Introduction

From a Muslim point of view, space travelling was still only an individual experience back in the 1980s—although 230 Arab guests watched the launch of the spaceship in Florida that took the first Arab to outer space. Prince Sulṭān b. Salmān Āl Saʿūd (b. 1956), member of the Saudi royal family and the second son of today’s King Salmān b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (b. 1935), participated in Space Shuttle mission STS-51-G in 1985 and helped to deploy the second communications satellite for the multi-national Arabsat programme. A crew member woke him up when they passed over Saudi Arabia for 212 the first time, and, looking from the upper deck window, the prince enjoyed seeing the Eastern province floating above him. During the seven days’ mission, he gave a guided tour through the spaceship which was beamed back to Arab television viewers on earth. He was the first astronaut carrying a small Qurʾān and dates from Medina— as his special meal—to outer space. Together with the Qurʾān, the prince took with him his pilot’s licence and a prayer dictated by his mother asking God to take care of the travellers, which he recited during take-off (Lawton and Moody 1986).

Some 20 years later, the scenery had changed. Before the first astronaut from Malaysia was rocketed to the International Space Station (ISS) in a joint programme with Russia (2007), 150 religious scholars gathered in Malaysia to discuss the challenges of Muslim life in zero gravity. The scholars not only approved of the mission’s aim to study the secrets of the universe, but also discussed how often to pray, considering that ISS circled the earth 16 times in 24 hours, how to face Mecca in orbit, and how to perform prayers. The National Fatwa Council finally approved of the suggestions worked out in the “Guideline for Performing Ibadah at the International Space Station (ISS)” (Fischer 2008; Lewis 2013).

This example epitomizes the growing ambitions of Arab and Muslim-majority countries in conquering outer space (Koren 2018). 25 Arab satellites have been launched since 1985. The interest in space technology not only serves military and economic interests and provides national prestige, it also has a high symbolic “Islamic” value, as it invokes the “Golden Age” of Muslim astronomers in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries (Koren 2018; Guessoum 2013). Arab interest in modern space technology, which can be traced back to the nineteenth century, has created a cosmopolitan scientific community transcending Arab and Western boundaries, as Determann (2018) has shown. When, in 2010, the Qatar Exoplanet Survey discovered an extrasolar planet 500 light years away, it was named “Qatar-1 b.” The Emirates Mars Mission, composed of a team of 150 solely Emirati engineers, is preparing to launch a space orbiter named Amal (“Hope”) in 2020 that is to reach Mars in 2021, just in time for the fiftieth anniversary of the foundation of the United Emirates. The data of the Mars mission will be provided to 200 universities and research institutes all over the globe, according to the mission statement. The Emirates have also announced a “Mars 2117 project,” aiming to establish the first inhabitable human settlement on Mars within 100 years (Determann 2018; Koren 2018).

Outer space has not become a “Muslim space”; nor has exoplanet “Qatar-1 b” turned into a Muslim planet through these activities. However, the scientific endeavours mark outer space as a legitimate area of Muslim-majority countries’ interests. Heavy investment, international and local experts’ planning, religious scholars’ approval, popular use of TV satellites, and the interest of the scientific community give credit 213 and legitimacy to enterprises which produce a symbolic space that connects the great Muslim past to the future of humanity. What these examples show is that the social “production of space” (Lefebvre 1974) involves a variety of human actions, from investment, planning, and popular use to claims of legitimacy. These actions attribute not only cosmopolitan, political, economic, and technical dimensions to a certain space, but also religious, emotional, and symbolic value. In a sociological sense, space is not just there to be inhabited by human beings, but its different dimensions are produced, changed, or destroyed by them.

From this starting point, I question the usefulness of terms such as “Muslim space” and “Islamic world” as analytical categories and take issue with the ways in which an Islamic identity is often inscribed onto space and history, thus implying Muslim sameness, boundedness, and groupness that are also connected with medieval, sectarian, or anachronistic beliefs. While places appear to be sheer facts, “our conceptions of them (…) are cultural constructions born of particular moments in time” (Green 2014, 556). As analytical categories, geographical models should not only be designed to enable “the tracing of commonality or connectivity” (ibid.), but also to understand “dynamic and mutable spaces of interaction that enable patterns of dissemination, circulation, or competition among ideas no less than commodities” (ibid., 558). Following Brubaker’s and Cooper’s (2000) critique of “identity,” a distinction between a category of analysis and practice is paramount. Common parlance about Muslim places and a Muslim’s feeling of belonging to a certain space must be kept separate from a view that analyzes the practices of identifying and categorizing places and spaces; otherwise, the strong or soft ways of “identitarian theorizing” (Brubacker and Cooper 2000, 7) expound either that Muslim spaces simply exist or that they are multiple, fragmented, and fluid, in short, arbitrarily constructed. Although the critique of “Orientalism” (Said 1978) has cast “serious doubts on the assumption that an Islamic entity can be regarded as a world apart from, or even opposed to, the ‘western world’” (von Oppen 2001, 277), scholars have mainly taken issue with the strong way of identitarian thinking by showing “the making and unmaking” of the “internal boundaries” (ibid.) of Islam; they left the external boundaries as well as the problem of soft, fragmented identities mainly untouched. My proposal is that we should start seeing what is termed as Muslim spaces or an Islamic world as inherently diverse and affected, if not created, by circuits of global knowledge production.

Drawing on Tim Unwin’s (2000, 26) insight in his critique of Lefebvre (1974) that “to say that our ideas about space are socially constructed is something very different from saying that space is socially constructed,” my approach revolves around two concerns. First, I aim to show that the space of Islam has often been described as predominantly Islamic by historical actors and various observers, thus neglecting, 214 ignoring, or suppressing its multi-religious character. As a way out of this impasse, I secondly propose a topological approach, arguing that the debates about Islam created a trans-religious and transcultural space in which ideas about Islam circulated. What today is usually categorized as “Islam” is thus part of a historically growing knowledge production that has been circulating between believers, unconventional believers, and adherents of other faiths for a long time. On the one hand, the internal diversity of Islam offers overlapping areas with other religions; on the other hand, the space of Islam expands beyond the territories under Muslim rule. Therefore, the following considerations do not simply aim to attract attention to the position of Christians and Jews under Muslim rule (e.g. Courbage and Fargues 1997; Pink 2016) or to the mutual perceptions between Muslims and adherents of other religions (e.g. Waardenburg 1999) or to the common history of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Sharkey 2017; Conermann 2017). Rather, the focus is on the production and circulation of knowledge that created a transcultural space and turned Islam into a “mutable mobile”¹ (van de Kamp 2016, 1 and 3f.).

