Mosques in the Metropolis: Muslims, Jews, and Incivility's Unsettling Echoes

Mosques in the Metropolis: Muslims, Jews, and Incivility's Unsettling Echoes
Elizabeth Becker, Ph.D.
Feb 24, 2022, 12:30 p.m. EST
Zoom Link: https://udel.zoom.us/j/94318499897

​This presentation draws from the narratives through which Becker's book Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe took shape: bringing the ideas, hopes, and challenges faced by 20th century Jews in Europe into conversation with the ideas, hopes and challenges faced by Muslim populaces in Europe, today. 

Rooted in the ethnographic research of two mosques in Berlin and London as well as a survey of media coverage and policy, Becker traces a discourse of incivility that casts Muslims, like Jews before them, as European insider-outsiders perceived as threatening the social order. At the same time, through the stories of my interlocutors illuminate the agency of Muslim Europeans in shaping the social worlds around them, and contesting their associations with incivility. Unsettling the so-called "Muslim question" that dominates conversations about the (im)possibilities of Muslim (and Islam's) belonging to Europe—echoing the so-called "Jewish question" of the 20th century—Becker will come to focus on the unsettled and unsettling question of Europe. Can Europe define itself without drawing boundaries to its religious minorities, or does it depend on this juxtaposition? And if the latter, how can we re-imagine a truly plural Europe, one that is not forged around a civil/uncivil divide?

​Elisabeth Becker Topkara is a Freigeist Fellow at the Max-Weber-Institute-for-Sociology, Heidelberg University. She is a cultural sociologist trained at Cornell University, Oxford University and Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. Elisabeth previously held an ad astra/assistant professor position in Sociology at University College Dublin, and a post-doctoral fellowship with the Religion & Its Publics project and the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture at the University of Virginia.

This talk is sponsored by:

• European Studies
• Faculty Senate Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events (CAPE) 
• Islamic Studies
• Jewish Studies