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Islam and Contemporary European Literature

By Carool Kersten

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£24.99

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Published 31 January 2027

About this book

Examines the use of Islamic referents and themes in literary writings by European authors
  • Examines literary writings by European authors from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds
  • Covers a range of writing genres, addressing a wide variety of themes related to Islam and the Muslim world in literary texts
  • Includes authors originally writing in French, German, Spanish, Serbo-Croat and Albanian
This book uses literary texts featuring themes and references related to Islam and the Muslim world to offer new perspectives on non-Western intellectual history and contemporary European literature. Shifting from abstraction to sublimation by highlighting individualized interpretations of religion by authors from both Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds, it asks how and why present-day European authors, from Albania, France, Germany, Spain and the former Yugoslavia, write fiction or fictionalized works that engage with Islamic religious themes and Europe’s Islamic past. This thematic focus contributes to the interrogation of Eurocentric understandings of literary canons and points out ways of decolonizing the curriculum in the humanities by reading contemporary European literature through the lens of cosmopolitanism, cultural hybridity and in-betweenness.

Reviews

Islam and Contemporary European Literature is timely and needed. I think that this is an excellent book. There is no other monograph which traces the interaction of Muslim and non-Muslim literary voices, in several languages over particular forms of imagination, through a focus on individual praxis of religion and the civilisational aspects of Islam. It is extraordinary to see how Dr. Kersten has constructed a macro-analytical project which denies easy generalisations and looks with nuance at specific texts and affective entanglements.
Exciting, intelligent, and learned, Carool Kersten’s timely study guides his readers through a fascinating constellation of writers, texts, and ideas drawn from all over Europe to explore the relationship between Islam and Contemporary Literature. He demonstrates the poverty of fixed ideas about closed identities –especially in relation to religion-- along with the beauty and urgency of reckoning with porous borders, liminalities, and heterotopias through literature. As barriers are erected all over the world and the drumbeats of war grow louder, we should all, despite Kersten’s modest closing sentence, read ‘a book like this.’
Table of contents

Acknowledgements
A Note on Translation and Transliteration

Introduction: Studying Islam through Literature

1. West-Eastern Affinities
2. Double Genealogies
3. Andalusian-Islamic Footprints
4. Europe’s Ottoman Past
5. New Humanisms

Final Thoughts: Everything is Connected

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the author

Carool Kersten

Carool Kersten is Research Professor in Islamic studies at the University of Leuven in Belgium and Emeritus Reader at King’s College London. He is also a senior research associate of the Institute for Philosophical and Religious Studies at the Science and Research Centre Koper in Slovenia. Carool Kersten is the author or editor of thirteen books, including Islam and Contemporary European Literature (EUP 2025), Contemporary Thought in the Muslim World: Trends Themes, and Issues (Routledge 2019), and multi-volume anthologies on Islamic statehood and law. His research interests include the intellectual and political history of the modern Muslim world, the history of Islam in Southeast Asia, contemporary literature and travel writing.