The problem of the spatiality of Islam is embedded in a wider epistemological context. The so-called “renaissance of space” in the humanities and social sciences has generated partly ambivalent and contradictory effects, especially with respect to Islam (Dörfler 2010). The combination with other “turns” (Bachmann-Medick 2006) has often led to a “spatialization” of society, culture, or religion—and thus implicitly caused a reification of space and its congruence with society. The negative effect of this impasse was nowhere more obvious than in relation to things Islamic because the renaissance of space reconfirmed the outworn, yet still powerful idea of “cultural regions” and “cultural spheres” (Frobenius 1898; Braukämper 2005). Not only has the notorious example of Huntington’s (1996) “clash of civilizations” used the lame differentiation between Western, Christian, and European versus Oriental, Islamic, and Arabic. Huntington’s critics also regularly fall short of a productive alternative understanding of space when they are content with showing that his essentialist association of space with culture is merely the result of a discursive power that needs and produces the view about cultural and religious clashes (Dörfler 2010, 44). These critics’ concern with the spatial manifestations of power indirectly affirms the congruence of space, culture, and power. Thus, the idea of an Islamic incommensurability with modernity, the West, or other religions often creates a vicious circle in which “re-orientalizing orientals” speak for authenticity and “orientalizing orientalists” for difference (Al-Azmeh 2003, 26). This vicious circle results in an “over-Islamizing of Islam” (Al-Azmeh 1996) and deeply affects the construction and perception of space. 215

An obvious example that comes to mind is how space and its boundaries are arguments in popular debates about Islam in Europe among Muslims and non-Muslims alike. On the one hand, critics of Islam in Europe nowadays believe they are witnessing an “Islamization of Europe,” while some of their opponents, demanding inner-Islamic reform, wish for an “Europeanization of Islam” (Berger 2013). The spatial imaginary behind this debate is the question of whether Islam, or which kind of it, belongs to and fits in Europe (Hashas 2013). On the other hand, Muslim scholars also grapple with the inverse question of whether Muslim minorities in European societies should follow a special version of Islam, designed for a diasporic situation, the so-called fiqh al-aqallīyāt (“the jurisprudence of the [Muslim] minorities”). This expression came into being in the 1990s and has sparked controversial debates among Muslim scholars (Albrecht 2016). Dividing the social world into different spheres is a problematic use of the classical Muslim tripartition between the so-called territories of Islam, war, and treaty (dār al-islām, dār al-ḥarb, and dār al-ʿahd). The European Council for Fatwa and Research, the most influential institution dedicated to producing norms for Muslims in Europe, constructs an image of otherness for countries outside dār al-islām, even for third- or fourth-generation Muslims who no longer have any ancestors in predominantly Muslim countries (ibid., 118). Other scholars vehemently oppose this kind of dividing the world and societies. Some of them question boundary drawing on the grounds that the Islamic creed is the same everywhere; others explicitly relocate dār al-islām in the West because its secular societies guarantee religious freedom (ibid., 117–127).

This example also brings to the fore that exclusively Muslim spaces are an exception—either because the Islamic character of a space is only one spatial dimension or because there exist opposing claims. Why, then, is the talk about Muslim space—with its “bloody borders,” according to Huntington (1996, 254)—so pertinent? Why can an Arab grocery store be perceived as a Muslim place in Berlin but not in Cairo? Can Europe be regarded as a Muslim space in the same sense as the Middle East? Are European cities Muslim spaces and, if so, for whom? In other words, how do we—believers, observers, critics, or researchers—create and perceive, make and unmake Muslim spaces?

In order to approach these questions, it is necessary to unpack the dimensions involved in the production of space and Islam. Space obviously is a complex, dynamic, and relational configuration, not simply the geographical background of society (e.g. Löw 2001; Günzel 2017). Actors perceive, understand, and imagine space, while their own actions as well as their social relations produce space and give meanings to it. Rather generally put, elites invest in space, specialists design its future prospects, and people use it. Religiously marked space as well as religious architecture share in the material, cognitive, symbolic, and semiotic features that constitute social space (Knott 216 2005; 2009). The production of religious space involves believers and non-believers with differing, if not opposing, interests and affects their perception, behaviour, devotion, and respect for such a space. A financial investment, purposeful planning, a material shape, a symbolic meaning attached to its architecture and an understanding of its symbols, expressed in a certain comportment, bring religious space into being, while at the same time regulating and controlling the flow of people and goods inside and around it. A speciality of religiously connoted space is that it can be impermanent, transnational and can change or lose its function. Religious space can be a playground for conflicting claims, but also for inter-religious sharing. Whether actors openly claim a space to be Christian, Muslim, or multi-religious, and whether they try to change its identity or leave it open, depends on the physical availability, symbolic importance, and forms of legitimacy at play (Weltecke 2012).

In early modern times, an understanding of “cultural geography” was not yet present; it came into being in the nineteenth century (Frobenius 1898; Braukämper 2005). The term “Islam” has also only come into popular use since the nineteenth century and stands for an academic convention with its own history; it is used to categorize a form of intra-religious diversity under one umbrella term and to distinguish it from other forms of intra-religious diversity. In the past, Muslim heresiographers would not have considered every branch of what researchers today call Islam “Islamic” (see van Ess 2011); Christian Europeans, who might not have considered themselves as Christian Europeans in the literal sense, did not even use the term “Islam” before 1697 in French and before 1818 in English (Tolan et al. 2012, 14f.), and most of them thought of Muḥammad as a “Turkish prophet” and understood Mohammedanism as a “Christian heresy”. Although the term “musulman” and “moslim” can be found in French and English sources from the sixteenth century onwards, neither peoples nor spaces were Islamized. The terms mostly used for Muslims referred to their ethnic belonging (like Arabs, Turks, Persians, or Moors) or were of Biblical origin (like Hagarenes, Ishmaelites, or Saracens) (ibid., 12–17). Ottoman travellers were often categorized as Orientals or Levantines, “which could designate any merchant from the east, including Greeks, Jews, Armenians, Maronites, Persians, Turks, or Arabs” (Krstić 2015, 685).

The following chapter tries to describe the space of Islam from a fresh perspective by carving out its multi-religious topology. Firstly, I give an overview of the terminology that is usually used to inscribe Islam onto space and history. I distinguish three approaches—geographical, cultural, and trans-local/national/regional—in the academe and highlight their underlying premises and theoretical difficulties. My criticism mainly aims at showing that these terms tend to homogenize existing differences with regard to places, peoples, and cultures. Secondly, I propose the concept of a multi-religious topology of Islam as an alternative for a different understanding of Islam and its 217 location. The concept does not only mean that religious diversity and relationality are a permanent given of Islamic contexts; it also argues that the circulation of knowledge created a transcultural space of Islam. The multi-religious topology of Islam also involves actions and perceptions of non-Muslims and even circumstances in which Muslims were not personally present. As will be shown, the topology of Islam encompasses a global sphere, ranging from debates about Islam, violence, and tolerance in the ages of the Reformation and Enlightenment in Europe to debates about the treatment of Native Americans, religious freedom, and slavery in the Americas.

What is said here could most probably be said, with slight variations, about other religions as well and seems, in this respect, to verge on a platitude. However, the following remarks are not only directed against the “over-Islamization of Islam” (Al-Azmeh 1996), but also against a fetishism of geography and a one-dimensional understanding of spatialized—national, regional, cultural, or religious—entities. They speak back to the “epistemic violence” (Spivak 1993, 76) represented by “the remotely orchestrated, far-flung, and heterogeneous project” (ibid.) that constitutes the colonial subject as the Other and obliterates the trace of this Other. Following the anthropologist and historian Fernando Coronil (1996, 57), the overall aim of this chapter is to challenge

conceptions of the world, which (1) separate the world’s components into bounded units; (2) disaggregate their relational histories; (3) turn difference into hierarchy; (4) naturalize these representations; and thus (5) intervene, however unwittingly, in the reproduction of existing asymmetrical power relations.

In this respect, the following considerations underline both the multi-religious experiences in Islamic contexts and the continuing presence of things Islamic in the European imaginary. Moreover, this chapter puts the existence of shared sacred places under Muslim rule–and the controversial discussion about this phenomenon (Hasluck 1929; Hayden 2002; Bowman 2012; Couroucli 2012; Weltecke 2012)²—in a wider frame. By underlining differing spatial practices in multi-religious landscapes, I further challenge the trope of a violent Islam inimical of the religious Other. Instead, the history of Islam will be described as a continuous negotiation with religious diversity that was linked to inclusivist as well as exclusivist practices from its very beginning.³ The opposing practices can be better understood against the background of cross-connections, interdependencies, and shifting power relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in various places. 218

Where and What is Muslim Space?

