Introduction

Contemporary scholarly accounts of Islam in Europe have tended to portray one of two extreme visions: heaven on earth or hell in a hand basket. In the pessimistic version, foreign policy analyses and the scholarly literature are in rare concurrence about the meager chances for either inter-religious dialog or Muslim integration. These accounts bear witness to a showdown between intransigently secular states and an ambitious, fundamentalist religion whose followers aim to transform the continent into “Eurabia” (Ye'or 2005; Ferguson 2004; Savage 2004). To justify their gloom, these authors cite Islam's un-hierarchical nature and the impossibility of establishing legitimate representatives – or “one phone number” – for Muslim communities in Europe (Rémond 1999; Warner and Wenner 2002). Compounding this difficulty, these scholars emphasize, is the inadequacy of Europe's nineteenth-century State–Church institutions, which stumble from crisis to crisis with this new and agile religious challenger (Fetzer and Soper 2005; Shore 2004). The optimistic voices, on the other hand, come from the camps of post-nationalist theorists and from proponents of a reformed “Euro-Islam” that is divorced from overseers and financiers in the Muslim world (Soysal 1994). But those authors' cheerfulness is founded, respectively, on two formidable hypotheses: the diminishing importance of “host” state institutions for immigrant integration; and the “sending” states’ renunciation of religious influence over the Muslim Diaspora (AlSayyad and Castells 2002). A decade after they were first expounded, neither of these scenarios is in view.