Political Islam within Europe: A contribution to the analytical framework

‘Political Islam’ in Europe, central Asia and the Middle East, since the 1970s, has furnished evidence for the salience of ethnicity as an organizing principle for political action, and forced a number of scholars to re‐think the conceptual models regarding the relationship between ethnic and religious identities and citizenship/nationhood. Nevertheless, there is still a paucity of analytical research which can account for the way in which Islam as a global identity motivates political action. By reference to a critical discussion of current paradigms (Orientalist and Neo‐Orientalist), this paper is a first contribution towards such an analytical framework.