In academic discourse, three different yet inter-related categories to locate Muslims in space can be distinguished. Firstly, (pseudo-)geographical terms like “Orient,” “North Africa,” “Middle East,” “Central Asia,” or “Southeast Asia” are often used to outline some of the “central” lands in which Islam has spread since its beginning and in subsequent centuries. Secondly, cultural-religious terms like “Islamic” and “Islamicate” civilization or “Muslim (Ottoman, Mughal) empire” are meant to designate the unity of Muslims, sometimes in far-flung lands, either in an idealistic sense (comparable to Muslim expressions like umma or dār al-islām) or in a political sense (like in the case of Indian Muslims’ support for the Ottoman caliphate in the early twentieth century). Thirdly, different “trans-” perspectives—from “trans-local” to “trans-national” and “trans-regional” to “trans-cultural”—highlight Muslims’ connections across boundaries. This last approach is a result of a growing unease with conventional area studies—an unease scholars in various fields have felt in the wake of globalisation and at the end of the Cold War since the 1990s (Mielke and Hornidge 2014). Whereas conventional Area Studies focused on fixed physical or cultural territories, demarcated by clear political or cultural borders, a “post-Area Studies perspective” questions these boundaries and understands spatiality not as a given but as shaped and re-shaped by human experience, action, and imagination. It looks at the transgression of boundaries, processes of entanglement, and the negotiation of space as well as at various forms of mobility, dynamism, and at networks (ibid., 18f.).

Each of these designations of Muslim space has its blind spots. Geographical and cultural-religious ascriptions designate space as a rather stable entity, mostly ignoring the contingency of the underlying terminology. The “trans-” perspectives, in contrast, focus on interconnectedness and “contact zones” (Pratt 1991) and tend to dissolve complex social, religious, economic, and political structures into channels, routes, and networks through which people, goods, and ideas flow, without being able to say much about the specific nature of the social structures behind these flows.

Geographical terms suffer the most from the limitations of a container perspective on space. They describe geological, economic, cultural, or religious characteristics of the areas under study as if they explained the existence of Muslims in these areas. In a recent handbook article, Escher (2016) deals with the “geography of the Islamic space,” yet largely focuses on 28 countries of the MENACA region (Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia) and their characteristic, “semi-arid” features. As this region comprises only half of all Muslims worldwide, he is well aware that the “Islamic space” could (or should?) also include Southeast Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa (ibid., 12, 17). However, these regions, as well as the existence of Muslims in Europe and America, are dealt 219 with in separate chapters of the same handbook. This arrangement implicitly treats the MENACA region as the primordial Muslim space, whereas all other regions are only marked by the presence of Islam and Muslims “in” them, meaning that they obviously do not represent inherently Islamic spaces. The focus on an “Islamic geography” in the MENACA region allows elucidating some common features with regard to agriculture, nomadism, urban development, water policy, and “problematic natural resources,” such as oil and gas (Escher 2016, 18–33); yet it necessarily remains unclear how the socio-economic features of this Islamic space can explain “the socio-political dynamics” (ibid., 33–40) and a “geography of violence” (ibid., 37–40) in this Islamic space. It seems questionable how the identified elements of and in the Islamic space are connected with each other, in how far these elements are historically connected to the emergence of Islam and its development, and how closely geography and religion are generally interrelated. Singling out 28 countries because of an arbitrary criterion—the historical depth of Muslim presence and the high Muslim percentage in the present—neither explains the presumed “Islamic” character of this area nor the spread of Islam beyond this area with its presumably characteristic features, from the existence of Tatars in Poland and the Baltic region for 500 years (e.g. Svanberg/Westerlund 2016) to the conversion of indigenous peoples in Australia and New Zeeland in more recent times (Onnudottir et al. 2012).

Even with regard to the MENACA category, the question arises which countries should be placed inside the category. Why is Pakistan included, but India—with numerically nearly as many Muslims as Pakistan—excluded? Why is the predominance of Muslims a criterion while Indonesia, the country with the most Muslims worldwide, is not part of the region? Why does Northern Africa belong to a region extending to Fergana Valley and is set apart from the rest of Africa while nearly half of the latter’s population is Muslim? This separation proves that Islam in Africa is still perceived as being “rather peripheric” although “Muslims in Sub-Saharian Africa form one of the largest bodies of Islam worldwide, second only to the Indian subcontinent” (Loimeier 2009, 287). The MENACA category also suggests that Islamic space and the MENACA area as a whole are somehow synonymous, in spite of various religious minorities, such as Christians of Eastern and Western denominations, Jews, Zoroastrians, Bahāʾīs, or Yezīdīs.

To be sure, MENACA is not only an acronym used by scholars, but also by the United Nations (Escher 2016, 12; United Nations 2018). The five UN regional offices include and exclude Arab and Muslim countries in a somewhat arbitrary manner. The Economic and Social Commission for West Asia (ESCWA) encompasses 18 Arab countries in Asia and North Africa, but not Algeria, Morocco, Mauretania, Sudan, Djibouti, and the Comoros, all of which are members of the Arab League. These six states are part of the regional 220 office of the African group (ECA), which also includes the other three Arabic states of North Africa (Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt). Turkey and Iran are part of the regional office for Asia and the Pacific region (ESCAP), which also includes the Central Asian and South Asian states with substantial Muslim populations and extends from Russia over China to New Zeeland. Israel is neither part of “West Asia” nor of “Asia and the Pacific”, but is treated as part of the regional office for Europe (ECE), which also includes Central Asia (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan). The only regional office that does not include any Muslim-majority state is the one for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC).⁴

This allocation of contemporary Muslim-majority societies to different regions is far from clearly defined. Moreover, in the MENACA acronym lurks the pseudo-geographical term “Middle East” that brings with it a package of political, cultural, religious, and historical assumptions (see the discussion in Bonine et al. 2011). While other fields in academia are designated with more neutral terms, pertaining to continents—e.g. African or South Asian Studies—, this has not happened with “Middle East” studies, whose region is said to lay somewhere in between. The terminology remains a mirror of European interests and a relic of Euro-centric nomenclature (Khalidi 1998, 74). While its boundaries are unclear, a relation to Islam is suggested but not clearly expressed. Following Davison’s (1960) recommendation to make the “damage-limiting best” (Green 2014, 562) out of this category, Green (2014, 557) has pointed at the possibility that scholars might agree on arbitrary limits of the “Middle East” and redefine the category “for each and every analysis”. For the similar term “Near East”—a term mainly used in French and German—an “epistemological crisis” (Reinkowski 2017) has been diagnosed, especially with the mass migration over the Mediterranean Sea following the Arab revolts in 2011. The region has come too close to many Europeans, since “near” originally meant close enough for Europeans to reach it, but far enough away from “them”.

With regard to the formerly very prominent notion of the “Orient,” the same problem of imprecision holds true, since the region has been perceived just as small as the “Near East,” or as a synonym for Asia, or as including parts of Africa. Edward Said pointed out in the late 1970s already that the production of images of the “Orient”— by connecting it to Islam, Arabs, violence, and promiscuity—was a “Western style for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient” (Said 1978, 3). Astonishingly enough, his—for the most part valid—critique, concerned with the de/ construction of the binary of Orient and Occident as it was, did not breathe a word 221 about the Ottoman Empire and its ambivalent position beyond this binary (Bryce 2013). For centuries, the Ottomans were present in Europe, had a vast number of Christian subjects, and could hardly be subsumed under the category of the “Orient,” although they were certainly depicted as the “Other” in European discourses throughout the centuries (Konrad 2011). Thus, Said avoided making sense of the fact that the Ottoman Empire was deeply involved in the power game of European states for centuries and represented a third entity, situated beyond the simple dichotomies of Orient and Occident, Islam and Christianity.

