Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and Across Europe (Muslim Minorities, 1) (Muslim Minorities, 1) PDF
Preview Muslim Networks and Transnational Communities in and Across Europe (Muslim Minorities, 1) (Muslim Minorities, 1)
MuMi-1-allievi.qxd 14/11/2002 14:24 Page i MUSLIM NETWORKS AND TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES IN AND ACROSS EUROPE MuMi-1-allievi.qxd 14/11/2002 14:24 Page ii MUSLIM MINORITIES EDITORS Jørgen S. Nielsen (University of Birmingham) Stefano Allievi (University of Padua) VOLUME 1 MuMi-1-allievi.qxd 14/11/2002 14:24 Page iii MUSLIM NETWORKS AND TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES IN AND ACROSS EUROPE EDITED BY STEFANO ALLIEVI and JØRGEN NIELSEN BRILL LEIDEN • BOSTON 2003 MuMi-1-allievi.qxd 14/11/2002 14:24 Page iv This book is printed on acid-free paper. Die Deutsche Bibliothek - CIP-Einheitsaufnahme Muslim networks and transnational communities in and across Europe / edited by Stefano Allievi and Jørgen Nielsen -- Leiden, Boston : Brill, 2003 (Muslim minorities ; Vol. 1) ISBN 90-04-12858-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is also available ISSN 1570-7571 ISBN 90 04 12858 1 © Copyright 2003 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands ALLIEVI_F1_v-xi 11/4/02 10:25 AM Page v v CONTENTS Preface ........................................................................................ vii List of Contributors .................................................................. xi C O Islam in the public space: social networks, media and neo-communities ................................................ 1 S A C T Transnational Islam and the integration of Islam in Europe .................................................................... 28 J S. N C T Gender, generation, and the reform of tradition: from Muslim majority societies to Western Europe ...................................................................... 52 S A-M A S C F ‘Human nationalisms’ versus ‘inhuman globalisms’: cultural economies of globalisation and the re-imagining of Muslim identities in Europe and the Middle East ............................................................................ 78 M LV C F Towards a critical Islam: European Muslims and the changing boundaries of transnational religious discourse .................................................................................. 127 P M C S Turkish political Islam and Europe: story of an opportunistic intimacy ........................................ 146 V A C S Islamic TV programmes as a forum of a religious discourse .................................................................. 170 A B ALLIEVI_F1_v-xi 10/21/02 12:04 PM Page vi vi C E Transnational or interethnic marriages of Turkish migrants: the (in)significance of religious or ethnic affiliations ................................................................................ 194 G Sß C N Communication strategies and public commitments: the example of a Sufi order in Europe ...... 225 L L P C T Transnational Islam versus ethnic Islam in eastern Europe: The role of the mass media ...................... 243 G M. Y C E Virtual transnationalism: Uygur communities in Europe and the quest for Eastern Turkestan independence ........................................................ 281 Y S C T Diaspora, transnationalism and Islam: Sites of change and modes of research .............................. 312 S V I .......................................................................................... 327 ALLIEVI_F1_v-xi 10/21/02 12:04 PM Page vii vii PREFACE When serious academic study of Islam in western Europe started about a quarter of a century ago, it was from a variety of disciplinary starting points. From the social sciences there were local community studies based in ethnography and social anthropology, and sociolog ical and geographical studies providing snapshots of larger dimen sions and specific themes, in particular race relations and discrimination. Political science and occasionally legal studies looked at the impact of national and local structures and the participation, or absence of participation, of Muslim groups. International comparative accounts, dealing with the situation in several European countries, were primar ily descriptive before they attempted to identify areas of common developments and characteristics. Religious studies, broadly defined, concerned itself with religious ideas and forms of expression in the context of migration and settlement and often overlapped with the more traditional disciplines of oriental studies and comparative reli gion or the history of religions. More recently, research has started to analyse links between the Muslim presence in western Europe and the countries of origin, recording and analysing the processes involved in chains of migra tion and their impact at both ends of the chain. Many such stud ies have an emphasis of interest at one end of the chain rather than the other. It is in this area that the papers in this volume have a common interest. Different aspects of the contemporary situation of Muslims in western Europe are dealt with, all under the general per spective of transnational dimensions. What distinguishes the papers in this volume from much of the literature until recently is the extent to which the ‘transnational’ forms of Islam with which we are con fronted are partly or wholly independent of the chains of migration or shared ethnic identity. What the papers show is that there is cur rently a very active process