Making public space: Opportunities and limits of collective action among Muslims in Europe

Recent research suggests that the settling of Muslims in secular Europe is leading to the individualisation of their religious identity and to the fragmentation of their social life. Such research purports to show the production of a specific 'European' Islam that eludes the traditional authority in which Islam is allegedly still mired in most Muslim majority societies. This paper considers the predicament of Muslims in Europe from a different perspective, through a consideration of the ambivalence of secular norms of the public sphere and of their limits in dealing with religious expressions. While much of the current literature concentrates on the diasporic and transnational aspects of the Muslim presence in Europe, the focus here is on specifically European and post-colonial dimensions. The institutional sedimentation of historic traumas, rather than universal values, specific to the formation of European societies and public spheres are considered in both their internal-metropolitan and external-colonial articulations. Set against these original characteristics of European public spheres, an analysis is offered of some of the most vocal activism, particularly that of Muslim women and youth, as instances of a struggle to transform and enrich, and even to decentre, European public spheres.