Muslims and Higher Education in Europe

Surveying the vast body of scholarship on Muslims in Europe published over the last two decades, a small group of interrelated questions reappears again and again. What steps, if any, should states take to incorporate Muslim minorities into European societies and public institutions (Vertovec 1996; Koenig 2007; Modood 2009)? How do such steps, when made in response to the emergence of public Muslim identities, challenge existing settlements between religious organisations and the state (Joppke 2000; Cesari and McLoughlin 2005; Meer 2010)? Who speaks for Muslim communities and for the Islamic tradition in Europe (Jones et al. 2015)? As a European Muslim presence becomes increasingly established across the continent, what forms of Islamic knowledge are being produced and popularised (Bruinessen and Allievi 2007)? Do European states need new centres of Islamic authority to address the distinctive challenges that European Muslims face and to counterbalance the influence of overseas patronage (Lewis 2007)? What space is there, if any, in centres of Islamic authority for the voices of Muslim women, and how should the availability of this space influence the way the state engages with Islamic institutions (Brown 2006; Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor, 2015; Rashid 2016)? How should European states address the challenge of Islamist extremism, and how have policies designed to prevent extremism impacted on social integration, public institutions and Muslim communities (Cesari 2009; Sunier 2014; O’Toole et al. 2016)? Have such policies contributed to Islamophobia in Europe, and how have Muslims resisted this and other forms of Islamophobia (Brown 2010; Pantazis and Pemberton 2013)? How has this resistance connected with other anti-racist and de- or post-colonial writers and movements (Sayyid and Vakil 2010; Rizvi 2020)?

There is, I want to suggest, no institutional setting that brings all these questions together in quite the way that Islamic studies in European higher education does. For this reason, discussion of contemporary Islamic studies in European states is of far greater significance than the modest numbers of students taking the subject might initially suggest. In a number of countries across Europe, governments have taken steps to expand and formalise Islamic studies at higher level, with these steps ranging from the full creation of Islamic theological faculties (Agai and Engelhardt, Chapter 5, this volume) to the facilitation of links between universities and private Islamic seminaries (Geaves 2012; Scott-Baumann and Cheruvallil-Contractor 2015; Nielsen, Chapter 2, this volume).