With this example, we have come to the second category, cultural geography. It is controversial whether and for what epoch we can speak of a distinct Muslim, Islamic, or Islamicate civilization. Aydin (2017) has recently pointed out that the idea of the “Muslim world” was only coined in the nineteenth century by European colonialists and then adopted by Muslim elites to counter racism against Muslims. From the seventh to eighteenth centuries, the idea of Muslim solidarity practically proved “politically impotent” (Aydin 2017, 15), since the Muslim political experience was characterized by “multiplicity, contestation, and change, leaving the idea of the Muslim world to emerge later, alongside the later civilizational narrative of the West” (ibid.). In contrast to this argument, Ahmed (2016) tried to show that Islam in “the Balkans-to-Bengal complex” (ibid., 74) can be conceptualized as “the co-herence of contradictory norms in the lived ‘religious’ reality of Muslims” (ibid., 46; emphasis in the original). Thus, the differing ideas that Muslims expressed in philosophy, Sufism, poetry, art, and the celebration of wine consummation seemed to stand in stark contrast to Qurʾānic and Sharīʿa prescriptions. That Ahmed takes “the unity in diversity” of the Islamic worldview and experience as his starting point makes it rather challenging to come up with a precise definition of Islam, yet he remarks that contradictory ideas and norms were a commonplace phenomenon in Islam from 1350 to 1850. For him, this “Balkans-to-Bengal paradigm” marks “demographically, spatially, and temporally an (if not the) historically major paradigm of Islam” (ibid., 82; emphasis in original) before the European encroachment into Islamic lands in the nineteenth century. In a similar way, Abu-Lughod (1989) already spoke of a “world system” prior to European hegemony for the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries; in Lapidus’s (1989) view, a “world system” of Muslim societies existed up to eighteenth century.

The attempt to determine an Islamic space and underline its historical importance is directly inter-connected with the much-debated question of where Islam stands in relation to world history (Abu-Lughod 1989; Lapidus 1989; Eaton 1993; Hodgson 1993; Voll 1994; Clarence-Smith 2007): How does Islam relate to the emergence of the modern world system? Can it be seen as a “world civilization” in its own right? When was it integrated into the European hegemonic global system, developing at some 222 point after 1500? Reichmuth (2000), discussing the different approaches, shows how this debate is related to other theories and grand narratives, from Hodgson (1974) to Wallerstein (1980–1989) and Braudel (1979/80) to Frank (1998). These authors hold completely different views about Islam. Hodgson understands the Islamicate world as key mediator between Asia and Europe, Antiquity and Modernity; Wallerstein does not treat Islam as a socially, economically, or politically important unity; Braudel partially integrates Islam into his narrative in an ambivalent manner; and Frank subsumes Islam under the category of an Asian age in world history/economy. Therefore, Reichmuth (2000, 81f.) is sceptical whether it is adequate to speak of different interacting “world systems” and of a special “Islamic world system” in a cultural and economic sense. He remarks that Muslims’ economic activities, at least since the seventeenth century, were too much entangled with South Asian and European spaces to make the expression of a coherent Islamic world economy meaningful. Even expanding religious networks, spanning several regions, are no indication for a cultural, discursive Islamic world system. Rather, giving up on the idea of a coherent system leaves room for multiple and contradictory relations, according to Reichmuth (ibid., 82).

Like the geo-political nomenclature, the geo-cultural terminology, which tries to ascribe a cultural (and economic) sphere to Muslim activities, suffers from the deficiencies of the container perspective. The cultural boundaries of a term like “Islamic civilization” are as unclear as the geo-political boundaries of the “Middle East.” Not only does it homogenize cultural-religious internal differences when it calls a civilization “Islamic.” It also has little to say about Muslim minorities with possibly different traditions outside of Muslim empires or Muslim-majority societies. From a cultural perspective, Muslims in peripheral Islamic areas in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas dwell in the “wrong” places, similar to Muslims outside out of the geo-politically constructed MENACA region. In what sense are these Muslim minorities— such as the Moors in Sri Lanka, the Rohingya in Myanmar, or the Cham in Cambodia— part of “Islamic civilization” and not also, or even more so, of South Asian cultures? Is it not impossible to understand diverse local traditions from an exclusive Islamic point of view, such as the approximately 300-year-long tradition of women’s mosques (qingzhen nusi) and their female religious leaders (nu ahong) among the Chinese Hui (Jaschok and Jingjun 2000), or the zār-cult in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt, or the bori-spirit possession cult in Hausaland, and the East African pepo-cult (Loimeier 2013, 33)? A way out of this impasse seems to be the terminology of the “world of Islam” or an “Islamic world,” which is, for example, used in the possibly most comprehensive encyclopaedia about Muslims around the globe to date (Esposito 2009). In its claim to be comprehensive, it includes entries even about the tiniest Muslim minorities. However, the problem that arises from this perspective is that the “Islamic world” corresponds to the globe. Not 223 only do Muslim-majority societies make up the ‘Islamic world’, but Muslim minorities in secular societies or regions with different hegemonic cultural or religious traditions are also part of it. In what sense can these diverse spaces be subsumed under the heading of an “Islamic world”?

A different way of looking at blurry, porous boundaries are trans-national, trans-regional, trans-cultural, and trans-local perspectives that are interested in migration, mobility, and the interconnectedness of political, economic, cultural, and religious phenomena (Budde et al. 2006; Welsch 2017; Freitag and von Oppen 2010; Mielke and Hornidge 2014). In these approaches, spaces such as the Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Black Sea, the Silk Roads (Frankopan 2015), and the trans-Saharan trade routes have drawn new scholarly attention in recent years because they are placed at the crossroads of continents, “civilizations,” and religions. Green (2014) has proposed to “disaggregate and enlarge” the Middle East into three intersecting arenas: a Mediterranean arena, an inner Asian arena, and an Indian Ocean arena. Although these arenas also run the risk of being reduced to a container understanding of space, the new scholarship indulges in them to highlight forms of exchange across boundaries. Already in the monumental work on the Geniza documents, Goitein (1967–1988) portrayed Jewish communities of the Arab world as an integral part of a “Mediterranean Society.” Putting Islam at centre stage also helps to explain how, under Muslim rule, technological toolkits from the Romans, Persians, Indians, and Chinese—such as water management, writing and book technology, as well as mathematical expertise—were acquired and refined, and helped to bring about (European) modernity. The ensuing decline of the formerly dynamic region between 1500 and 1800 is then explained not by drawing on cultural (Islamic) factors but from an “ecohistorical perspective,” which underlines the limitations in man power and natural resources compared to other regions of Eurasia (Burke III 2009 and 2012).

