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Public discourse on Muslims in Europe has been characterized by a differentiation between "moderate" and "radical" Muslims. This discourse which distinguishes between acceptable and unacceptable forms of Islam also creates tensions and competitions among Muslims with organizations and individuals vying for leadership, recognition, and government sponsorship by presenting themselves as moderate voices within Muslim communities speaking out against extremism and radicalism. In Ireland, the Shii community, its clerical leader and other lay activists emphasize their moderate and integrationist understanding of Islam and appear as outspoken critics of radical and militant expressions of Sunni Islam. Thereby, representatives of the Shii community adopt the differentiation between moderate and radical Muslims in contemporary discourse and conflate it with the historical sectarian divide between Sunnis and Shiis, translated into a European diaporic setting. In addition to providing a profile of the Shii community in Ireland, this paper discusses the Shii selfrepresentation as a moderate group among Muslims in Ireland. The reasons and motivations for this particular self-representation in the public will be examined by considering the socio-economic background of early Shii migrants, current streams of Shii thought and its impact on Shiis in Ireland and the double-minority setting as "a minority within a minority".

Academic scholarship on Shia Muslim minorities in the West has described them as 'a minority within a minority' (Sachedina 1994: 3) or as 'the other within the other' (Takim 2009: 143), referring to a certain sense of double-marginalization of Shia Muslims in non-Muslim societal contexts. They need to undertake particular efforts to maintain both an Islamic as well as particular Shia identity in terms of communal activities and practices and public perception and recognition, responding to the rise of Islamophobia more generally and anti-Shia sectarianism more specifically. This article problematizes this notion of a double-marginalization of Shia minorities in the West as too simplistic. The article investigates the dynamics around the creation of transnational Shia communal spaces in northwest London, the public representation of Shia Muslim identities by networks and organizations based there to illustrate their multilocal connectivities and internal heterogeneity. The article is based on research in the borough of Brent, northwest London, and presents novel insights into Shia spaces in Britain and thereby makes an important contribution to complexifying academic discourse on Muslims in Britain which has focussed on Sunni Muslims almost exclusively. The ethnographic data is contextualized by providing background information on the historical and social formations of the networks and the centres examined in the article. To analyze the multilocal spatial manifestations and connections of these network, the article utilizes Werbner's notion of 'complex diasporas' (2002, 2004, 2010) and recent contributions to the development of a spatial methodology in Religious Studies (Knott 2005; Vásquez 2010; Tweed 2006; McLoughlin and Zavos 2014). The article thereby constitutes the very first attempt to apply recent contributions on the nature of diasporic religions and their spatial multilocality to the case study of Twelver Shia networks based in London.

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