharqiyin’ (‘Easterner’) to the Greek ‘skene’ (‘tent dweller’) or the Greek ‘sara kene’, meaning ‘empty Sarah’, referring to Abraham’s wife Sarah who gave birth to Isaac, the founding father of the Israelites, and who was therefore not related - ‘empty’ - to Ishmael, who was fathered by Abraham with his slave woman Hagar, and who is claimed by the Arabs as their founding father.

mostly non-religious, terminology was used. Still, even though we might try to be historically true in terminology, references to ‘Muslims’ cannot be avoided.

The second representation of ‘Islam’ is that of a culture and civilization. We can observe this in the institutions of typical Islamic nature, either as physical buildings like mosques, hospitals and caravanserais, or as non-physical institutions such as forms of government, judiciary, or a legal or social system. In addition to these institutions, Islam as a culture or civilization can be found in the cultural and scientific achievements of the Muslims, such as irrigation and navigation techniques, sciences, arts. Islam in this sense can also exist long after Muslim presence has disappeared, either as a heritage of forlorn times, as is the case in Spain and Sicily where tour guides advertise ‘Islamic civilization’, or as a legacy of arts, sciences and technologies that over the centuries have been adopted and assimilated by Europeans.

The third representation of ‘Islam’ is that of the religion itself, meaning the theological doctrines that can be found in scripture and texts, and the religious practices of Muslims. The historian Hudgson in his seminal Venture of Islam had introduced the term ‘Islamdom’ and the adjective ‘Islamicate’ to denote Islam as a culture and civilization, separate from the notion of ‘Islam’ as religious doctrine.” Unfortunately, this useful distinction never really caught on. And indeed, one of the unfortunate effects of post-9/11 developments is that the understanding of ‘Islam’ and the way it is being discussed has become reduced to that of religious doctrine - not only in the West, but also in the Muslim world. By consequence, the religion of Islam is by many considered essential to understanding the Muslim, disregarding all the other aspects that have shaped the identity, character and mind-set of this same Muslim. Equating Muslims with the theological tenets of Islam is even more problematic if we want to make sense of the past thirteen centuries of European interaction with ‘Islam’, as we will see in the coming chapters.

Finally, there is a fourth notion of Islam, which is its imaginary representation in the minds of either Muslims or Europeans. Such representation may be emanant, in that it reflects something ‘out there’ like a historical civilization, an apocalyptic threat or a great religion. But more often the representation is immanent in that it reflects a notion of Islam that relates to people personally. For Muslims such immanent representation may take on the form of identity: being a ‘Muslim’ makes one part of a greater identity called ‘Islam’, which may take on all kinds of forms, ranging from a great civilization to a global religious community. For non-Muslim Europeans, on the other hand, ‘Islam’ often takes on the representation of a photo negative of themselves and as such constitutes what is also called the European Other. We will elaborate on this below, since the concept of ‘Othering’ is one of the central themes in this book.