ABSTRACT
Today, most European universities and university colleges offer courses on the history of Islam and Muslims in Europe, and a number of academic subdisciplines associated with this specific topic are now recognised as essential parts of the modern academic curriculum. Other institutions, however, such as political think tanks and various forms of intelligence services in numerous Western countries, are also showing a mounting interest in Islam and Muslim affairs, not least since the rise of global terrorism. In addition to politicians and journalists, sociologists of religion, historians of religion, political scientists and other scholars are paying close attention to Islamic questions, especially to the transformation of Europe that has followed Muslim immigration and globalisation. However, not all parts of Europe are included in the analysis. While the Nordic countries (Norway, Denmark and Sweden) are generally incorporated in most introductions, collected volumes and encyclopaedic articles on Islam and Muslims in the West, Finland and the Baltic countries (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) are generally left out. The peoples of the former Soviet empire have often been neglected or presented as a homogeneous group, and internal regional, linguistic, ethnic or religious variations have often been downplayed. The same observation is also true for the few Muslims who live in Iceland and the Faroe Islands. One of the most important aims of this volume is to fill these lacunae and provide fresh comparative data. Hopefully, this book will inspire other scholars to pay more attention to countries such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Iceland and the Faroe Islands in the future study of Islam and Muslims in the West. It is also necessary to develop the field and armoury of scholars who work on Islam and Muslims in Europe with a more critical and self-reflexive approach. What are we studying, and why are we analysing the topics that we have selected for our research? What kinds of data are missing, and why is it important not to follow uncritically the tempting public demand for superficial knowledge about terrorism, violence and extremism?1 On this point I agree with Jacques Waardenburg, who convincingly argues that we (i.e. scholars who study Islam and Muslims in Europe) actually have a very limited knowledge about what Muslims de facto “say, think and do” (Waardenburg 2004: 27).
