Jacob David Liming

The increasing prominence of Islam in Europe has been met with fervent debate on the limits of Muslim represnetation within state institutions and a reassement of the history of Europe — within official state bodies and Muslim communities themselves. Scholarsship of these debates has vacillated between advocating for the inclusion of Islamic discourse into the European public-sphere and maintaining that Islam is incommensurable with the foundations of European secular values and can only be included insofar as it challenges those secular sensibilities. In my research, I turn to the margins of Europe to investigate how Muslims in Portugal claim belonging and representation in the state by invoking resonances between secular law and Islamic jurisprudence and by recalling Portugal’s colonial and medieval imbrications with Islam. Centrally, my research looks not only to the conflicts or accommodations between the secular state and Islam, but rather how Muslims engage in a reconceptaulization of the history of Europe and its laws in registers congruous with their own practices of Islam as a discursive tradition. Specifically, my research asks how Muslim claims to belonging and representation in Portugal are generative of and grounded in debates surrounding history and memory.