Recently, the populist Dutch politician Geerd Wilders provoked a public storm of greater intensity than even he is used to, when he called for a sharp reduction in the number of Moroccans in the country. This was just one more in the long sequence of incidents focusing on Islam and Muslims in Europe which, over a quarter of a century now, has been merged into a grand narrative. It is this narrative which the authors of this book set out to analyse. The opening chapter, “Muslims in Europe: balancing between belonging and exclusion,” sets out the main tensions of the book: in fact, its title would actually have been a more suitable one for the book. At the center lie the contrasts between realities on the ground and a tendency to fit these into a historical mythology of civilizational confrontations. The following two chapters — “Islam in Europe: A Genealogy” and “Who are the European Muslims?” — are essentially a mapping exercise, albeit one that is necessary as a foundation for the following chapters. The genealogy is basically a history of Europe's historical experience of Muslims and Islam, from the middle ages until the present, in which Islam has been integrated into Europe's history and culture as the permanent “other.” The focus is overwhelmingly on Western Europe; south-eastern Europe is mentioned in passing, and the Tatars of the Lithuanian-Polish grand duchy not at all.

The authors' attempt to answer the question in the title of Chapter Three is interesting: They emphasize the diversity of the Muslim populations of Europe, making the important point that this diversity is itself diverse: diversity by ethnicity, national origins, modalities of integration, social and economic resources, levels of education, and so on. A central problem, then, becomes terminology and its use. By talking of “Muslims” are we privileging particular aspects of this diversity? And do we talk about “Muslims in Europe,” “European Muslims,” or “Islam in Europe”? For some, this may seem overly pedantic; but for others, the choice of terminology betrays preconceptions, not to mention that terminology has an impact on discourses and thence on behavior. Once this discussion narrows down to the inevitable discussion of numbers, it reveals both the complexity of terminology and the political sensitivities (68 ff). The authors pick up from other Swedish scholars in their choice of identifying “cultural,” “religious,” and “ethnic” Muslims. Many will be unhappy with these terms, but somehow we have to work with something — or do we?

Chapter Four takes us into the main substance of this book, the raw material that has been drawn out of over 700 interviews accumulated over a number of years of research (not only for this project) as well as extensive reference and analysis of the role of the media. The discussion in this chapter focuses on space and place, noting especially the identification with the local space, where issues like public visibility (e.g., in discussions about mosque building and tensions over minarets) are of special importance to both Muslims and others. As with a number of surveys in recent years, the authors show how the local focus is twinned with a “translocal” perspective, which transcends national borders and leaves the identification with the nation-state of residence and citizenship the weak link. The following chapter sets out to show how global inter-connectivity reinforces perceptions of injustice and discrimination, fusing into the grand narrative of opposition referred to in the first chapter. This sense of injustice could — and does — fuel a sense of victimization. But, say the authors in Chapter Six, it also is a spur to action. The strengthened sense of identity becomes the framework encouraging Muslims to take control of themselves and their environment. The growth of Islamic relief agencies during the 1990s is a telling illustration of this. There is clearly a generational dimension, and both here and in earlier research we have seen how responses to the wars in Bosnia and Kosovo especially were the route through which young Muslims were first mobilized as Muslims. But the authors take this theme further and show a gender dimension: while many in the public debate presume to speak about or on behalf of women — usually in their absence — the women themselves have quietly, and increasingly not so quietly, carved out their own niche with their own agendas. In the final chapter, the perspective is turned fully on the European environment: “Is there space for European Muslims?” Self-perceptions, European and Muslim, clash, and Muslims locate themselves in four circles or facets of reference: experience in the local, national, European, and transnational context (160–163). Perhaps the asymmetry between these references, on the one hand, and most non-Muslim Europeans' often much more limited horizons of reference, accounts for some of the tensions which feed the grand narrative.

Islam in Europe is a thought-provoking study that relates the experiences that the authors have collected over the years well to the broader research literature. Generally it is easily accessible and not too pervaded by jargon and should therefore be useful for senior undergraduates. However, it is a shame that the technical editing has not been more careful. Several sources are mentioned in the text that are absent from the bibliography, and the index is of little use, with no reference to key actors (e.g., Geert Wilders) or countries, the latter especially disappointing given the broad European coverage of this otherwise very useful study.