Book Club: ‘Muslim Europe’ uncovers years of Muslim presence across the continent, challenging the widely held notion that Islam is foreign to European hist

14 January, 2026

“I didn’t need to worry about Muslim history to know how to practise Islam; I didn’t need to concern myself with ‘belonging’ in this society when all my role models lay elsewhere.” This early conviction, recalled by author and journalist Tharik Hussain, provides a revealing starting point for his latest book, Muslim Europe.

At a time when Muslims in Europe are routinely framed as a problem to be solved — through securitisation, integration metrics or culture-war polemics — the quotation illustrates both Tharik’s intellectual and physical journey into Muslim Europe, encompassing travels that explore presence, memory and belonging.

Part historical excavation, part detective work, the book’s narrative traverses the continent to uncover Muslim histories that have been buried, marginalised, or deliberately forgotten, and is interspersed with the author’s personal reflections on his inner spiritual journey.

This blend of history and reflection is characteristic of Tharik’s wider body of work.

An award-winning author and travel writer, he has published a new book that complements his earlier work on European Muslims in the Balkan regions and again demonstrates his instinct for narrative and place.

That said, Muslim Europe is not an academic text or a policy intervention, although it carries clear political implications.

Instead, it positions itself as a work of recovery, of stories, sites and lives, challenging the dominant assumption underpinning much contemporary debate: that Islam is alien to Europe.

A travelogue with purpose

As the book reveals, Tharik traces Muslim communities across Cyprus, Sicily, Malta, Portugal and Spain, communities that long predate modern nation-states.

These are not the Muslims of headline anxiety, such as recent migrants, refugees or so-called ‘parallel societies’, but indigenous populations, converts, traders, soldiers, scholars and survivors of empire.

By letting geography do the talking and taking the reader to places where Muslims have long belonged, Tharik destabilises the familiar binary of ‘European’ versus ‘Muslim’.

This way of telling the story is reinforced by Tharik’s journalistic style, which is central to the book’s effectiveness. He writes with close attention to detail, often noticing what is hidden in plain view.

In Cyprus, for instance, he discovers that one of the Prophet Muhammad’s maternal aunts was buried on the island, a fact that appears to vindicate sacred prophecy.

In Spain, he revisits Al-Andalus, not as a romanticised lost civilisation of Muslims who pioneered science, arts and culture, but as a layered historical reality whose legacy remains visible in architecture, language and memory, often uneasily so.

Through this consciously ‘Muslim-centric’ narrative, Europe is presented as far more religiously plural and historically Muslim than contemporary discourse often acknowledges.

History grounded in observation

At its best, the book reads like long-form reportage. Tharik is attentive to sights, sounds, mood and texture, and he sometimes describes the tension between heritage and tourism in the places he visits.

These details ground the narrative and prevent it from drifting into abstraction. At the same time, journalism is underpinned by serious historical engagement, marked by clarity and restraint, and a preference for observation over assertion.

Tharik’s cordial conversations with local people and academic experts are woven lightly into the text, allowing individuals to speak for themselves rather than serving merely as evidence for a thesis.

Throughout, he is careful to situate Muslim presence within shifting political orders, as empires rise and fall, borders are redrawn, and populations are displaced.

He does not present Muslims as passive victims of history, but neither does he shy away from the violence of erasure, whether through ethnic cleansing in Bosnia or cultural amnesia in Western Europe.

Challenging the ‘newcomer’ myth

It is against this historical backdrop that one of the book’s central interventions becomes clear. Muslim Europe challenges the idea that Muslims are recent arrivals whose presence must be justified through economic contribution or cultural assimilation. Tharik shows that for many European Muslims, the experience is not one of arrival but of endurance.

This distinction matters because contemporary debates about Muslims in Europe, whether focused on migration, security or national identity, often rest on historical ignorance.

By documenting Muslim communities that have survived and thrived for over a millennium within Europe, Tharik exposes the shallowness of claims that Islam is incompatible with European values.

