One of the challenges facing the attempts at establishing public higher education in Islamic theology in Europe has been the forging of Islamic religious authority. Creating viable cooperation between universities and Muslim stakeholders (including potential students as well as subsequent employers for graduates) and finding the right teachers who can meet the requirements for academic positions at a European public university as well as present a convincing religious habitus, have not always been easy. One of the available frameworks for understanding and debating these challenges has been the insider–outsider distinction. In the context of Islamic theology this distinction seems to indicate both a distinction between confessional and non-confessional teaching, between Islamic and non-Islamic, and between inside and outside the epistemic domain of the public university. Across the board, insider–outsider discussions here largely draw upon what we could call a secular discursive repertoire, for example, assumptions about the category religion and its position vis-à-vis domains of publicly sanctioned knowledge. In neighbouring areas of European academia, a different conversation has intensified during the last decade, legitimising certain forms of insider positionality as more insightful, knowing and authentic. This conversation has been launched mainly by students in the humanities and the social sciences, it focuses on the role of power in knowledge production, and it is driven by a critique of claims to universality and the exclusion of non-Western knowledge traditions from university curricula. In many respects, this mobilisation continues debates from the 1970–90s about black history, feminist epistemology, post-colonialism and Eurocentrism, and it is articulated not through a distinction between confessional and non-confessional, but rather through the binary of oppressor– oppressed, lodging the discussion within a struggle for justice and equality.

Both Islamic theology and what I in the remainder of this chapter will call newer social justice mobilisation in the academy represent attempts to open up the public European universities to new and potentially challenging forms of knowledge. As such, they elicit various forms of boundary work (Gieryn 1983; McCutcheon 2003; Johansen 2006; also Dreier, Chapter 6, this volume) that in different ways contribute to the conflictual reproduction of a European academic field. My aim in this chapter is to unpack and compare these two forms of boundary work in order to discuss their different ramifications and consider what they tell us about the epistemic underpinnings of European (secular) universities.