The differences between the Eastern and Western Churches lost significance in the face of the Turkish peril, and Europe is now described as a Christian territory.

The conquest of new regions shifted the horizon towards the Atlantic world; it coincided with the completion of the Reconquista in 1492 as an event marking a sharp rupture between European and Muslim civilizations. 'Moors' in Spain and Ottomans in the Balkans were seen to belong to a different religion, so therefore were Europe's 'others'. This reinforced European identity.

The religious schism following the Reformation epitomized a deep division and marked a crucial turning point. 'Europe' emerged during that period of upheaval as a form of self assertion, with an hypostasized Islam acting as the point of negative reference.

In this context, the 'Turkish peril' catalysed the establishment of both external and internal boundaries in Europe; in medieval travel reports and encyclopaedias Muslims were already being depicted as the devil incarnate and the Koran as a phantasmagoria of lies.5 From the middle of the fifteenth century onwards, when Latin Christendom came face to face with the militarily superior Ottomans, the knowledge being passed down became the foil against which empirical reports — and thus new knowledge about the Ottomans —were presented. In the context of the printing revolution around 1500, which created new opportunities to duplicate ideas and enabled the rapid spread of a media-propagated image of the Turks, this knowledge aggregated into an 'antagonist narrative'.

On the threshold of the eighteenth century, admiration became mixed with disdain in representations in which the Ottomans were depicted as exaggeratedly exotic and effeminate. In that century of enlightenment and science, scholars also attended to the Koran, in particular by translating it. While it is true that translators' opinions of Islam — which they always proclaimed in the introductions to their works — tended to centre on exposing a 'web of lies', at the same time efforts to approach the text with academic and scientific rigour also gained ground. In Germany, the foundations were laid for the philological analysis of the corpus of Islamic traditions. In France, the Netherlands and Britain, knowledge about the Muslim world was filtered through the experiences of colonial administrations. Edward Said's thesis of the potent link between colonial power and Orientalist constructions is of particular relevance here.

It is difficult at present, though highly desirable, to establish how these different strands of intelligence produced by litterateurs, philologists and philosophers entered the body of European knowledge that characterized the nineteenth century. The richly illustrated volume Mythen tier Nationen indicates, however, that in the course of the construction of the nation-state, Islam was assigned a precise place in the popular culture of many European countries.? It was a conflict-laden portrayal consisting primarily of a string of armed disputes, with Islam, whether in the guise of Arabs, Ottomans, Tatars or Turks, perceived 'as Europe's most dangerous and enduring enemy, as Europe's antithesis and negation'. A succession of academics who studied, over the course of the twentieth century, the corpus (now spanning more than 1000 years) of European source

texts on Muslims concluded that it was the Muslim populations at Europe's margins that were the catalyst for European self perception, and that this applied in particular to the borders of southeastern Europe, where Europe's insecure identity is still kept alive today.

The longue durée of textbook narratives

The longue durée approach is based on the long-term observation of events. In his history of the Mediterranean world, Fernand Braudel painted a unifying picture of barely perceptible changes that became describable only over a prolonged period. This method of investigation can also be applied to the collective imagination and mindset of a society. From the sociological viewpoint, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann's work on institutionalization was a locus classicus. It supported the view that the transmission of knowledge builds up into underlying conceptual strata that assume a foundational status and shape subsequent events. Like landscapes, societies and their languages also have durable structures that change slowly and that invite long-term historical enquiry. The formulation of the self as opposed to the 'other', for instance, is often an outcome of slow processes of social interactions and projections. Braudel drew attention to the narrative of the Crusades, a train of thought on both sides of the Mediterranean that became fixed through endless repetition over and beyond long periods of time until it presented the respective 'fitting' perception.

History textbooks are an interesting medium in which to examine the sedimented perceptions of a society in relation to its images of the self and the 'other'. Unlike works of literature, school textbooks are the result of political and social negotiations. They can be offered as instruments of educational change, but need to be backed by concerted political will and social consensus. Unlike novelists, authors of school textbooks do not write after their own inspiration; more often than not they continue the story of what already existed in previous textbooks as secured knowledge in accordance with political guidelines and social expectations. History textbooks can thus be viewed as a semantic reservoir in which images of former generations are layered on top of one another, prone to be repeated and recontextualized from different perspectives and with varying patterns of interpretation. In textbooks, old thoughts can unexpectedly reappear and new ideas are incorporated only slowly, generally following a thorough societal censuring process. With regard to history textbooks, the observation of the historian Reinhart Koselleck can be applied: the images of a society are like geological deposits that can be mined at any time.