The interconnectedness of various spaces can be put to work in different ways. Regarding the Mediterranean region, some scholars underline its distinctiveness and connectivity for more than two millennia or since pre-history (Horden and Purcell 2000; Abulafia 2011); others stress the multi-directionality of migrations from and to different shores and rather speak of “Mediterraneans” (Clancy-Smith 2010); some question whether there is a distinct and coherent history of the Mediterranean and rather argue for a “coherent eastern Mediterranean world” (Holmes 2012, 13f., 23–25); still others focus on the mutual impact between the French Revolution, the Ottomans, and the southern rim of the Mediterranean basin (Lorcin and Shepard 2016, Firges 2017). Similarly, a focus on the Indian Ocean tries to capture the trans-local, multi-directional flows of people, goods, and ideas around the rim of the ocean and place them in Islamic as well as global history (Conermann 1998; Deutsch and Reinwald 2002; Freitag 2003; 224 Freitag and von Oppen 2010). This approach can also be applied to Ottoman relations to South Africa (Kavas 2007) or to Islamic transatlantic contexts in Brazil and South Africa (Gebauer and Husseini de Araújo 2012). Focussing on techniques of mobilisation or on network analysis can further help to explain the different ways in which political Shiism has recently spread in Cambodia and Venezuela (Bruckmayr 2018), how actors create “transnational Shia communal spaces” and networks in London (Scharbrodt 2018), how Salafism was located among the Oromo Muslims of Ethiopia (Østebø 2012), and why the recruitment of the self-proclaimed “Islamic State in Iraq and Syria” has been rather successful in Trinidad (Graham-Harrison and Surtees 2018).

What transpires from the three—geographical, cultural-economic, and trans-regional—perspectives is that a “Muslim world” is envisioned by academic researchers with different agendas. The mutability of geographical models not only reveals the varying interconnections of the same spaces; it also shows that different spatial models “suit different questions and methodologies, not to mention different periods” (Green 2014, 557). The geo-political construction of Muslim space can easily exclude half of all Muslims and locate them somewhere in an ill-defined outside. A cultural geography that is concerned with locating bygone Islamic civilizations can similarly fall short of taking into account the experiences of Muslims beyond the borders of former empires and locate them in ill-defined diasporas. It further has little sense for the facts that (1) “Islamic civilization was a big house” (Sharkey 2017, 16), produced “not only by and for Muslims” (ibid.) but also by non-Muslims, (2) that “Muslim, Christian, and Jewish populations in the Middle East historically exhibited considerable internal diversity” (ibid.), and (3) that Middle Eastern societies were never monolithic and static (ibid., 17). Trans-regional and trans-cultural perspectives that are more interested in the interconnectedness of places and peoples than in carving out a distinct Muslim space implicitly tend to make the “in between” position of Islam their raison d’être. These kinds of studies can foster forms of fragmentation with regard to Islam. When Islam is seen as entangled in trans-local/national/regional contacts, the container of a Muslim space is dissolved into contact zones; yet these zones appear to be rather exceptional in relation to a traditional understanding of Islam. For example, the historiography of the Ottoman Empire already suffers from a fragmentary character along regional, national, ethnical, tribal, or epochal lines and faces “difficulties in bringing together the work of historians from different local realities” (Lafi 2014, 246). Therefore, the long history of the Ottoman Empire, with its European and extra-European parts, finds different expressions in national, comparative, and global historiographies; its integration into the periodization and research interests of European historiography poses a challenge that is far from solved (Helmedach et al. 2013). 225

It is not the intention of the preceding discussion to proclaim the relativity of space according to differing agendas. Rather, the aim is to underline the relational nature of spaces that are termed as “Muslim spaces.” Islamic communities in Western cities are not only incorporated in a changing material and sociological landscape; they are also grounded in trans-local and trans-national connections and reflect personal as well as gendered experiences, all of which produce changing modes of visibility, othering, resistance, adaption, and self-perception (Bendixsen 2013). In a mobile world, religious and confessional identities “cannot be taken as a deep-rooted social reality but as having been actively produced, and reproduced in an on-going process” (Peleikis 2001, 400). Migration can directly affect and change the ritual practices, performance, and embodiment of religious identities (Langer et al. 2005). The re-negotiation of religious identities can take place “on a translocal and transnational scale in the interaction between local, regional, and national actors” (Peleikis 2001, 400), thus between processes that tend towards a “territorialisation of identities” in the home country and a “de-territorialised social space” that binds a physically dispersed community together, as Peleikis (2001) shows with regard to groups from multi-confessional Lebanon. This paradox effect is also visible in the heterogeneous Shiite communities in Germany, “highly diversified in terms of their linguistic, national and ethnic backgrounds and ritual practice” (Langer and Weineck 2017, 216), as they show considerable differences in the representation and reproduction of their faith (ibid.). The argument, developed from here in the rest of this paper is that a topology of Islam must grasp this dynamism and diversity, which means that the sense of what it means to ascribe “Islamicity” to a community and its location is subject to ongoing negotiations between its members as well as other Muslims and non-Muslims.

Towards a Multi-Religious Topology of Islam

The attempt to carve out the multi-religious topology of Islam rests on the idea that religious diversity has a direct imprint on spatial practices and vice versa. The following description connects the multi-religious dynamism that is visible in (changing) Muslim practices, norms, and institutions with historical inter-religious encounters and mutual perceptions as well as with non-Muslim discursive uses of Islam, the European knowledge production and transcultural circulation of ideas about Islam. The term “topology” describes this relational understanding of space and differs fundamentally from “topography,” in the sense that the latter represents a mere physical location (Günzel 2017, 110–140). Topography rests on a container understanding of space, according to which two objects cannot be in the same place at the same moment; with 226 this view, places or people residing in them can also be ascribed a singular identity of cultural, national, or religious provenience. In contrast, the topology of a location can change over time because of its relational and dynamical nature, even if its topography stays the same. For example, the perception of the same place changes in times of war and of peace (ibid., 127). In the same way, different perspectives and practices are connected with places and spaces shared by members of different faiths. Perspectivity and spatiality also apply to institutions that facilitate religious encounters and boundary-drawing. Thus, the institution of the dhimma, a contract of protection (and submission) of non-Muslims under Islamic law, went hand in hand with differing practices, depending on time and place; historically applied to a growing number of religious groups, it could even include simultaneous forms of tolerance and intolerance (Noth 1978). The same ambivalence holds true for the treatment of non-Muslim groups under the so-called Ottoman millet system, which was far from a comprehensive system prior to the eighteenth century (Masters 2001), but became increasingly differentiated in the nineteenth century and encompassed seventeen different confessions prior to World War I (Pink 2016, 495). Instead of focusing on the “status” of dhimmī minorities under Muslim rule, an alternative view is to trace the non-Muslim “responses” to Muslim rule, which opens up a “matrix of interfaith relationships” (Simonsohn 2017, 362). As soon as non-Muslims responded in favour of the possibility of participating in Islamic institutions, they blurred traditional communal boundaries and triggered a spectrum of further “responses from various parts within non-Muslim communities” (ibid., 363) but also Muslim reactions. Regarding the question of how the “Ottomanization” of newly conquered lands worked, Hadjikyriacou (2016a; 2016b) suggests focusing on multi-layered encounters in “contact zones” (Pratt 1991) and leaving behind state-centric approaches as well as the periphery-centre binary. The case of Cyprus from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries reveals that—while there was “no inhibition about empowering non-Muslim locals” (Hadjikyriacou 2016a, 250)—the rise and fall of individual actors of Christian background was characterized by fluid confessional boundaries as well as inter-Christian conflicts, but also, more generally, by social dynamism as well political instability (Hadjikyriacou 2016a; 2016b).