of constructing Muslim/Islamic networks held together by shared ideas and responses to the European envi ronment, rather than common ethnic or national identity, and using various forms of media as the tool for such networking. It was precisely this dimension we wished to explore when we proposed a workshop with the title of the present volume as part of ALLIEVI_F1_v-xi 10/21/02 12:04 PM Page viii viii the Second Mediterranean Social and Political Research Meeting, organised in Florence in March 2001 by the Robert Schuman Centre of Advanced Studies at the European University Institute.1 In our preparations we had thought primarily in terms of western Europe, since Islam in eastern Europe is a field which has until recently been treated quite distinctly. There are, of course, good reasons in the past and the present why this should have been so. But the two papers by Yemelianova and Shichor show that many of the issues which we are dealing with increasingly apply also to eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. The papers presented here highlight particularly the roles played by media networks and other means of communication, traditional and modern, from physical travelling to the Internet, from visits by shaykhs and regular meetings of transnational Sufi orders to private e-mail and ‘fatwas on line’. What is also notable is the ‘identity net works’ which, through these various media, find their place in the religious and cultural market place. These aspects are a neglected area of research, thus underestimating their significance and lacking persuasive theoretical interpretation.2 The importance of media and communications in the construc tion by Muslim communities of their self-understanding and contexts is only starting to be understood and continues to be linked to stud ies on questions of perception, construction of prejudice, concerns about ‘islamophobia’, etc. These are aspects of the problem but not necessarily the most important, even though their profile has been enhanced due to the political attention to militancy. The papers in this volume pay more attention to how media and communications contribute to the construction and maintenance of various common Muslim identities across European state borders. But the Muslim communities in Europe are part of a global Muslim umma which plays an active role in local Muslim self-perceptions to an extent which is possibly unprecedented in Muslim history. So the frontiers 1 Not all the papers presented in the workshop have been published here, and the papers by Amiraux, Salvatore and Amir-Moazami, and Vertovec have been commissioned especially for this volume. 2 Peter Mandaville’s Transnational Muslim politics: Reimagining the Umma (London: Routledge, 2001) was published after the papers were completed. This is one of the first to offer a well thought through modelling of many of the issues dealt with in this volume. A full overview of the current state of research on Muslims in Europe is currently in press. This includes a chapter on the media by Stefano Allievi. ALLIEVI_F1_v-xi 10/21/02 12:04 PM Page ix ix between European Islam (understood solely as a geographical con cept) and the wider world are both demarcating and mediating, as we see across the Mediterranean and also in the less studied con text of eastern Europe and the former USSR. Thence the ‘in and across’ of the title. These discussions raise questions about the nature of the public space in Europe and the modifications to it introduced by the inte gration of communities which were formerly perceived as being ‘alien’. What kinds of communities are Muslims in Europe trying to build? How do media and communications impact on the meaning of com munity as such and the ‘contents’ which communities produce and exchange? What are the feedback effects to be observed at both ends of the lines of communications? How are the self-definitions of com munities, groups and networks changing through the passage of gen erations? What is the function of religion as a reference point for such communities? What is the ‘Islam’ which is in question when we are talking about ‘Muslims’, and how do they and we perceive both terms? These are but a few of the questions which arise from the present collection of papers and towards answering which they are a contribution. As workshop convenors we are grateful for the support, facilities and the opportunity provided by the European University Institute to bring a group of researchers of very varying backgrounds and experience together to explore this topic. The practical advice and support (and, of course, regular reminders about deadlines) offered by the staff of Brill Academic Publishers in Leiden, Netherlands, is much appreciated. Our thanks are obviously due to the contributors for their cooperation in revising their papers in the light of discus sions in the Florence workshop—we can only hope that they feel that our editing of their papers has improved them. Finally, a spe cial record of appreciation has to be noted for Dr Steve Vertovec, who did not participate in the workshop and whose final chapter was written to particularly sharp deadlines. His years of research on Muslim communities in Europe and his experience leading the Transnational Communities Programme of the UK Economic and Social Research Council are a particularly appropriate foundation for his concluding chapter. Stefano Allievi, University of Padova Jørgen S. Nielsen, University of Birmingham June 2002
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