10 - Muslims and European Identity: Can Europe Represent Islam?

Summary

Simultaneously, and despite the parochialism of the governments at home, a sort of international solidarity was slowly evolving in the colonies. … Out of interest if not out of good will, an embryonic European understanding had at last been found in Africa. We could hate one another in Europe, but we felt that, between two neighboring colonies, the interest in common was as great as between two white men meeting in the desert.

Count Carlo Sforza, Europe and Europeans, 1936

Muslims are present in Europe and yet absent from it. The problem of understanding Islam in Europe is primarily, so I claim, a matter of understanding how “Europe” is conceptualized by Europeans. Europe (and the nation-states of which it is constituted) is ideologically constructed in such a way that Muslim immigrants cannot be satisfactorily represented in it. I argue that they are included within and excluded from Europe at one and the same time in a special way.

I take it for granted that in Europe today Muslims are often misrepresented in the media and discriminated against by non-Muslims. More interesting for my present argument is the anxiety expressed by the majority of West Europeans about the presence of Muslim communities and Islamic traditions within the borders of Europe. (In France, for example, a 1992 poll showed that two-thirds of the population feared the presence of Islam in that country.