Space, Place and Social Action: European Muslim Geographies

Abstract

If one tried to fashion a map capturing the loci in which European Muslim lives unfold, where European Muslims derive their experiences from, interact with each other and with ‘others’, engage in various forms of social action and reflect on and construct their identities, they would have to find ways of depicting and making sense of a fluid and continuously evolving, multifaceted and multidimensional terrain that conventional geography would have difficulty to describe. For European Muslim identities clearly derive strength, resilience and a sense of ‘belonging’ from the relative immediacy of the ‘local’ but are also very much ‘at home’ in the midst of complex, more mediated but still strong relationships established at the translocal and transnational fields. At the same time, both the local and the translocal constitute not only spaces of positive identification but also contexts for the construction and experience of adversity and alterity. These are spaces where European Muslims encounter each other, where their experiences and memory converge, where solidarities are forged, but also arenas of contestation and confrontation where a sense of self and other is formed and continually tested, confirmed or revised and set in context. In this chapter, we attempt to unravel and make sense of the nexus of physical and virtual spaces, networks and flows that makes up what we could describe as Muslim space in Europe.