ABSTRACT
Behind the headlines about Islam in Europe, increasing in frequency over the last couple of decades, lies a complex history and contemporary story. For the purposes of this article, Europe is the north-western part of the Eurasian continent which geographers have traditionally bounded by the Arctic Ocean in the north, the Atlantic in the west, the Mediterranean and the Black Seas in the south, and in the east by the Urals and the Caucasus. Turkey and Cyprus are not included. The Europe covered is thus larger than the European Union (without Cyprus) while smaller than the membership of the Council of Europe. This area makes for a very varied history, one which immediately serves to emphasise the complexity of the story to be told. While there has been a steady interaction between the Muslim world and Europe since the rise of Islam in the seventh century, there have been four major phases of Muslim presence, all of which leave their mark in the present:
First, from the early eighth century parts of the Iberian Peninsula were under continuous Muslim rule, ending only with the fall of Granada in 1492. For a shorter period in the ninth to eleventh centuries, Malta, Sicily and parts of southern Italy also came under Muslim rule. The resulting Muslim populations gradually left or assimilated into the Catholic kingdoms of Spain and Portugal, with the last vestiges lasting well into the sixteenth century, leaving behind a rich cultural, institutional and intellectual heritage which continued to mark Europe down to the present.
Second, a series of Mongol expansions into eastern Europe during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries left behind Mongol realms whose rulers had become Muslims. Their successor states were the Tatar khanates of the Crimea and the Volga river basin, and Muslim Tatar populations and culture survived the Russian conquests which were completed with the capture of the city of Kazan in 1552. At least a century before this the Grand Duchy of Lithuania-Poland had recruited significant numbers of Tatars into its army, and their descendants still live in today’s Finland, Poland, Belarus and Ukraine.
Third, in south-eastern Europe the Ottoman state expanded out of Anatolia, conquering Constantinople in 1453. Muslim communities grew up through migration and conversion across the region over subsequent centuries. While many left as the Ottomans 358retreated before Habsburg and Russian expansion and, later, the appearance of new nation states in the region, many remained, and their descendants are still there today.
Fourth, from the mid-nineteenth century Muslims from European colonies in Africa and Asia started to move to the imperial metropolises, a movement which grew exponentially after 1945. The large Muslim communities of western Europe have arisen out of the arrival of economic migrants, refugees and family reunion from all parts of the Muslim world of the last 50 years.
This history immediately points to two major and different components of the European Muslim scene. Concerning the first, on the one hand are those, particularly in eastern and south-eastern Europe, who have been an integral part of European societies for generations and centuries. While they have participated in the social and economic life of their countries, they have also on occasion played collective political roles mostly as ethnic, but occasionally also as religious, groups in periods of conflict, most notably in the collapse of the Yugoslav state in the 1990s. On the other hand are those who have arrived more recently, mostly into western parts of Europe, whose story has been one of the struggle of settling and finding a place and a role in established nation states, which have not always found it easy to acknowledge them as fellow citizens. Since the collapse of the Soviet system and the end of the Cold War in 1989–91, Muslim immigrants have also been arriving in increasing numbers in the countries of central and eastern Europe (for eastern Europe, see Górak-Sosnowska 2011; for western Europe see Nielsen and Otterbeck 2016).