A focus on multi-religious dynamism also helps to grasp the mutual perceptions that circulated between Muslims, unconventional Muslims, and non-Muslims. In this respect, it is necessary to think together the “internal” diversity of Islam and the “external” religious diversity in an Islamic environment, which seems to be rather challenging for scholars of religious and Islamic studies; they often take refuge in the problematic concepts of “orthodoxy and heterodoxy”⁵ (e.g. Langer and Simon 2008; 227 Dressler 2010). On the one hand, tropes from different religious traditions often appear to be intermingled and integrated into one communicative unity, which does not allow clearly distinguishing between Jewish, Christian, and Muslim elements, especially in the studies of Qurʾān and early Islam—in spite of (later) differences.⁶ On the other hand, Sunnī, Shīʿī, and Ṣūfī expressions of Islam and its regional, popular, and legal variants⁷ are sometimes so divergent and ridden with conflict that it also seems challenging to understand them as one religious tradition—even more so if we consider highly non-conformist groups that developed in an Islamic environment, such as Alawites (Nuṣayrīs), Durūz, Yezīdīs, Ahl-e Ḥaqq, Sikhs, Bahāʾīs, and Aḥmadīs. The meaning of Islam has been permanently re-negotiated by a variety of social and religious groups, some of whom were considered Muslim by their co-religionists, while others were seen as dubious or even un-Islamic. When we start treating “Islam as an ever-changing set of arguments rather than a panoply of beliefs and practices” (Bashir 2018, 25), processes of negotiation about Islam also include decidedly non-Muslim groups who shared a common space with Muslims. As Waardenburg (2004) has shown, Muslim authors often treated Islamic sects and non-Muslim religions together in heresiographic works—with changing classifications.⁸ Terms such as milla or firqa, although used inconsistently, were applied to Muslim as well as to non-Muslim groups. In his Kitāb taʾrīkh al-Hind, al- Bīrūnī (d. 1048) not only gave a comprehensive insight into Hindu practices, folklore, cosmology, religion, and philosophy, but also compared them to existing Ṣūfī practices to make them understandable to his readers in spite of fundamental differences (ibid., 228).

Thinking about the multi-religious topology of Islam therefore involves rethinking how the very idea of Islam has been made, unmade, and remade but also materialized, manipulated, and stylized since its early years. In this respect, a main assumption is that religious flows are not unidirectional, emanating from a centre to the peripheries, but that a polycentric cartography of the sacred is shaped by pilgrims, scholars, travellers, and tourists through knowledge production, mobility, and different media. 228 The topological focus on “exchange” and “circulation” brings to the fore that practices, objects, and ideas “transform in the course of their displacement and become ‘mutable mobiles’” (van de Kamp 2016, 4). Drawing on this consideration, I suggest that there is not one Islamic form but multiple ones, and that processes of translation, addition, and appropriation “take different shapes but coexist in one particular space” (ibid., 5), especially when they come into contact with a multiplicity of other religious practices, ideas, and objects. Sketching historical examples in various settings will demonstrate how the polycentric dynamism of Islam, its expansion in space, and its encounter with various “Others” are inter-connected.

The history of the expansion of Islam is marked by attacks, retreats, losses, and re-conquests as well as by movements of religious renewal that emerged from different places and involved different tribal, ethnic, and religious groups. Although the emerging multi-religious topology of Islam marked the co-existence of a vast variety of religious “Others,” it did not necessarily equate with a particular Muslim tolerance for the plurality of understandings of Islam or for a pluralist society, as already mentioned. A peculiar story tells how Muslim pressure forced the so-called “pagans” of Ḥarrān—a strategically important town⁹ close to today’s Şanlıurfa, on the border between Turkey and Syria–to become “people of the book” (ahl al-kitāb).¹⁰ According to a Muslim source, caliph Maʾmūn (ruled 813–833) tried to force the Ḥarrānians to convert to Islam or at least adhere to a book religion. Under this pressure, they claimed to be “Ṣābiʾūn,” a name of unclear origins for an undetermined group that was mentioned in the Qurʾān (2:62, 5:69; 22:17) alongside Jews and Christians as “believers” and that, therefore, had the right to be treated as “people of the book.” Although it is unclear whether the story is true or whether Ṣābiʾūn had already lived in the region prior to the reported event (Green 1992, 106), reading the source suggests two points: First, the boundaries between what was termed “paganism” and “religion” were fluid at that time. Second, acceptable religiosity was created by an interaction between a Muslim ruler’s demand and the non-Muslims’ smart response.

Historically, non-Arabs did not become Muslims overnight after the Arab conquests of the early centuries, and when they converted, they were obliged to enter into a relationship with an Arab patron and remained second-class Muslims (Crone 1991). For quite some time, a rather tiny ruling Muslim minority was confronted with a non-Muslim majority in the lands under Muslim control. From the sparse data available, Bulliet 229 (1979) has concluded, based on a statistical evaluation of biographical dictionaries, that conversions might have taken place in different regions with different speed and that it sometimes may have taken several centuries before the population in the conquered lands adopted Islam. Given this approach, roughly half of the population in Egypt might have considered themselves Muslims 300 years after the Muslims’ conquest, while by the thirteenth century, the share may have risen to 90 percent (ibid., 92–113). Kafadar (1995, 76) describes the people of Anatolia and South Eastern Europe up to the fifteenth century as “metadox”—“a state of being beyond doxies, a combination of being dox-naïve and not being doxy-minded, as well as the absence of a state that was interested in rigorously defining and strictly enforcing an orthodoxy.” Individual Jewish and Christian subjects of Muslim empires were able to hold high ranks in the administrations in several instances; although they were excluded from the military service,¹¹ they could pursue their interests in trade, money lending, medicine, the sciences, and arts and craft, often without restrictions and alongside Muslims (Pink 2016, 493).

Irrespective of the sack of Baghdad (1258), the Mongols’ conquests helped to spread Islam to new spaces between China, Central Asia, India, and today’s Russia and Poland. The Mongols’ advance produced a common space of interaction, imagination, and destruction and intensified the trans-regional traffic of goods, travellers, and refugees, also creating “a single disease zone” (Jackson 2017, 382; 405-408) which caused the spread of the Black Death between China and Europe in the mid-fourteenth century. Chingis Khan (d. 1227), recognizing “the disruptive potential of competing religions,” decreed absolute religious freedom—“probably the first law of its kind anywhere in the world”—and exempted religious institutions from taxation (Weatherford 2004, 69). The conversion of Ghazan Khan in 1295 and other Ilkhanite rulers to Islam without privileging their new faith¹² had repercussions on Muslims within and beyond the Mongolian empires and changed the organization of things Islamic in a political, social, cultural, and religious sense (Jackson 2017).

In the Ottoman Empire, Christians could be long-distance merchants, slaves, subjects, or vassals, and their respective social positions were based on a complex mosaic of regulations throughout the centuries. The privileged, extraterritorial status 230 of European merchants was regulated by so-called Capitulations, bilateral agreements between the Ottoman Empire and its European counterparts; such agreements, through which European merchants fell under foreign jurisdiction and evaded local taxes, were signed with the republics of Genova, Venice, Florence, and Naples as early as the fourteenth century, and later also with France, England, and the Dutch Republic; they remained in place until the twentieth century (Schölch 1975). On the other hand, Christians, caught in enemy territories or on the peripheries of the empire, were enslaved and served in many sectors of Ottoman society. According to Zilfi (2009, 531), slaves and former slaves made up a fifth of Istanbul’s population in the sixteenth century, when Istanbul was the largest city in Europe and West Asia. As slave-ownership was associated with high social status, non-Muslims were discouraged from holding slaves, yet Christian and Jewish slave owners could be found “well into the 19th century” (ibid.). Christian boys from lands under Ottoman rule were taken from their families through devşirme (the child levy system) until the early eighteenth century; they were taught the Ottoman language and culture, converted to Islam, and trained as Janissaries (yeni çeri, “new soldiers”), which were established in the 1380s and existed until 1826 (see Ágoston 2009). As the elite corps of the sultans, or kapıkulu (“slaves of the Porte”), they enjoyed many privileges, were paid for their service, and could acquire a prominent status in administration and society; since the seventeenth century, they were also allowed to engage in trade and craftsmanship. Muslims and Turks were initially excluded from devşirme to avoid the development of a hereditary military aristocracy—a practice which only changed in the seventeenth century (ibid.). Enslaved girls and women of Christian and Jewish faith and of different ethnic origins also formed a continuous part of the sultans’ harem; many of them also gave birth to children. As sultan’s mother (wālidat sulṭān), they not only enjoyed authority inside the Imperial Harem, but also seized political power, especially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Peirce 1993).¹³ Non-Muslim European visitors found the porous boundaries between the free and the enslaved as well as the social mobility of slaves “most striking and foreign to the aristocratic governance of their own countries” (Zilfi 2009, 532). At the same time, Christian rulers from Europe could be Ottoman allies, 231 vassals, or enemies, just as other Muslim rulers could be considered opponents, rivals, or allies (Gürkan 2010).¹⁴

