This chapter traces the development of perceptions and interactions within the Islamic world of the papacy from the beginnings of Islam in the seventh century until contemporary times. It explores how the first few centuries were marked by ignorance before Christian military victories and political and economic expansion led to increased contacts and knowledge after 1050. It then examines how relations developed between the three great Muslim empires of the early modern world – Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal – and the papacy between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, and well as how contacts expanded from the traditional area of the Mediterranean basin to also encompass Persia and India. Finally, it explores relations in the modern era, including diplomatic contacts between the papacy and the Ottoman sultans in the nineteenth century, the impact of the First World War, and the effects of decolonization on the Islamic world’s relations with the papal curia.

European history has been defined as a field by a notion of Europe – its borders, values, civilization, and nationalities – that is structured by Christianity and its secular legacies. Rather than seeking to globalize the history of Europe by considering the impact of European Christianity on other parts of the world, and how it was impacted by them, this chapter challenges that narrative. It asks how the historiography of Europe can be integrated with the historiographies of Europe’s historic non-Christian populations, namely Jews and Muslims. These are historiographies with their own rhythms, conceptual frameworks, and geographies in which Europe carries quite different connotations. They shift our attention from the north and west to the south and east, enjoining us to think differently about Europe and the diversity that has always existed within it. Separately, these historiographies speak to very different experiences. Taken together, they help us to think differently about the interface between Europe and the world and to write the history of Europe itself against the grain.

The chapter examines principles and values of communication and societal relationships from an Islamic perspective. It highlights the significance of communication in Islam, including language, communication theory, and the principles of Prophet Muhammad (PBUH). The chapter explores different levels of Islamic communication, cultural influences, and communication within Muslim families across age groups. It addresses the challenges Muslims face in a globalized world and the impact of communication technologies on Islamic culture. The chapter offers health practitioners and educators an insight into effective Islamic-based communication in therapeutic relationships for individuals with regards to addressing mental and physical health issues. This chapter also briefly discusses the contemporary challenges of globalization and communication as it relates to Islamic principles.

This chapter emphasizes the significance of cultural competency and its relevance to health care through an Islamic lens. While Islamic texts do not directly address cultural competence, they highlight principles aligning with its values and highlight the importance of understanding and respecting various cultures. Addressing the health care needs of Muslim patients necessitates a thorough integration of cultural, religious, and spiritual considerations, recognizing the substantial influence of religion and spirituality on health care decisions. This chapter discusses the importance for public health care practitioners to be equipped with the requisite skills and knowledge to cater to the specific needs of Muslim patients and communities and the adherence to religious beliefs and practices. The foundational principles of cultural competencies, deeply rooted in Islamic values, can be universally applied in health care settings, ensuring health care providers are culturally competent and capable of offering culturally congruent care within an Islamic context.

Muslims structure their everyday lives and religious practices around Allah, believing that whatever happens, it is His will. Islam enables Muslims to cope with everyday life, especially when challenges occur, assisting in reducing levels of anxiety and reactive depression. The use of the Qur’an and Islamic teachings and guidance promotes positive religious coping, which is positively associated with desirable mental health and well-being indicators. Western psychiatry and psychology are attempting to move away from a biomedical model of care, but they still struggle to incorporate Islamic teachings and guidance and positive religious coping in treatment planning. Designing culturally competent mental health services involves accommodating and addressing Islamic beliefs and practices of Muslim patients to increase positive religious coping and develop more culturally congruent care.

There are often tensions within New Public Health because of the subjective nature of religion and spirituality. Omitting this crosscutting dimension reduces the evidence base and therefore the growth of New Public Health. Identifying the differences for low-income, middle-income, and predominantly Muslim countries compared to high-income countries outlines the ways these could exert an impact on New Public Health. Health-related guidance within the Qur’an and Prophetic sayings relates to the ways these link to the aims of New Public Health and their parallel positioning. Simultaneously, they differ, with Islam exhibiting a more salutogenic position. Therefore, the chapter suggests that the evidence base requires moving from New Public Health’s biomedical roots towards a more cohesive integration of the practices and beliefs of Muslim communities.

Religious beliefs and practices play a critical role in how public health and health care outcomes are realized. While there is little research on non-Muslim experiences with public health initiatives and health outcomes in Muslim Majority Countries (MMCs), there is a body of literature that identifies multiple social determinants of health that lead to poorer indicators of health and health outcomes in these countries. In addition, in societies where there are large immigrant Muslim populations, perceptions of the quality of care, participation in public health initiatives, and access to health care that is culturally relevant and aligned with belief systems has been found to impact health outcomes. Barriers and facilitators to accessing and receiving care in both MMCs and communities serving Muslim populations have been identified. Social determinants of health such as economic status, access to and quality of education and health care, social and built environment, foodways, and collaborative community action to advance cultural competence of providers and other public health stakeholders can all improve health indicators and health outcomes of MMCs and communities with Muslim populations.

