“A number of Britain’s most serious Islamist hate preachers…are…linked to Islamist extremism sponsored from overseas.”

Riyad, however, has changed course under Prince Mohammed bin Salman, seeking to rein-in the very brand of Islam it once championed. From the Carnegie Endowment:

“[T]he emerging Saudi position on Salafism is reflective of a wider strategic adjustmentt…The Saudis hope to make up for having exported Salafism…by promoting a less polarising…version of Islam, so as to reduce extremism at home and abroad.”

The closure of the King Fahd Academy in Bonn and relinquishing of control over Brussels’ Grand Mosque are emblematic of this shift. Nevertheless, the legacy of past investment persists, both in formal institutions and decentralised online networks where extremism can easily spread.

“Progressive” Islam

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Ramadan is often framed as a cultural, not to say consumerist, festival. In London, Ramadan lights in the West End mirror Christmas displays. High-end iftars in Paris and Milan emphasise shopping and dining. Retailers court Muslim consumers and streaming platforms roll-out Ramadan specials.

Ramadan is treated as part of a wider, secular, civic identity.

Politicians who champion values often seen as incompatible with Islam—such as same-sex marriage and transgender identity—routinely issue Ramadan greetings, among which Spanish PM Pedro Sanchez and French President Emmanuel Macron. Apart from political messaging, a more radical reimagining of Ramadan has emerged among explicitly “progressive Muslims.” The Ibn Rushd-Goethe Mosque in Berlin allows men and women to pray together, and, in Paris, Ludovic-Mohamed Zahed’s “prayer room” is explicitly pro-LGBTQ+. 

Such initiatives, however, remain contested, even among mainstream Muslims.

Muslim thinkers falling under the rough label of “progressive” include Amina Wadud and Mustafa Aykol, who argues for discovering the values of Western liberalism in Islamic history.

Neo-Traditionalism and Enculturation

Between reactionary Salafism and liberal integration, some have sought a middle-path of engagement with Western norms while remaining rooted in Sunni—usually Ash‘ari—orthodoxy. The Cambridge Central Mosque, partly spearheaded by Tim Winter (Abdul Hakim Murad), a Cambridge University professor and English convert to Islam, represents this integrative-yet-traditionalist approach.

Its Ramadan initiatives include children's fundraising campaigns encouraging youths to cycle, run, or pledge to attend dawn prayers to raise money for charity. It also hosts interfaith dialogues and emphasises the compatibility of Islam with contemporary concerns like environmental stewardship and social causes.

Winter, for his part, promotes attunement to local culture, from Gothic architectural elements in the Cambridge Mosque to participation in Muslim Gregorian chants. Explains Winter:

“I'm not somebody who seeks out exotica…I've no interest in something that dislocates me from what I already am…I've seen with a lot of new Muslims…that in a strange way it tends to situate them more strongly in their local identity. Some of the most English people I've ever met have been converts to Islam. That's one of the unexpected aspects of it.”

This of course is subjected to two criticisms: it is too compromising for hard-liners and too conservative for progressives—criticisms which Winter reciprocates. He writes in “Travelling Home: Essays on Islam in Europe:” “[T]he American cultural order presides over the globe so absolutely that…the reality of Jihad has become a MacJihad,” arguing for “[i]ntegration...but through something authentic and honourable which is neither MacWorld nor MacJihad.”

And yet, Winter’s conservatism constitutes chiefly a defence of Ghazilian, Sunni tradition. His desire to “indigenise” Islam is one-sided, contrasting European history with Islamic civilisation’s supposed greater pluralism, while also drawing on post-modern critiques of Western thought: “Whether God can forgive Europe,” he writes, “is perhaps the greatest problem of theodicy.”

Pluralism and “Perenialism”

Another “middle-way” between puritanism and progressivism is emerging from non-Muslim academia. Fred Donner’s “Pan-Abrahamic Thesis” of Qur’anic pluralism is now widely accepted. It notes that the Islamic holy book distinguishes between “Believers” and “Muslims,” describing People of the Book (as well as “Magi” and “Sabians,” often identified as monotheistic pagans) all as able to enter Paradise (if they hold to pure monotheism).

In this line, researchers like Joshua Little have established the unreliability of hadiths in contrast to the early codification of the Qur’an itself (Little, for example, has documented the fabrication of the infamous Aisha-age hadiths). It seems a Westernised, scholarly-informed Islam will tend to break with much of the medieval exegetical, hadith-centered and juridical tradition.

Western academic and literary engagement with Islam enjoys a long pedigree, from Carlyle’s “Heroes and Hero-Worship” to Goethe’s “Mahometsgesang,” Napoleon to Kipling to Nietzsche, Ernst Jünger and Valentine de Saint-Point. 

In Michel Houellebecq’s Soumission, a literary imagining of “European Islam” of sorts, the protagonist finally accepts a position in the newly “Islamised” Sorbonne by its president, Robert Rediger, a former Far-Right militant who wrote his thesis on the thought of French metaphysician Rene Guenon and has converted to Islam. Houellebecq seems to view Guenon as reconciling the foreign faith to those persons most averse to Muslim immigration.

Guenon saw in the world’s religions a plurality of genuine revelations. His influence has been persistent, with one follower, the English Sufi Martin Lings, writing a biography of Muhammad that former PM Tony Blair once claimed was one of the books he would take with him to a desert island.

Guenon wrote extensively on European history and esoterism, whose work can be interpreted as privileging certain traditions: Vedantic metaphysical terminology for its exactitude, for example, and Islam as the final legitimate dispensation before the eventual dawn of modernity. He recommended ritual adherence to the practice and dogma of one’s chosen religion, considering its principles to be approximating those of other paths. To a degree, this overlaps with the modern “Pan-Abrahamic Thesis.” 

RegardingIslam, Guenon emphasised traditional Sufi mysticism in that its underlying spiritual reality transcended mere external form. 

The Frenchman, in fact, ultimately converted, adopting the name Abd al-Wāḥid Yaḥyā, and moving to Egypt in 1930; he did so in the belief that Sufism’s equivalent—Christian esoterism in his own Catholic tradition—was closed to him.

What “Euro-Islam” will consolidate around—and if, indeed, anything like a dominant paradigm will emerge—remains uncertain. But the question is not only whether a cohesive ”Euro-Islam” can emerge, but how it will affect European culture at a time when Westerners themselves are questioning the nature of that into which “Islam” is integrating.

Statement

Today,the term “Euro-Islam,” originally coined to promote a liberal Western democracy-friendly form of the religion, describes a wide array of contrasting visions for integrating Islam into European societies (or vice-versa). From the diametric opposites of Salafism and “Progressive” Islam, to the “middle-paths” of enculturated Sunni orthodoxy, to historical-critical hadith-skeptical Qur’anic studies, to the perennialism of René Guénon, several “possible futures” for a European Islam are on the table.