European narratives on Muslims present a case in point. Three of the contributors to this book engage with the pathways and contingencies of longue durée narrations. Gerdien Jonker deals with the emergence of Protestant and Catholic narratives on Muslims in Germany between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, arguing that they were used as leverage in the confessional struggle at first, but later served to mark the border of descriptions of the self (Chapter 1). While focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, Mercè Viladrich-Grau lines up eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scholarly authors who strengthened the Catholic perspective by narrating the Iberian Muslim past. She uncovers traces of their work in history textbooks, children's poems and pedagogical theories, and reveals that stigmatizing representations of Islam and Muslims are deeply embedded in school history, both in Catalonia and the rest of Spain (Chapter 2). Marat Gibatdinov follows the translation of European texts into Russian as a starting point for the Russian Orthodox textbook narrative on Muslims. By the end of the nineteenth century, the textbooks of the Jadidi movement in Kazan had started to challenge the Orthodox view, but the 1917 revolution nonetheless adopted it. Recently, both narrations were fortified during an intense exchange between Moscow and Kazan — coined by some as a `textbook war' — on the place of Muslims in Russia (Chapter 3).

Contemporary approaches

The media revolution at the end of the twentieth century overlaid existing longue durée perceptions with a torrent of new images. Contemporary researchers are now debating whether the previous model of the 'antagonist narrative' continues to inform the selection

of new images or whether current challenges like terrorism, EU enlargement, the imposition of new EU standards and immigration are making an impact on former historical representations. Since the end of the Second World War, the cold war, changing demographics and the impending entry' of Turkey into the European Union have coloured debates on the form and content of 'Europe' and, through this, it seems, a new pattern of inclusion and exclusion is starting to emerge.

This is the context in which seven of the contributors to this volume tell their story. Luigi Cajani focuses on the historical debate in the Council of Europe to trace the changing positions of scholars between the 1950s and 2000 on the historical status and location of the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world (Chapter 4). Benoit Challand (in Chapter 5) and Antonio Brusa (in Chapter 6) look at the reappearance of old stereotypes in new Muslim populations, the former from the perspective of gendered identities as reflected in visual images in French, German and Italian contexts, and the latter from the viewpoint of popular and cultured portrayals in Italian school texts. Taking a different perspective, Adrian Brisku looks at how changes in the 'inner periphery' are narrated in Albanian texts. Declaring itself in 1973 as the world's first atheist state, communist Albania sought to define the identity of its subjects through a denial of religion, whereas in post-communist Albania, by contrast, religious diversity is acknowledged within the framework of Europeanness (Chapter 7). In another contrasting context, Mostafa Hassani-Idrissi, analysing three generations of Moroccan textbooks, discusses shifting representations of Europe brought about by policy changes in the independence, 'Islamist' and modern phases (Chapter 8).

The last two contributions, dealing with Russia and Great Britain respectively, address the latest turn of the screw. Irina Kuznetsova Morenko traces the most recent media representations of Muslims in Russia and Tatarstan following the hostage crisis in a Moscow theatre in 2002 (Chapter 9). Shiraz Thobani is concerned with constructions of the Muslim past that became inscribed in the English national curriculum in the neo-conservative 1980s and 1990s, the historiographical underpinnings of which have come under increasing interrogation since the 7 July 2005 bombings in London (Chapter 10) .

Textbook narratives of cultures and civilizations may well draw on semantic reservoirs that are centuries old, but at the same time they also seek to shape their readers' future destinies. Particularly in times of radical social shifts, the interface between past and future is subjected to conscious deliberation, when historical continuities and disjunctions are not assumed as given but explicitly questioned and scrutinized. In the present climate, we find Europe in the midst of redefining itself politically and culturally, as indeed are other regions globally, including Muslim states and societies. The story of Islam and Muslims in Europe, a story of longstanding otherness, is only one among many historical narratives of cultural negotiation across the globe calling for informed correction. How civilizational histories and cultural encounters are to be narrated in the current realignments is gaining new urgency, in the face of the increasing inadequacy of inherited paradigms of representation. Contemporary social change offers unique prospects for researchers to investigate the nature of the interplay between past constructions and future imperatives in the textual space that defines contemporary education. Seizing the moment, with this book we seek to open up an area of enquiry that has hitherto been largely neglected and that invites fresh probing.