In spite of the dhimma institution, there were recurrent cycles of pressure against and laxness regarding non-Muslims throughout the centuries. Under the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed IV (d. 1693), military conquest and religious conversion were directly linked with each other; his war strategy aimed not only at converting individual Christians and Jews, but also at Islamizing the landscape by turning churches and synagogues into mosques (Baer 2008). There were also several documented attempts to forcefully convert Jews to Islam, for example in Andalusia and the Maghreb under Almohad (al-Muwaḥḥidūn) rule¹⁵ in the twelfth century, or in Persia under Safawid rule in the seventeenth century as well as under Qajar rule in the nineteenth century (Reinkowski 2013, 88–90). Although rulers and authorities were well aware that forced conversion fostered techniques of dissimulation, they seem to have turned a blind eye and accepted them, not to mention that Jewish rabbis recommended them. Mōshe b. Maimūn, better known as Maimonides (d. 1204), pleaded for outer conversion when faced with the choice between emigration or death and emigration was impossible (Boušek 2011). In his correspondence, especially in his Epistle to Yemen (1172) in support of the Yemeni Jews, who seem to have faced persecutions at that time, Maimonides bitterly complained that the harsh treatment by the Arabs was unprecedented even in Jewish history: “Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they” (quoted ibid., 50). It is controversial whether Maimonides himself was forced, under Almohad pressure, to pronounce the shahāda (Islamic creed) before he left Andalusia for Egypt (ibid., 54–59), where he was appointed by the Ayyubids as the nagid (religious leader) of the Jewish community. Two Arabic sources even tell the story that he was accused of apostasy (ridda) by a jurist in Egypt who had known him as a Muslim in Andalusia; according to the sources, the charge was dismissed by the judge at the Ayyubid court on the basis that a forced conversion was invalid and could therefore not fulfil the criteria of apostasy (ibid., 58f.).

With regard to the Christians of European regions, Muslim perceptions since the seventh century followed neither a single pattern of superiority and hostility nor a 232 terminological consensus about the names, titles, toponyms, and ethnonyms applied to a broad range of peoples of the northern hemisphere (König 2010; Bennison 2007, 165–173). While the Qurʾān already used an intricate terminology for Christians, further inconsistencies resulted from the complex practical relations with various Christian groups. In spite of numerous refutations of Christianity by Muslim theologians, a combined religious and geographical definition of “Latin Christianity” as an entity in its own right “does not seem to have existed” (König 2010, 32) until early modern times. Different sources classified the pope as “the damned one,” the “caliph of the Franks,” or the “friend of kings and sultans” (ibid., 39). This inconsistency attests to the fact “that Muslim scholars were not in agreement on how to classify an institution whose activities had never been confined to the European continent” (ibid., 42). Apart from this, the land-conquering Umayyad and ʿAbbasid rulers viewed themselves as heirs of previous civilizations, including Greece, Rome, Byzantium, and Persia, and therefore had no qualms about incorporating their predecessors’ knowledge and techniques into their own administration (e.g. Ḥusayn 2012; Kaplony 2016). Some Ottoman sultans “aspired to and perhaps even believed themselves to be Roman Caesars, Kayser-i Rum" (Gürkan 2010, 15). The conqueror of Constantinople, Mehmed II (d. 1481), considered himself the”true heir to the Roman throne" and “did not hesitate to consider the propaganda that linked the Ottoman and the Komnenos dynasties” (ibid.). He understood himself as “the Islamic fulfiller” of Roman imperial power rather than its destroyer, “curious about and responsive to Italian and wider European culture” (Abulafia 2012, 291).¹⁶

As early as the eighth century CE, the Umayyads conquering Andalusia laid claim to Roman heritage; some of them even claimed descent from the Visigoths (Bennison 2007, 162). According to the sources, there seems to be evidence of “agreements and alliances between Muslim commanders and Visigothic notables” (ibid.) during the early conquest of Spain, which was accompanied by cases of intermarriage. The symbiosis between Visigothic and Umayyad styles was not only expressed in the adaption of local customs, but also in architecture and urban planning (ibid., 164f.). This kind of co-operation on several levels stands in contrast to the myth of the reconquista, which began to emerge as early as the ninth century at the Asturian court (ibid., 161). With regard to Christian slaves and captives from the North, a common ethnic term for men was saqlabī (“Slav”), while women were often called rūmiyya (“Christian”) in Andalusia. In reality, both men and women could hail from anywhere between the domains of the Carolingians and the Volga, since there existed various commercial routes with 233 merchants of diverse religious and ethnic background involved (ibid., 172). The majority of captured women seems to have come from northern Iberia and entered elite households as wives, concubines, and domestic servants, and continued on speaking their native languages. Because of this, the Muslim elite even feared that romance was ousting Arabic in the families, since “the majority of the mothers of amirs and caliphs were of northern origin” (ibid., 173); paradoxically, Christians in Andalusia were, at the same time, concerned that the spread of Arabic as a literary, scientific, and public language would replace Latin.

A peculiar case of entanglement between Muslims and the local population is the Arab, or possibly Berber, outpost called “Fraxinetum” in Latin sources (arab. Farakhshanīṭ) that existed between the end of the ninth and the end of tenth centuries in the Provence near today’s St. Tropez (Versteegh 1990; Vogel 2016), independent or semi-independent from Cordoba.¹⁷ The sources attest that after their defeat, not all of the “Saracens” were killed, but some of them stayed in the region and converted (Versteegh 1990; Vogel 2016). Fraxinetum represents an early example of a landscape in which a multiplicity of actors with different identities, loyalties, and interests interacted. Like Fraxinetum, Andalusia as well as the Umayyad, ʿAbbāsid, and Fatimid empires in the Eastern Mediterranean were connected with northern Europe via trade routes through which slaves (ṣaqāliba) from Middle and Eastern Europe were traded for dirhams up to the eleventh century (e.g. Jankowiak 2017). The import of goods and spices from the centers of Muslim commerce profoundly changed the emerging European economy—a transformation that was not only visible in the goods that travelled, but also in the movements of pilgrims, warriors, slaves, merchants, diplomats, and emissaries (McCormick 2001). This trans-cultural mobility across the Mediterranean found its continuation in early modern times, when European states had Muslim subjects, renegades, and allies, just as the Ottoman and North African states had Christian and European ones (see e.g. Davis 2006; Konrad 2010; Krstić 2011; Graf 2017).

