Category Archives: Islam in Europe

Move Over, You Tube

Film and Video, Islam and Christianity, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islam: Introduction, Qur'an, YouTube Watch

You Tube boasts one of the largest audiences on the web. There are plenty of videos put up by Muslims and many of these are in languages other than English. On July 11 there were 643,000 hits for the search “Islam” on You Tube. But move over, You Tube, and make room for Islamic tube, which has carefully selected videos on Islamic themes. You can find Quranic recitation, debates, numerous sermons and lectures and some rather raw anti-Zionist (and decidedly anti-Semitic) diatribes. This is a significant resource, but like all websites, should be consulted with caution.

Pox Britannica

Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media

The Shameful Islamophobia at the Heart of Britain’s Press

When a tabloid newspaper reports that a ‘Muslim hate mob’ is daubing abuse, can we believe them?

By Peter Oborne
The Independent, Monday, 7 July 2008,

On the morning of 7 October 2006 The Sun newspaper splashed a dramatic story across its front page. The story – billed as exclusive – concerned a callous and cynical crime committed by Muslims. A team of Sun reporters described in graphic detail how what the paper labelled a “Muslim hate mob” had vandalised a house near Windsor. The Sun revealed that “vile yobs hurled bricks through windows and daubed obscenities. A message on the drive spelled out in 4ft-letters: ‘Fuck off ‘.”

One Tory MP, Philip Davies, was quoted venting outrage at this act of vandalism. “If there’s anybody who should fuck off,” Davies was quoted as saying, “it’sthe Muslims who are doing this kind of thing. Police should pull out the stops to track down these vile thugs”.

The Sun left its readers in no doubt as to why the outrage had been committed. Local Muslims were waging a vendetta against four British soldiers who hoped to rent the house on their return from serving their country in Afghanistan. The paper quoted an army source saying that: “these guys have done nothing but bravely serve their country – yet they can’t even live where they want in their own”. Continue reading Pox Britannica →

Muslim Metal

Books You Should Read, Immigration Issues, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Music and Dance

Muslim Metal
Bands crank up multiculturalism in the Islamic world

By MARK LEVINE, The Chronicle Review, July 4, 2008

The first time I heard the words “heavy metal” and “Islam” in the same sentence, I was confused, to say the least. It was around 5 p.m. on a hot July day in the city of Fez, Morocco. I was at the bar of a five-star hotel with a group of friends having a drink — at $25 a piece, only one — to celebrate a birthday. The person sitting across from me described a punk performance he had seen in Rabat not long before we had met.

The idea of a young Moroccan with a Mohawk and a Scottish kilt almost caused me to spill my drink. That the possibility of a Muslim heavy-metal scene came as a total surprise to me only underscored how much I still had to learn about Morocco, and the Muslim world more broadly, even after a dozen years studying it, and traveling and living across it. If there could be such a thing as a heavy-metal Islam, I thought, then perhaps the future was far brighter than most observers of the Muslim world imagined less than a year after September 11, 2001. Continue reading Muslim Metal →

Marranci on the Anthropology of Islam

Anthropology/Sociology, Books You Should Read, Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Terrorism Issue

Note: The following is an excerpt from Gabriele Marranci’s latest book, The Anthropology of Islam (Oxford: Berg, 2008), which is well worth reading for insights on previous ethnographic study of Islam and guidelines for current research.

Books and ‘how-to’ guides about anthropological fieldwork are increasing in number within publishers’ catalogues. Among this large production, it is unusual to find even even chapters addressing the experience of conducting fieldwork among Muslim societies and communities. In the few cases in which some examples have been provided, they describe and discuss what I call ‘exotic’ fieldwork. Even less available is material containing reflections on the impact and issues that an anthropologist may face in conducting fieldwork within Muslim communities, in the west and in Islamic countries, during this endless ‘war on terror’. In this chapter, I have tried to start a reflection and discussion on what it means to conduct fieldwork among Muslims today. In doing so, I have provided examples from the experience of some anthropologists as well as my own. I have suggested that at the centre of a contemporary anthropology of Islam should be the human being even before the Muslim. This is vital if we wish to overcome a certain Orientalism and suppression of self-represented identities, as we can observe in classic works, from Geertz to Rabinow and Gellner. Continue reading Marranci on the Anthropology of Islam →

Idolatrous Jews, Muhammadans, and Papists

Bible and Holy Land, Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe, Islamic History, Islamophobia


The Ottoman army besieging Vienna (1529). Book Illustration, Nakkas Osman 1588.

The recent controversies over pastoral remarks that pit Christianity vs Islam, whether generated by Pope Benedict or McCain’s jeremiad-in-the-making over Rev. Parsley or Rev. Hagee’s hazardous raising of Hitler and the Holocaust to acts of divine retribution, are not unique. Interfaith harmony and ecumenical amenities have been the exception in a historical trajectory of damning the faith of the other in both monotheisms, not to mention how Judaism has been denigrated as well. An earlier reform-minded Protestant had reason to fear Muslim Ottoman Turks, who had invaded Christian dominions in Europe and who had attracted more than a fair share of converts. A little more than a decade after Ottoman army besieged Vienna, Martin Luther wrote a preface to a German translation of the Quran. In this he targets “idolatrous Jews, Muhammadans and Papists” as instruments of the Devil, the kind of religious intolerance that easily spills over into the secular arena as ethnic hate bating.

