Former Fellows

This project seeks to examine the development of European Islam from the mid-nineteenth century through the First World War. It not only intends to fill a gap in the history of Europe’s encounter with Islam, but equally to elaborate a comparative context for the study of European Islam. In doing so, the project seeks to gain a more precise understanding of the ways in which Muslim enclaves developed in cities such as London, Paris and Vienna as well as the policies employed by governments to accommodate foreigners and the practice of Islam in the West. At the center of the study are three predominant nineteenth-century empires: France, Great Britain and the Habsburg Empire, states which pursued distinct models of integration and religious tolerance between 1850 and 1924 that continue to have implications for the issue of Islam in Europe to this day. Central to this investigation is the role the press and civic associations played in shaping trans-imperial networks that connected metropolitan societies to colonial peripheries in places such as North Africa, the Near East and Bosnia. As this study argues, examining these networks allows us to see the entangled histories that have shaped discourses of European Islam since the nineteenth century as well as provides a historical context in which to assess Muslim cultural politics in the public sphere.