Muslims and the Making of Modern Europe

Abstract

Muslims have lived in Europe for hundreds of years. Only in 1878, however, did many of them become formal citizens of European states. Muslims and the Making of Europe shows how this massive shift in citizenship rights transformed both Muslims’ daily lives and European laws and societies. Starting with the Treaty of Berlin and ending with the eradication of the Shari’a legal system in communist Yugoslavia, this book centers Muslim voices and perspectives in an analysis of the twists and turns of nineteenth- and twentieth- century European history, from early nation-building projects to the shattering of the European imperial order after World War I, through the interwar political experiments of liberal democracy and authoritarianism, and into the Second World War, when Muslims, like other Europeans, were caught between occupation and civil conflict, and the ideological programs of fascism and communism. Its focus moves from Ottoman Europe in the late nineteenth century to Yugoslavia, a multi-confessional, multi-lingual state founded after World War I. Throughout these decades, Muslims negotiated with state authorities over the boundaries of Islamic law, the nature of religious freedom, and the meaning of minority rights. As they did so, Muslims helped to shape emergent political, social, and legal projects in Europe.

Making Minorities and Majorities: National Indifference and National Self-determination in Habsburg Central Europe

“…In some instances, as Emily Greble has shown with regard to the Muslims of Yugoslavia, this in fact produced a differentiated form of citizenship precisely of the type that nation-states generally claim to reject. 38 In other instances, as Dominique Reill has shown with regard to the city of Fiume, the choice to attach to a nation-state constituted an attempt to maintain the privileges of imperial citizenship. 39 However, the interwar constitutional frameworks also differentiated these states radically from the old Empire.…”

The whiteness of ‘Christian Europe’

“…35 During this period, local Muslims and secular authorities negotiated to define the boundaries of religion in matters such as the status of minorities, the permissible extent of religious law, and the possibilities for religious freedom. 36 At the same time, nationalists across the region acted as imperialists themselves, imagining a raft of colonising policies directed inwards and designed to manage ethnic and religious differences. Many of their efforts incorporated scientific knowledge about race, health and eugenics and translated them into new institutions that regulated social welfare and public hygiene along ethnic and religious lines.…”