The second chapter traces the trajectories of Muslim leaders of the UOIF, leading them from North African middle-class families to the uneasy condition of Arab foreigners in France. Despite obtaining French citizenship, their status remains vulnerable, with state authorities and political elites regularly questioning their national loyalty. Owing to the intense scrutiny and suspicion, French Muslim leaders tend to engage in various practices of “Frenchification.” These practices consist of distancing themselves from homeland politics, providing evidence of cultural (notably linguistic) integration, and promoting a form of “pure Islam” that is detached from their homeland traditions. The chapter demonstrates that proving Frenchness is irreducible to legal status and implies nourishing a specific set of emotions, such as national pride, feelings of belonging, and a “love” of France. These expressions of emotional attachment can be understood in light of the emotionalization of citizenship that now characterizes the politics of belonging in Western Europe. However, such credentials of membership are not socially neutral; rather, they are layered with class considerations and can, in some cases, feed into anti-migrant sentiments against less privileged coreligionists, whom they regard as insufficiently French.

Obtaining French citizenship is not enough to secure social acceptance, and terror attacks committed in the name of Islam have critically impaired Muslims’ claims to national membership. Beginning with a discussion of how the construction of Muslims as a “suspect community” has impacted their daily lives, the chapter explores Muslim leaders’ efforts to display exemplary conduct to reassure majority members and circumvent the terrorist stigma. Their actions, such as organizing guided tours and open days in mosques, are emblematic of this endeavor, as well as of the asymmetrical burden of mutual understanding that characterizes postcolonial European societies. Moreover, embodying exemplariness involves cultivating Islamically justified dispositions for approachability and gentleness in daily interactions. Efforts to allay suspicions can also lead Muslim leaders of the UOIF to establish taboo forms of cooperation with intelligence officers, which highlights the ways in which the securitization of Islam relies partly on the involvement of certain community members. Overall, through their practice of disidentification from “Salafi,” “literalist,” and other “extremist” worshippers, French Muslim leaders tend to reinforce the distinction made by state authorities between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” thereby deflecting the fundamentalist stigma onto some coreligionists.

Examines American relations with non-Protestant others within the Mediterranean, primarily Jews, Catholics, and Muslims. Pays particular attention to shipwrecks in Morocco.

By way of conclusion, this final chapter briefly discusses the Flemish ban on religious slaughter without prior stunning, which was confirmed by the Court of Justice of the European Union in 2020, and restates the main arguments of the book. Moreover, I take the Flemish case to briefly outline three further questions that have emerged from the story this book has told. These questions relate to the relationship between Christian ambivalence and legal progress, the role of Jewish engagements with secular law, and the entanglement of Jewish and Muslim questions in the contemporary politics of religious difference.

The book begins in the Turkish beach town of Şarköy, home to a community of first- and second-generation return migrants who were interviewed for this book. These returnees are just some of the millions of people who have journeyed back and forth between Turkey and Germany for over 60 years. The introduction lays out the book’s four core arguments, which together reveal that Turkish-German migration history is far more dynamic than typically told. First, return migration was not an illusion or unrealized dream but rather a core component of all migrants’ lives, and migration was not a one-directional event but rather a transnational process of reciprocal exchange that fundamentally reshaped both countries’ politics, societies, economies, and cultures. Second, migration introduced new ambivalence into European identities: although Germans assailed Turks’ alleged inability to integrate, they had integrated enough to be criticized in Turkey as “Germanized Turks” (Almancı). Third, examining West German efforts to “kick out” the Turks in the 1980s exposes the reality of racism in the liberal, democratic Federal Republic of Germany. Finally, including Muslims and Turks in European history expands our idea of what “Europe” is and who “Europeans” are.

The conclusion revisits the book’s key claims and maps new avenues for research on medieval European representations of, and self-definition in relation to, Muslims and Islam. It closes with a brief discussion of the qualified anti-crusade argument, grounded in imperfect ideas of equality, voiced by the French lawyer Honorat Bovet in his widely disseminated Arbre des batailles (1387).

Chapter 8 continues this discussion, noting that Moses and Elijah are both held in honour by Jews, Christians and Muslims, as is Jesus by Christians and Muslims (following Christian scholars such as David Thomas). Although there are important and abiding doctrinal differences between these Abrahamic Faiths, particularly about the status of Jesus and Mohammed, this chapter argues that there are crucial ethical commonalities that could and should help to move the world beyond religiously inspired violence. The chapter ends with an extended discussion of Raimon Panikkar’s inspiring vision of the Cosmic Christ in his collected works Omnia Opera.