Since the mid-twentieth century, most western European states have experienced an increase in population from Muslim-majority societies. At the same time, the latter have had to face diverse political and military interference on the part of European countries. Traditional images on both sides are informed by historical memories of encounters and entanglement as well as violence, oscillating between ambivalence and demarcation. Today, judgemental and emotionally charged images of the respective other remain challenged by geographical and everyday proximity before a backdrop of global mobility and information. These contemporary conditions give rise to conflicts of recognition that generate new complex and subtle patterns of differentiation. Such symbolic boundaries are often formed by polarising categories such as the modern versus the traditional, or the religious versus the secular, which determine aspects of ‘belonging’ and lend recognition accordingly.

Current shifts within the framework of this relationship raise the question as to how far traditional reflections and demarcations of symbolic boundaries in conceptions of orientalism and occidentalism have now become antiquated, and whether and how they are being replaced by new, non-polarised patterns of perception. For a research area focusing on Europe and Muslim-majority societies, this means that the epistemological interest of research and transfer activities must concentrate on examining and revising changes to cultural polarisations, shifts, and the permeability of boundaries within the setting of the school as well as in educational media.

The research area’s projects aim to scrutinise current diagnoses of mutual demarcation tendencies between Europe and Muslim-majority societies, as well as with regard to Muslims living in Europe. We are currently working with three points of focus:

• Historical scholarship discusses narrative structures which have essentially remained stable over longer periods of time. The project ‘The Longue Durée of European Islam Narratives’ traces their emergence. It examines the extent to which images currently being produced refer back to images of self and other that have long since become ‘institutionalised’.

• The completed project on Education Reform, Curricula and Textbooks in Arabic-speaking MENA countries, and the current project, ‘The Crusades Myth’, have initiated contrasting studies of various national contexts. This line of research is being continued with a project on Jemen and the Sudan. Differing colonial experiences and domestic ethnic and confessional boundaries that have developed over the course of history are shifted into the focus of nation-building processes.

• The transfer project ‘1001 Ideas’ renders new knowledge on Islamic countries and Muslims in Europe accessible for use in the classroom. To a large extent, the current Islam narrative in textbooks written in the German language reflects European perceptions of Islam from past centuries, in which Islam is seen as a source of backwardness and violence. With a view to destabilising these unilateral patterns of perception, this project has rendered web-based material in the German language available to teachers since 2005 (www.1001-idee.eu). The project is thus well positioned within contemporary discourse addressing history and histories between Europe and the Orient as well as between Christianity and Islam. Key aspects include investigating categories of self and other and how cultural transfer is portrayed or ignored. 
  

Further research and transfer projects are currently in the planning or funding application stage. They aim to examine the origins and development of symbolic boundaries from a comparative perspective. In doing so, they address the following questions: What counts as “European” and what counts as “Muslim”? How else do people identify themselves beyond their national or religious boundaries? How is perceived otherness spoken about or silenced? Which temporal shifts are expressed in new interpretations of ‘cultural’ difference, for example between scholarship and the public sphere or between textbook portrayals and current negotiations between pupils and teachers in the classroom? [more]

The following diagram outlines the location of the individual projects within this research area along the coordinates of contemporary research, historical research, transfer and networking.