The recent migration of refugees from Muslim majority countries to Central Europe has prompted an almost unprecedented dynamic in the British and German public sphere and political culture. However, there exists a lack of understanding how the "refugee crisis" and Islam are linked to each other in public discourse. This paper addresses this lacuna by seeking to answer the question how the current refugee situation has been interpreted with regards to Islam in British and German newspapers. A critical analysis allows to identify three major discursive patterns that contribute to the securitisation of the refugee situation. Moreover, the study reveals the construction of Muslim refugees as the culturally inferior "other" to an exclusive "European Christian Culture". Keywords

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Secularisation theory has been a central element of research and teaching in sociology since the middle of the twentieth century. This article discusses the current state of the art in secularisation research through the perspectives of decolonial theory, global sociology, feminist theory and the experiences of minority religions. Responding to Jörg Stolz, the article argues that current secularisation research suffers from conceptual shortcomings regarding the socio-political implications of secularism and the secular, that the parochial nature of secularisation theory has led to its entanglement in modernist, catching-up narratives, and that a feminist perspective is necessary to provide more detailed accounts of the gendered nature of processes of secularisation, particularly regarding new religious movements and the religious transformations within minority religious groups. The article concludes that secularisation theory needs to take into account minority religious experiences, the religiosity of women and religion beyond Euro-America in order to understand the significant shifts in religiosity that remain overlooked by methodologies operating solely at the level of nation-states.

Over the last decade, cities have become key sites of investigations into the politics of religious diversity. However, the vibrant scholarship on governing urban religion frequently suffers from conceptually thin understandings of the debate's key terms. This contribution critically engages with the conceptual underpinnings of this scholarship by discussing the interdependence of the dimensions of state, space and secularism. Regarding the state, I suggest that we should reconceptualise the state as strategic terrain, effect and social relation; regarding space, I discuss the analytical purchase of the TPSN (Territory, Place, Space, Network) approach, and regarding secularism I argue that we need to investigate local secularisms as problem-spaces and vernacular practices. Focusing on Islam in Western Europe, I demonstrate the analytical benefits of these theoretical reconfigurations by discussing the case study of the failure of one of Germany's most prominent mosque projects, the Munich Forum for Islam (MFI).