Here is Luther’s “Preface to Bibliander’s Edition of the Qur’an” (1543):

Many persons have authored small tracts describing the rites, beliefs, and customs of Jews of this day for the very purpose of more easily refuting their manifest lies and exposed errors and ravings. There is no doubt that, when pious minds bring the testimony of the prophets to bear on the delusions and blasphemies of those people, they are greatly confirmed in faith and in love for the truth of the gospel and are fired with a righteous hatred of the perversity of the Jewish teachings. Continue reading Idolatrous Jews, Muhammadans, and Papists →

Jihadi studies

Islam in Europe, Islamophobia, Journalism and Media, Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism Issue


The obstacles to understanding radical Islam and the opportunities to know it better

by Thomas Hegghammer, Times Literary Supplement, April 2, 2008

We were all frightened by the destruction caused on 9/11. Yet most of us, regardless of political orientation, assumed that there would be people in the intelligence services or in academia who possessed detailed knowledge about the jihadists. It might take time, and we might disagree on the methods, but the experts would eventually bring the perpetrators to justice. How wrong we were. Of course, the CIA knew the basics about al-Qaeda, such as the location of the Afghan training camps and the approximate whereabouts of the top leadership. But as Osama bin Laden slipped out of Tora Bora one foggy morning in early December 2001, al-Qaeda left the realm of tactical intelligence and became the complex organization-cum-movement which, six years later, we are still struggling to understand. For a few years, the commanders of the so-called War on Terror enjoyed the benefit of the doubt. After all, we did not know what they knew. However, it has become increasingly clear how little was known about al-Qaeda back in 2001, and how long it will take for us thoroughly to understand the dynamics of global jihadism. Continue reading Jihadi studies →

No Room at the Mosque

Islam in Europe, Terrorism Issue


In Lleida, Spain, Muslims gathering in front of a cramped, converted garage that serves as a mosque. The congregation has grown to 1,000 members from 50 over the past five years.


Spain’s Many Muslims Face Dearth of Mosques

By VICTORIA BURNETT, The New York Times, Sunday, March 16, 2008

LLEIDA, Spain — As prayer time approached on a chilly Friday afternoon and men drifted toward the mosque on North Street, Hocine Kouitene hauled open its huge steel doors.

As places of worship go, the crudely converted garage leaves much to be desired, said Mr. Kouitene, vice president of the Islamic Association for Union and Cooperation in Lleida, a prosperous medieval town in northeastern Spain surrounded by fruit farms that are a magnet for immigrant workers. Freezing in winter and stifling in summer, the prayer hall is so cramped that the congregation, swollen to 1,000 from 50 over the past five years, sometimes spills onto the street.

“It’s just not the same to pray in a garage as it is to pray in a proper mosque,” said Mr. Kouitene, an imposing Algerian in a long, black coat and white head scarf. “We want a place where we can pray comfortably, without bothering anybody.”

Although Spain is peppered with the remnants of ancient mosques, most Muslims gather in dingy apartments, warehouses and garages like the one on North Street, pressed into service as prayer halls to accommodate a ballooning population. Continue reading No Room at the Mosque →

God’s Crucible Reviewed

Islam and Christianity, Islam in Europe, Islamic History, Teaching Resources, Terrorism Issue

Detail of Carl von Steuben’s depiction of the Battle of Poitiers, fought in 732, the year Muslim armies crossed the Pyrenees.

A Better Place

What if the Muslim armies hadn’t been stopped at the French border?

by Joan Acocella, The New Yorker, February 4, 2008

In 610 A.D., Muhammad ibn Abdallah, a forty-year-old man from a prosperous merchant family in Mecca, repaired to a cave on nearby Mt. Hira to meditate—a retreat he had made many times. That year, though, his experience was different. An angel appeared and seized him, speaking to him the words of God. Muhammad fell to his knees and crawled home to his wife. “Wrap me up!” he cried. He feared for his sanity. But, as the voice revisited him, he came to believe that it truly issued from God. It called on him to reform his society. Poor people were to be given charity; slaves were to be treated justly; usury was to be outlawed. Muhammad’s tribesmen, the Quraysh, were polytheists, like most people in the Arabian Peninsula at that time, but this God, Allah, proclaimed that he was the only God. He was the same deity that the Jews and the Christians worshipped. Jesus Christ wasn’t his son, though. Christ was just a prophet, like the prophets of the Old Testament. Their word was now superseded by Muhammad’s, as their creeds were supplanted by this new one, Islam. Continue reading God’s Crucible Reviewed →