Towards a Multi-Religious Topology of Islam: The Global Circulation of a Mutable Mobile

Narratives of the origins, the history, and the present state of Islam always entail spatialclaims. Accordingly, Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, spread over its so-called heartlands, andbecame a world religion. A common understanding inscribes Islam onto the Orient and opposes it toEurope, the Occident, or the West. Such spatial claims are faced with fundamental challenges andepistemological shortcomings because neither Islam nor space are naturally given, bounded entities.Rather, different historical actors and observers produce spatialized Islam. In this chapter, I challengethe notion that “Muslim space” is a useful analytical concept, and scrutinize the ways in whichacademic discourses inscribe Islam onto space and history. As an alternative, I propose a topology thatunderstands the production of space as a multi-dimensional social process, including Muslim and non-Muslim perspectives at the same time. Thus, I delineate the topology of Islam as variegated, dynamic,and multi-religious from its inception. My argument is that Islam’s trans-regional spread turned it into apolycentric, mutable mobile characterized by internal and external diversity. I further argue that imagesof Islam are an integral, yet often concealed part of European and Western knowledge production andself-understanding. Epistemologically, this perspective argues that the “Islamization of Islam” is nowherebetter visible than in the spatial ramifications of discourses that marginalize, exclude, or obfuscate boththe multi-religious experiences in Islamic contexts and the continuous presence of Islam in Europeanhistory.