is professor of sociology at the Ecole des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Centre d’Analyse et d’Intervention Sociologiques (CADIS). In May 2014 she was awarded France’s most important decoration, the Légion d’Honneur, for her contributions in the field of Islam In Europe and alternative modernity. Her publications include Interpénétrations: L’Islam et l’Europe, Paris, 2005; Islam in Sicht, (ed. with Ludwig Ammann), Bielefeld, 2004; The Forbidden Modern: Civilization and Veiling, University of Michigan Press, 1997.
Contemporary Islam in Europe, its modes of public expression and the visibility of associated religious signs and symbols all raise questions concerning the values of the European public sphere. And yet, writes Nilüfer Göle, religious agency itself remains a blind spot in the public debate.
As democratic imaginaries linked to new protest movements circulate globally, Nilüfer Göle reassesses relations between the public sphere and democracy; and shows how the Gezi Park movement, among others, has used public space as a site for the rehearsal of new forms of citizenship.
It is not distance from but proximity to modern life that triggers a return to religious identity among migrant Muslims in Europe, says Nilüfer Göle. What we are witnessing today is a shift from a Muslim to an Islamist identity. The religious self for individual Muslims is being shifted from the private to the public realm.
