International colloquium, 25-26. September 2008, Strasbourg
Every year, in various towns of Europe – Athens, Copenhagen, Paris, Hamburg or Helsinki - the Shi'a Muslims of Europe celebrate Ashura, to commemorate the day of the martyrdom of the Imam Hussein defeated at the battle of Kerbala. These Shi'a Muslims come from Iran, Pakistan, Iraq or Turkey… and form, within the Muslim populations living in Europe, an active minority. This Muslim minority is most often discreet and not well known. It is a composite group: they are divided ethnically, linguistically and sometimes even religiously.
The colloquium organised by the research Center PRISME (CNRS / Robert Schuman University of Strasbourg) will bring together some twenty specialists of Shiisme, Muslims in Europe, and religious minorities. It will be one of the first attempts to realise an in-depth analysis of the Shiite presence on European ground: re-structuring, re-composition of believing and acting, relations to ethnicity, nation, and modes of declinations of belonging to the Umma.
The cooperation between different ethnic minorities and religious trends, interactions established between religious belonging and politics of the home country will be compared to the situation of other Muslim groups in Europe.
This meeting is the first step of a new field that the research group on re-compositions of Islam in Europe of PRISME intends to develop. Directed toward minoritarian elements of European Islam, this new field should allow evaluating how much Islam, in this part of the world, is heterogeneous and composed of many trends, sensitivities, with a pluralist reference to Islam, sometimes at the extreme of what society considers "canonic" Islam.
Samim Akgönül, Franck Frégosi, Anne-Laure Zwilling
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