He also calls out the tendency of traditional Eurocentric histories to label the presence of Muslims as an ‘invasion’, a framing that has laid the foundations for the current right-wing obsession with the alleged threat of a growing European Muslim demographic.

Such narratives ignore the presence of millions of indigenous Muslims who have lived for centuries in places such as Bosnia, Kosovo and Albania.

At the same time, Tharik does not deny historical friction or conflict. He acknowledges moments of tension and inter-communal strife, but resists flattening history into the familiar cliché of a ‘clash of civilisations’.

Instead, Europe is presented as a space shaped by entanglement, Christian, Muslim, Jewish and secular, rather than by purity.

Identity without apology

Running alongside this historical analysis is Tharik’s own positionality as a British Muslim journalist, which subtly informs the narrative.

He does not foreground himself excessively, but his presence is felt in moments of recognition and unease that resonate with his own sense of belonging in Europe.

This lends the book an emotional undercurrent without turning it inward, as Tharik is careful not to universalise his experience or present Muslim identity as monolithic.

The Muslims he encounters are diverse in theology, practice, politics and levels of religiosity. What unites them is not belief alone, but a shared navigation of marginality within European national stories.

Crucially, Tharik avoids the trap of defensive writing. Muslim Europe does not plead for acceptance or attempt to sanitise Muslim history to make it more palatable. Instead, it insists on complexity, contradiction and dignity, modelling a confident form of Muslim European self-understanding that does not require validation from hostile gatekeepers.

This, in turn, underscores the importance of European Muslims speaking and writing for themselves rather than allowing others to define them.

Sadek Hamid

Limits and silences

As comprehensive as the book is in scope, it inevitably leaves some questions open. Western European urban Muslim life, shaped by post-war migration, racialisation and class, falls largely outside the book’s scope, and readers seeking a deeper engagement with France, Germany or Britain will need to turn to other scholarly work.

This omission is less a flaw than a deliberate choice. Tharik’s work acts as a bridge, drawing attention away from familiar sites of controversy towards histories that unsettle prevailing narratives.

Even so, the absence of deeper engagement with contemporary political Islamophobia, including policies such as Prevent, bans and surveillance, means the book operates more at the level of cultural memory than policy critique.

Gender, too, appears more as background than as a sustained lens. While women are present throughout the narrative, their specific experiences of Muslim European history are not foregrounded, and a more explicit focus could have enriched the analysis.

Sadek Hamid

Why this book matters now

Ultimately, Muslim Europe arrives at a time when European identity is increasingly policed through border regimes, citizenship tests and cultural anxiety, with Muslims frequently positioned as outsiders whose loyalty is questioned and whose presence is closely monitored.

Other reviews of the book have echoed Tharik’s argument for foregrounding a European, Muslim-centric perspective written from within, rather than filtered through neo-Orientalist assumptions.

Against this backdrop, Tharik’s book performs an act of narrative resistance, not by shouting but by showing. By documenting centuries-old Muslim cemeteries, mosques and communities, he reframes the question of belonging so that it is no longer about whether Muslims can integrate into Europe, but whether Europe is willing to acknowledge its own plural past.

For journalists, policymakers, educators and general readers alike, Muslim Europe offers a corrective to lazy assumptions and ahistorical debate.

It reminds us that history is not only what is remembered, but what is chosen to be forgotten, and that forgetting has political consequences.

The result is a thoughtful, accessible and quietly powerful book that combines journalistic craft with historical insight to tell a story that is too often erased.

In doing so, Tharik expands the imaginative boundaries of what Europe has been and what it could still become, helping contemporary Muslims “look for a heritage to anchor and secure their identity right here, so they can create narratives of belonging and forge a ‘place identity’ that includes their European Muslim history.”

Dr Sadek Hamid is an academic who has written widely about British Muslims. He is the author of  Sufis, Salafis and Islamists: The Contested Ground of British Islamic Activism

Follow him on X: @SadekHamid

source https://www.newarab.com/features/muslim-europe-travelogue-faith-place-and-identity