Session Abstract

The conventional narrative of the history of Muslims in Europe begins after the Second World War with the mass migration of laborers. Scholars have only recently begun exploring the Muslim presence in Europe prior to 1945. Most of these studies focus more on political and religious movements than on significant individuals. Addressing this gap, this panel presents biographies of Muslims who established Islam in inter-war Europe. By exploring the lives and works of Muslim exiles and converts to Islam, the papers will appeal to a broad audience interested in the interconnected histories of Muslim-majority and Christian-majority lands, and of Jews and Muslims in modern Europe.

The first paper focuses on Shakīb ʾArslān (1869-1946), a Lebanese intellectual who spent the inter-war years in Geneva. Contrary to the assumption that Muslim exiles in Europe represented the spearhead of liberalization in their societies, this group produced the fiercest critics of the emulation of Europe and the strengthening of a conservative pan-Islamic attitude. Because Arslān was influential in the Arabic-speaking world, the paper sheds light on the intertwined histories of the Middle East and Europe.

The second panel paper focuses on Arslān ally, Dutch convert Charles Muhammad Ali Beetem (d. 1938), who played a leading role in the Muslim community in the Dutch capital. Muslim communities established their first mosques in Europe in the 1920s. The first mosque in the Netherlands, however, was not built until 1955. Little research has been done on the attempt to establish mosques and their proponents in the Netherlands prior to the Second World War. The second paper provides an unknown chapter in the history of Muslims in Europe by analyzing the public debate on the construction of the first mosque in the Hague in the 1920s and 1930s, an effort led by Beetem.

Like Beetem, convert Hugo Marcus (1880-1966) also played a seminal role in establishing Islam in inter-war Europe. From 1923 to 1935 he was the most important German in Berlin’s mosque community, despite not ending his membership in the Jewish community. That he was allowed to rise to the top of a Muslim community, which risked its standing to save his life after the Nazis rose to power, challenges many preconceptions about Muslim attitudes to Jews and Nazism and the diversity of Muslim responses to anti-Semitism. It also sheds light on the interconnected histories of Jews and Muslims in modern European history.

The fourth paper explores the life and work of Alimjan Idris (1887-after 1945), a Tatar of Central Asia, who like Marcus became a key figure in the organization of the Muslim community in Weimar Germany. Unlike Marcus’s Berlin mosque community, Idris enthusiastically served Nazi propaganda efforts. Yet his stance can be situated in his longer engagement with German authorities as he participated in German propaganda efforts to the Muslim-majority world during World War I. Similar to ʾArslān, the biography of Idris provides insight into the role played by peripatetic conservative exiles in establishing Islam in Europe.