Manfred Sing Against All Odds: How to Re-Inscribe Islam into European History Abstract: The central place that Muslims and Islam are accorded in the European media and public debates today contrasts with their near-complete absence in parts of European historiography until recently. While right-wing demagogues campaign against refugees, Muslims and the supposed Islamization of Europe, their argument that Islam does not belong to Europe is, at least partially, supported by the rather patchy awareness of a continuous and multi-facetted Islamic history in European societies and, horrible dictu, even in some history departments. Recent research challenges this neglect, tries to overcome the “Othering” of Islam, and demands a new conceptualization of European history that leaves behind the Europe/Islam binary. As the construction of a European identity and a European space is based on “Othering” – a definition of what is not European –, the conscious and visible integration of Muslims into European history poses a systematic challenge to nar- ratives of Europeanization. The article draws attention to the difficulties that spring from this challenge and discusses new approaches in scholarship that try to over- come them. Reflecting on the status of Muslims as a minority in Europe, the anthropologist Talal Asad once coined the paradoxical phrase: “Muslims are clearly present in secular Europe and yet in an important sense absent from it.” 1 This simultane- ous presence and absence of Muslims in the West has found a recent expression in the popular rediscovery of thirteenth-century Sufi master Jalaluddin Rumi. In times of hate speech and fake news, seekers of love and truth have made him a best-selling author in the USA. 2 The “Rumi renaissance” 3 has even seized showbiz celebrities like singer Madonna, actress Tilda Swinton, or Coldplay’s Chris Martin (“It kind of changed my life”). 4 The new veneration for the Persian poet (d. 1273), who is “typically referred to as a mystic, a saint, a Sufi, an enlightened man,” 5 has been substantially sparked by the new English translations by the American 1 Talal Asad: Formations of the Secular. Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford 2003, 159. 2 Jane Ciabattari: Why is Rumi the best-selling author in the US?, in: BBC culture (21 Oct. 2014). URL: http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20140414-americas-best-selling-poet (6 Jan. 2017). 3 Ibid. 4 Rozina Ali: The Erasure of Islam from the Poetry of Rumi, in: The New Yorker (5 Jan. 2017). URL: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-erasure-of-islam-from-the-poetry-of-rumi (6 Jan. 2017). 5 Ibid. DOI 10.1515/9783110532241-008, © 2017 Manfred Sing, published by De Gruyter. Die Online Ausgabe steht unter einer Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND Lizenz. Bereitgestellt von | Institut für Europaeische Geschichte Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 16.11.17 10:24