Muslims Diaspora in Western Countries

The aim of this special issue is to bring together some of the most up-to-date ground-breaking work on Muslims in Europe, focussing on research data collected since 9/11, which has represented a kind of watershed in the relationship between European citizens and administrations (both at local and national levels) and Muslims.

Dear Colleagues,

In Europe, research and studies have focused on the growing presence of Muslims, through observations and insights carried out from different perspectives: religious beliefs and practices, hope for a certain type of society (laic versus Islamic), definition of identity (religious, national, transnational, cosmopolitan), orientation regarding the education of children and intermarriage and requests made to educational institutions (recognition of holidays, teaching of religion in school). In addition, attention to the religious variable has often been correlated with that dedicated to labour, school, urban schedules and spaces, with specific requests regarding nutrition, places of worship and areas for the burial of the dead. From another point of view, the terrorist attacks added a further perspective of the analysis of this specific group, in an attempt to figure out if its members can become new representatives of fundamentalism in Europe. In this way, the intertwining between Islam and politics is back in the spotlight. The level of the city is the scenario wherein religious identity has been questioned and wherein requests for reprepresentation made by Muslim communities have been widely discussed. Attention was focused, more rarely, on how local policies, from the scope of integration to that of social cohesion, from inter-religious to urban-architectural, have developed and how they have managed the relationship with the plurality of associations which can be traced to the Muslim milieu in each local context. Recently there have come into being a further two elements of interest, that is to, on the one hand, the tragic events in which European Muslims with a migratory background have been involved and, on the other, the arrival on the scene of the issue of asylum seekers and refugees, which are reshaping the attention to the Muslim presence in the European society.

The special issue aims to update the scholarly debate on the current situation of Muslims in various European cities, considering contributions based on both quantitative data and qualitative collected materials, as well as comparing and contrasting what is happening off- and on-line. Priority will be given to contributions covering the following issues:

• relations between Muslim associations and local/national administrations in promoting the recognition of rights (from family legal issues to places of worship, from religious courses in the schools to political involvement);
• the role played by ethnic mosques in the broader integration process;
• religious socialization across generations, comparing and contrasting Muslims with other religious belongings;
• investigating how native Europeans develop their identity in response to/relationship with the Muslim identities of asylum seekers;
• the religious requests made by first and second generations of Muslims at both national and local levels;
• how Muslim associations cope with the phenomena of radicalization and fundamentalism;
• exploring the involvement of young European Muslims in transnational religious networks;
• examining the implications of how Muslims, belonging both to first- and second generations, (re)configure religious arrangements in the context of anti-immigrant discourse.

Prof. Dr. Roberta Ricucci
Guest Editor

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• Diaspora
• Muslim
• Transnationalism
• Representation
• Governance
• Recognition