The subtitle signals the book's argument that Muslims in Europe are diverse and have multiple identities. Who disagrees? The major media do, with their focus on such events as the assassination of Theo van Gogh, bombings in capital cities, and controversies over free speech. Such conventional coverage encourages “popular perceptions of Islam as a (violent) monolith and as the shared and main definition of Muslims living in Europe,” according to coeditor Effie Fokas (p. 2). Each of the book's chapters shows in detailed ways the errors of those perceptions. The book also shows how Islam is influencing Europe by unsettling established boundaries and interconnections between secular and religious institutions. Taken as a whole, it raises the question of how to combat dangerously misleading and (at least partially) self-fulfilling characterizations of Islam in Europe.

According to the preface, the chapters originated in meetings of the Forum for the Interdisciplinary Study of Christian-Muslim Relations in Twenty-First Century Europe at the Hellenic Foundation for European and Foreign Policy (ELIAMEP) (p. xi). The authors have European institutional affiliations and collectively cover a range of disciplines, from anthropology to history to sociology to political science. As is common among European scholars, the individual contributions are less bound to the disciplinary conventions of most American political scientists: no hypotheses, testing, or variables; no citations to Homi Babha, Judith Butler, Paul Gilroy, Albert O. Hirschman, Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, Tariq Ramadan, Stein Rokkan, Olivier Roy, Malise Ruthven, and Max Weber; no sources in many European languages or instances of better prose. Unfortunately, the book (on p. viii) offers too-terse descriptions of the authors to be of much help in guiding readers' judgments about the contributors' qualifications and other works. At least one of the authors has a political career: In addition to his listed affiliation with the World Council of Churches in Geneva, Tarek Mitri has held several ministerial portfolios in Lebanon since 2005. The book's organization largely eschews the series-of-country-studies model.

Half of the book provides essential overviews of the new Muslim presence in Europe. Fokas's Introduction explains the book's rejection of cultural differentialism and monist conceptions of identity and calls for methodological rigor in the study of Islam in Europe—a charge that subsequent chapters fulfill with clear arguments and evidence. Mitri reviews Christian–Muslim relations (not just in Europe) and warns against the tendency to globalize local conflicts between people who exaggerate their religious identities; his essay takes the broadest and most explicitly policy-oriented view in the collection. Jocelyne Cesari's essay on the ways Muslims define and experience their identities recalls or introduces to the reader several of the themes she has explored in her prolific career. Werner Schiffauer's research (mainly on Turkish migrants in Germany) sustains a broad argument about Islam's evolution from a transnational religion in temporary exile to one in permanent diaspora and how the institutions established in the first phase have become partly overlaid with conflicts of the second. Aziz Al-Azmeh's deliberately contentious Afterword uses the book's findings to take Europeans (including politicians—“not only conservative ones” (p. 208), publicists [Oriana Fallacci], and unnamed prelates) to task for being distracted by the apparent “symbolic strangeness” of European Muslims and for overlooking the social and historical realities of Islam in Europe (p. 209). The arguments in each of these contributions—and their bibliographies—set out key points of reference in a growing field.

The other half of the book considers equally important but understudied phenomena. Xavier Bougarel's chapter on Bosnian Islam disaggregates such labels as Western, modern, Eastern, and backward and, in a detailed study of three particular Bosnian Muslim leaders, shows how Islam in Bosnia is oriented to both European and Middle Eastern influences. Bérengère Maassignon traces the development of institutional ties between European Union institutions, especially the European Commission, and Muslim intellectuals, organizations, and religious leaders; she brings order to a largely haphazard history. Dia Anagnostou examines how integration into the EU has changed—indeed mostly improved—the relations between the Greek and Bulgarian states and their territorially concentrated Muslim minority populations. Valérie Amiraux tackles the often-raised but rarely carefully examined question of whether a Muslim population prevents Turkey from becoming a full member of Europe (her answer is no, Turkey's Islam is not the problem—the real obstacles lie in non-Muslim Europeans' misperceptions, both of Islam and of their own societies and polities).

Even as the chapters agree on Islam's diversity, they diverge regarding views of the future. Does diversity signal that voices of moderation will prevail, or, alternatively, that opportunities for extremism will endure? Neither starry-eyed romanticism nor prophecies of doom appear in this collection. Five chapters end with relative optimism (those of Mitri, Nielsen, Massignon, Anagnostou, and Amiraux), while one chapter stops at divisions (Bougarel) and two chapters conclude pessimistically (Cesari and Schiffauer). The framing Introduction and Afterword play good cop (“the potential for a happier future for Islam in Europe,” Fokas on p. 14) versus bad cop (“Clearly, Europe must look forward to turbulent times,” Al-Azmeh on p. 214). Apparently, even if Islam in Europe is manifold and nonviolent, challenges continue. It remains to be seen whether serious, detailed, and exemplary scholarship such as is offered in this volume can turn back waves of media coverage and redirect popular consciousness toward more positive or at least more accurate political visions of religious and cultural heterogeneity.

Scholars of European politics, religion and politics, and the politics of Islam will certainly profit from a close reading of this volume. It deserves to influence research, teaching, and broader public discussion of the future of Europe and its increasingly heterogeneous societies.