European Islam

[3][6][7] The terms "European Islam" and "Euro-Islam" were originally introduced at a conference presided by Carl E. Olivestam, senior lecturer at Umeå University, in Birmingham in 1988, and subsequently published in the Swedish handbook: Kyrkor och alternativa rörelser ("Churches and Alternative Movements").

[8][10][11] There are three Islamic scholars who participate in the debate on "Euro-Islam": Enes Karić,[12] Bassam Tibi,[13][14] and Tariq Ramadan,[8][14] who adopted the term in the second half of the 1990s but use it with different meanings.

[14] The foremost Western, Non-Muslim scholars of political science and/or Islamic studies involved in the debate on "Euro-Islam" are Jocelyne Cesari, Jørgen S. Nielsen, and Olivier Roy.

[8][10] German-Syrian Bassam Tibi is considered the original coiner of the term "Euro-Islam",[14] which he used for the first time in his 1992 paper Les conditions d'une "Euro-Islam", published in 1995,[13] to describe a type of Islam that embraces Western political values, such as liberal democracy, religious pluralism, secularism, tolerance, and the separation between religion and state.

[17] Tibi insists that Euro-Islam means secularity, the acceptance of separation between religion and state, as well as that Muslims living in Europe should embrace European values.

[24] While family law, the status of women, religious freedom, social justice and criminal laws are still areas of high controversy within Islam, in Europe and elsewhere, and in comparison with European societies, attempts to Islamize modernity performed in European territory and in dialogue with Europe express creativity and innovation capacity.

Xavier Bougarel proposes to replace these culturalist visions by an accurate comparison taking into account the nuances of the realities of Islam in Western Europe and in the Balkans.

[23] She has also held post as research associate at the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard University and director of Islamopedia Online.