Mapping the diverse images of Islam and Muslims in educational texts as reproduced in national contexts across Europe and neighboring regions, "Narrating Islam" explores both historical perceptions and contemporary representations of Islam and Muslims as projected through instructional media. Based on interdisciplinary research, it seeks to excavate the layered images of Muslims and Islam which have been historically embedded in semantic reservoirs and which feed into the modern scripting of the 'other' in a global context. "Narrating Islam "offers a framework to critically discuss European identity through interrogating how pedagogical discourses negotiate the Muslim presence in and around Europe.

This book focuses on a wide variety of Muslim ac- tors who, in recent years, have entered into the European public sphere. Without excluding the phenomenon of terrorists, it maps the whole field of Muslim visibility. The nine contributions present unpublished ethnographic materials that have been collected between 2003 and 2005. They track down the available space that is open to Muslims in EU member states claiming a visibility of their own. The volume collects male and female, secular and religious, radical and pietistic voices of sometimes very young people. They all speak about "being a Muslim in Europe" and the meaning of "real Islam."

"Gerdien Jonker" (Ph.D.) is affiliated to the Georg-Eckert-Institute for International Textbook Analysis in Braunschweig, Germany. Her ethnographic research focuses on the Muslim minorities in the EU. Aspects of her work encompass religious history and memory, conflict and gendered communication.

"Valrie Amiraux" (Ph.D.) is a permanent senior research fellow in sociology at the CNRS (Amiens, University of Picardie). She is currently a Marie Curie fellow at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (EUI) in Florence where she is completing a book on religious discrimination of Muslim minorities in the EU.