It needs hardly be said that interest in relations between Europe and the Islamic world has undergone a dramatic increase in recent decades. One cannot keep count of the books and articles being churned out since the 1980s on two of the largest publishing bonanzas, Muslim immigration in contemporary Europe and Islam and terrorism. Writings on Muslim-European relations in the medieval and early modern eras have been less plentiful, albeit contributing importantly to slavery studies and other preoccupations of global history. Although the quantity of such scholarly production has been impressive, it clearly has not gone any distance in dispelling old negative views, especially in the face of recurring episodes of violence involving Muslims in the Middle East and the West.

The notion of a perennial and absolute confrontation between Europe—especially Western Europe—and Muslims is an enduring feature of European political and cultural discourse. The editors’ aim is not to deny the preponderant reality of violence, hostility, and mutual incomprehension in Muslim-Christian relations in Europe of the premodern era. Rather, it is to demonstrate the fault lines in that discourse, the vast differences in time and space in the nature and density of Muslims’ association with Europe. It is also to focus attention on the unacknowledged, nonconflictual presence of Muslims in Western Europe. After a comprehensive introduction by the editors, the volume comprises sixteen chapters organized under three headings: “Muslims in Europe: An Overview,” “Reconstructing the Muslim Presence: An Historiographical Attempt,” and “The Muslims through the Prism of Europe: Toward a Dynamic Reading.” An 182-page piece by coeditor Dakhlia, “Muslims in France and Great Britain in the Modern Era: The Exemplary and the Invisible,” makes up the entirety of part 2. The temporal and spatial coverage of the chapters ranges from the fifteenth century through the early nineteenth, and from Britain to Austria and Hungary, with the greatest attention on France and the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries. Sixteen pages of illustrations, most of them in color, add to the volume.

The book’s subtitle, “an invisible integration,” highlights the collection’s shared thesis, that Muslims were present, to varying degrees and in relatively integrated roles, in the central locales of Western Europe, but that the sources are either silent or garbled regarding those realities. Thankfully, the contributors unpack the ubiquitous misnomer “Turk,” the catchall Western term for Muslims of any ethnicity in the era and sometimes for all Ottoman subjects, including Christians and Jews. The very issue of who should be counted as a Muslim for the collection, and indeed, who was counted or noted in the sources themselves, poses problems that are not easily overcome. However, since the volume seeks to uncover the Muslim presence and the mechanisms by which Muslims were received in Western Europe, the attention of several authors to Muslim converts to Christianity—both voluntary and coerced—is a valuable contribution. All of the authors find evidence of Muslim merchants, diplomatic envoys, exiles, lackeys, slaves, artisans, and war captives in European urban settings, although the numbers are generally small. As the authors themselves concede, the question of representativeness remains elusive. While demonstrably thin demographics may be the reason for uncertainty in most cases—Muslim populations in Spain being the obvious exception—the rarity of Muslims or former Muslims in the sources might also result from historiographical indifference, deliberate erasure, or, in the case of Ottoman Muslims, the conflation of all Ottoman subjects into one religiously indeterminate category. Paradoxically and more speculatively, rarity might even be a function of Muslims’ or former Muslims’ integration and thus disappearance into society. In any case, the collection is a testimony to wide-ranging research, combining new investigations into histories and first-person accounts with documents from the Austrian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, British, and various Italian archives.

The collection’s fresh insights into the varieties of invisibility and their causes destabilize some of the historiographical tropes that make implacably separate realms out of the “enmeshed and coextensive” world of Muslims and Christians in Western Europe and throughout the Mediterranean. Muslim merchants were active in more European markets than previously thought, Muslim diplomatic missions from the North African regencies as well as from the Ottoman and Persian empires were more frequent and more populous than the histories suggest, and Muslim captives in the hundreds of thousands were permanent or temporary inhabitants of Western Europe. Indeed, the fate of those hundreds of thousands weighs heavily in any attempt to establish the nature and extent of the Muslim and former-Muslim presence in Europe. The scale of Muslim disappearance, invisibility, low profile, and the like would seem to call for a closer look at causation, with religious institutional factors specifically in mind. Just as in discussions of Middle Eastern interconfessional relations, Islam—as legal, moral, and institutional force—figures importantly; more localized attention to the specific role of Christianity in shaping patterns of interconfessional outcomes in different Western European settings would contribute to understanding the endurance of the separate worlds formulation.