This text examines the evolving fate of Europe's Muslims; comparing the status, role and perceptions of these communities across Europe and Western Europe following the demise of communist authoritarianism.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion. Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region's state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women's embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks' new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria's Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.

This book offers a unique transdisciplinary collection of essays written by highly renowned international scholars.

In the post-9/11 era the complexity of Muslim and non-Muslim relations within Europe has sharpened: Global events have contributed to the reshaping of religious and cultural, in particular Muslim, representations and arenas. The position of Europe as such is in doubt. Much of its future depends on how to deal with the emerging new ideals and realities with respect to religion and the challenges of Islam in Europe. Muslim participation in contemporary European affair has been long standing. But in the past the minority status of such ethnic and religious communities from the Middle East has never been in question. Now they are, Cities and communities now boast Muslim majorities. Questions emerge of bilingualism, political participation, head dress at public institutions of learning, and protection of other minorities, such as the Jewish community. On the other side, European concerns over immigration, unemployment, health and welfare for the newly arrived, and the admission of predominantly Muslim states into the European Community have begun to test the social welfare systems of many nations within Europe. The idea of cultural exchange based on tolerance has lost its magical aura. Volume 6 of the Yearbook of the Sociology of Islam presents a variety of discussions and case studies from different European countries related to how Muslims are responding to this situation, how they and Muslim representation change, and how cultural and public negotiation is involved in shaping new perceptions of Islam and Europe.

The Emancipation of Europe's Muslims traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, Jonathan Laurence challenges the widespread notion that Europe’s Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy. He documents how European governments in the 1970s and 1980s excluded Islam from domestic institutions, instead inviting foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Turkey to oversee the practice of Islam among immigrants in European host societies. But since the 1990s, amid rising integration problems and fears about terrorism, governments have aggressively stepped up efforts to reach out to their Muslim communities and incorporate them into the institutional, political, and cultural fabrics of European democracy. The Emancipation of Europe’s Muslims places these efforts--particularly the government-led creation of Islamic councils--within a broader theoretical context and gleans insights from government interactions with groups such as trade unions and Jewish communities at previous critical junctures in European state-building. By examining how state-mosque relations in Europe are linked to the ongoing struggle for religious and political authority in the Muslim-majority world, Laurence sheds light on the geopolitical implications of a religious minority’s transition from outsiders to citizens. This book offers a much-needed reassessment that foresees the continuing integration of Muslims into European civil society and politics in the coming decades.

This collection of twelve papers provides case studies and thematic reflections on the growing transnational networking of European Muslims and their involvement with contemporary global Islam. The volume pays particular attention to the mechanisms and significance of this phenomenon.

Papers presented at a conference held in 2003.