The second chapter traces the trajectories of Muslim leaders of the UOIF, leading them from North African middle-class families to the uneasy condition of Arab foreigners in France. Despite obtaining French citizenship, their status remains vulnerable, with state authorities and political elites regularly questioning their national loyalty. Owing to the intense scrutiny and suspicion, French Muslim leaders tend to engage in various practices of “Frenchification.” These practices consist of distancing themselves from homeland politics, providing evidence of cultural (notably linguistic) integration, and promoting a form of “pure Islam” that is detached from their homeland traditions. The chapter demonstrates that proving Frenchness is irreducible to legal status and implies nourishing a specific set of emotions, such as national pride, feelings of belonging, and a “love” of France. These expressions of emotional attachment can be understood in light of the emotionalization of citizenship that now characterizes the politics of belonging in Western Europe. However, such credentials of membership are not socially neutral; rather, they are layered with class considerations and can, in some cases, feed into anti-migrant sentiments against less privileged coreligionists, whom they regard as insufficiently French.

Obtaining French citizenship is not enough to secure social acceptance, and terror attacks committed in the name of Islam have critically impaired Muslims’ claims to national membership. Beginning with a discussion of how the construction of Muslims as a “suspect community” has impacted their daily lives, the chapter explores Muslim leaders’ efforts to display exemplary conduct to reassure majority members and circumvent the terrorist stigma. Their actions, such as organizing guided tours and open days in mosques, are emblematic of this endeavor, as well as of the asymmetrical burden of mutual understanding that characterizes postcolonial European societies. Moreover, embodying exemplariness involves cultivating Islamically justified dispositions for approachability and gentleness in daily interactions. Efforts to allay suspicions can also lead Muslim leaders of the UOIF to establish taboo forms of cooperation with intelligence officers, which highlights the ways in which the securitization of Islam relies partly on the involvement of certain community members. Overall, through their practice of disidentification from “Salafi,” “literalist,” and other “extremist” worshippers, French Muslim leaders tend to reinforce the distinction made by state authorities between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” thereby deflecting the fundamentalist stigma onto some coreligionists.

Examines American relations with non-Protestant others within the Mediterranean, primarily Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. Pays particular attention to shipwrecks in Morocco.

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

The conclusion revisits the book’s key claims and maps new avenues for research on medieval European representations of, and self-definition in relation to, Muslims and Islam. It closes with a brief discussion of the qualified anti-crusade argument, grounded in imperfect ideas of equality, voiced by the French lawyer Honorat Bovet in his widely disseminated Arbre des batailles (1387).

Chapter 8 continues this discussion, noting that Moses and Elijah are both held in honour by Jews, Christians and Muslims, as is Jesus by Christians and Muslims (following Christian scholars such as David Thomas). Although there are important and abiding doctrinal differences between these Abrahamic Faiths, particularly about the status of Jesus and Mohammed, this chapter argues that there are crucial ethical commonalities that could and should help to move the world beyond religiously inspired violence. The chapter ends with an extended discussion of Raimon Panikkar’s inspiring vision of the Cosmic Christ in his collected works Omnia Opera.

Chapter 5 asks why the public continues to support restrictive policies given their considerable economic and rights costs. It identifies the predominant values informing and facilitating the liberal state’s governance of contemporary immigration and its implications for restricting human mobility by focusing on the effects of a threat environment in sustaining the onerous policies of the migration policy playing field. It argues that the persistence of these policies can largely be explained by the continued negative framing of these events by political elites and the mass media. In particular, their conflation of public safety and national security with immigration makes the issue more salient for the public, and the popular legitimacy of restrictive policies is sustained and endorsed by center and extreme Right politicians and political parties. The chapter concludes that the predominance of a security paradigm has shifted the baseline of values salience and realigned popular values and attitudes regarding immigration.

“Decolonizing the Medieval Literary Curriculum” shows why the critical teaching of the literatures of the deep past – in the form of a critical canon, and a countercanon – is essential today, at a moment when White supremacist and alt-right groups in the West are weaponizing the symbols, cultures, and histories of the European Middle Ages to assemble a spurious, fantasied past of White racial purity and superiority, prelapsarian Christian homogeneity, and religiopolitical supremacy so as to make this fantasied past the basis of authority for transforming today’s world. At the same time, changing population demographics in the West are creating cohorts of students in higher learning who have diversified substantially in terms of their race, class, countries of origin, sexualities, genders, and physical, cultural, and psychosocial composition. Students, even more than faculty, have called for curricular transformations that are responsive to the urgencies of our time. The pedagogical strategies and curricular offerings in this essay are thus an example of the efforts undertaken today by a community of largely premodernists of color who are working to teach a decolonizing curriculum, and who are profoundly engaged in transforming how the deep past is taught and studied in the twenty-first century academy.

This chapter presents the Buffalo Agency, a trade agency, school, and library that was owned and operated by Ibadi Muslims in Ottoma-era Cairo. It presents the book’s main argument; namely, that the history of the Buffalo Agency shows how Ibadi Muslims participated fully in the religious, economic, legal, and political life of Ottoman Egypt. Their ability to maintain cohesion as a community while also engaging fully with Ottoman society was in part due to their unusual status as both members of a religious minority and part of the Muslim majority. The chapter then situates this argument in the three conversations to which the book contributes: Ottoman history in Egypt, minority communities in the empire, and the history of Ibadi Islam. The chapter next introduces the main historical sources used to support the argument: shariah court records, manuscript evidence from private libraries, and archival documents. Methodologically, the chapter grapples with the tension between the emphasis on the material history of Ibadis in Egypt and my need to rely on digital facsimiles of many of the sources.