Framing Muslims demographically erases long histories of European Muslim presence

Evidence

Over the past decades, Muslims and Islam in Europe have increasingly been framed and approached through the specter of demographics, in which the optic of migration, always already framing Muslims as recent arrivals to Europe (thereby erasing both long-standing colonial entanglements and century old and deep-rooted Islamic presences in various parts of Europe), has been increasingly joined by an optic of birth rates. — Sarah Bracke and Luis Manuel Hernández Aguilar, “They Love Death as We Love Life”, 89

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes arguments in Edward Said and in the migration/colonialism literature, plus Nuruddin Farah’s Maps on identity and territory.