For the global circuit of knowledge production about Islam, it is therefore necessary to have a look at such inter-connections between the various Muslim and non-Muslim contexts. Before I turn to this subject, let us first of all consider how three examples that seem to contradict the multi-religious topology of Islam fit into these considerations. 234 Following this, I will then examine how Muslims and non-Muslims understood and debated the position of Jews and Ṣūfīs—as “inside outsiders”—under Muslim rule. In a further step, I describe how the trope of Islam as an anti-Trinitarian Christian heresy circulated throughout history and was connected with debates about religious violence and tolerance. Then, I shed light on the European knowledge production on Arabic philosophy and Islam by way of translation work.

Conclusion

This article has tried to establish the distinction between the analytical category of Muslim space and the emergence of a trans-religious space, characterized by the circulation of ideas about Islam. In a first step, I aimed to problematize the notion of a Muslim world as a geographical, cultural, or trans-local conception in academic discourses. As a central problem in such conceptualizations, I have identified the different ways in which Islam is inscribed into space and history. My critique further tried to highlight that similar spatial mechanisms are at work when different actors and observers mark spaces—such as outer space, Europe, or the Middle East—as Islamic or un-Islamic or both at the same time. These include political and ritual practices, imagination, investment, planning, and popular use as well as scholarly debates. The scientific and legitimating use of outer space requires state investment in science. Populists who abominate the “Islamization” of Europe invest in mobilization in public space and social media. Muslim scholars who understand Europe as diaspora or a new homeland invest in institution-building and scholarly debate. Scholars of the Middle East try to convince the public as well as the academic community that the knowledge they produce about Islamic spaces is of importance.

In a second step, as a way of grasping the mutability of space and Islam, I have proposed a topological approach that leaves behind geographically or culturally defined space and focusses on the relational production of the (material, social, cultural, semiotic, economic, and political) dimensions of space. The argument was that the 253 spatial expansion of Islam led to encounters between various “Others” and ever-changing arrangements for these “Others” under Muslim rule. The lynchpin between the various historical examples on the previous pages was the idea that knowledge production about Islam created a trans-religious and transcultural space in which various imaginations of Islam came to circulate. The production of this multi-religious space is understood as the result of activities performed by Muslims and non-Muslims who perceive Islam, ascribe meaning to it, mark it, invest in it, or argue about it. This kind of approach does not look at isolated Muslim places and practices, but at human actions that constitute spatial relations and thereby a multi-religious topology of Islam. Some main reference points in this knowledge production—the position of Christians, Jews, and Ṣūfīs under Muslim rule or the anti-Trinitarian character and religious tolerance of Islam—were shared by Muslims and non-Muslims, although their meaning could strongly vary. Circulating in the global sphere over a long period of time, the notion of “Islam” has become a variegated object of global knowledge production. The continuous role that knowledge about Islam played in European debates has been at least partly forgotten or has sunken into oblivion altogether—although various actors have negotiated the idea of Islam with differing interests from the times of early Islam to the ages of Renaissance, Reformation, and Englightenment, and European colonialism to the independence of the United States.

This conception of a multi-religious space marks differences to other approaches in the studies of Islam. Although I am indebted to Shahab Ahmed (2016) and Thomas Bauer (2011) when it comes to the plural, if not contradictory, imaginations of Islam inside Muslim-majority societies, and to Cemil Aydin (2017) and Edward Said (1978) when it comes to the impact of Western perceptions of Islam especially in the nineteenth century, I detach neither Muslim negotiations of their understandings of Islam nor non-Muslim perceptions of Islam from their being situated in a cross-religious space. When Ahmed (2016) and Bauer (2011) support the idea that “contradictions” or “ambiguities” are inherent to Islam, the topological approach disagrees on three levels. Firstly, both authors do not dwell on the continuous historical transformations that can strengthen or dedifferentiate the underlying ambiguities. Secondly, they overestimate the pre-modern/modern divide that, according to them, created a modern Islam totally different from its pre-modern plural form. Thirdly, while they base the existence of Islamic contradictions/ambiguities on an intra-Islamic dynamism, they offer no place for the multi-religious diversity of Islamic landscapes—with the exception of modern Islam, whose emergence they do not explain by an intra-Islamic logic but mainly by extra- Islamic factors, such as European colonialism and modernity. Although both authors try to grasp the totality of Islam, their approaches envision a kind of uniform space; even if this space is treated as consistently contradictory, this is not fully satisfying. The 254 production and perception of space generally involves rugged, polycentric, dynamically changing, and hierarchical landscapes. Even given persistent Islamic ambiguities, it should be made visible that the practical effect of ambiguity was locally and historically differentiated, even in pre-modern times.

In a similar way, Aydin’s (2017) thesis that “the idea of the Muslim world” resulted from nineteenth-century European-Muslim encounters that made Muslim élites adopt European ideas about themselves seems somewhat one-sided. Aydin’s attempt to explain unpleasant developments of modern—violent, intolerant—understandings of Islam through the impact of Western colonialism shares with Ahmed (2016) and Bauer (2011) the ambivalent tone, since it can be read as an explanation of transcultural interconnections and power asymmetries, at best, or an exculpation, at worst.

The topological approach is also critical of the blunt rejection of “Orientalism” in the tradition of Edward Said (1978) that is premised on the spatial divide between Orient and Occident. Said dismissed the production of an imaginary Orient as a mere expression of Western domination, without considering that the production of space always incorporates boundary work and an imaginary dimension. His rejection of the Orientalist kind of image production does not acknowledge the partly positive ways in which a minority of European and American theologians, writers, scholars, and politicians engaged with Islam for various reasons (e.g. Irwin 2007), especially when trying to plead for tolerance and religious freedom. The criticism of one-sided Western image production neither recognizes circuits of knowledge production nor falsely positive, yet efficacious images of Islam.

Finally, the previous pages have shown that it has always been only a minority of non-Muslims who held a positive, or at least double-edged, view of Muḥammad, the Saracens, the Turks, or Islam. Recently, Arshad et al. (2015, 18) have once again demonstrated, by way of a long-term analysis of New York Times headlines from 1990 to 2015, that Islam and Muslims—in contrast to Christians and Jews and a multitude of other nouns—are associated with negative terms so consistently that their image is even worse than that of cancer.³⁶ From a historical point of view, the current prevalence of extremely negative tropes about Islam is no news and can be interpreted as the downside of Islam’s global circulation as a mutable mobile, aggravated by reactions to recent acts of violence perpetrated in the name of Islam and by perceptions of problems of social cohesion in democratic societies. 255

As a way of deepening the critique of one-sided—Muslim as well as non-Muslim— representations of Islam, this article has tried to underline the central place of Islam in European and global history as well as the multi-religious experiences in Islamic contexts and the cross-connection between both phenomena. It thus aimed to follow Coronil’s (1996) critique of a historical disjunction between the producers and the objects of knowledge by underlining “the relational nature of representations of human collectivities” (Coronil 1996, 56). By treating “Islam” as a traveling, mutable mobile, my focus was not to explain that the dominance of certain imaginations and practices of Islam followed from “asymmetrical relations of power, including the power to obscure their genesis in inequality” (ibid.), since the existence of asymmetries inside and outside the territories under Muslim rule seems an obvious fact. Rather, my interest was to show that production—as well as dissemination, consumption, negotiation, destruction, and oblivion—of various imaginations of Islam created a global space. Thus, this article hopefully contributed to Coronil’s critique of a historiography that presents “as the internal and separate attributes of bounded entities what are in fact historical outcomes of connected peoples” (ibid.). In this sense, the emergence of “Europe” and “Islam” as separate and antagonistic entities can also be seen as the effect not only of interrelations, but also of the circulation of ideas in a common space of knowledge production.

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