There is a growing awareness among heritage organizations that Europe’s religious minorities have largely been absent from heritage in two ways.^[1] Firstly, although minorities have always been present and played a key role in European culture and society, their history has generally not been reflected in the most prestigious sites of national heritage. Museums, castles and cathedrals, for example, have generally focused on the dominant social groups or the majoritarian population. Secondly, many of the minority communities who now make up a large and growing part of European societies have, until recently, not taken part in the process of assigning meaning to public heritage. Several factors have coincided to raise public awareness that a change is needed. New international guidelines, such as the Faro Convention and the UNESCO Strategic development goals, have called for the democratization of heritage. Many of the central documents of the European Union state that a shared heritage is the foundation for the EU’s democratic, inclusive ambitions. For example, the Preamble to the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights (1999) states:

Conscious of its spiritual and moral heritage, the Union is founded on the indivisible, universal values of human dignity, freedom, equality and solidarity; it is based on the principles of democracy and the rule of law.^[2]

In Faro, in 2005, the Council of Europe proposed a new framework for heritage policy that shifted the focus from buildings and objects to people and their values. The Faro Convention establishes the right of all inhabitants of Europe to participate in cultural heritage. Such participation does not amount to simply engaging with pre-existing authorized heritage, but includes the active ‘identification, study, interpretation, protection, conservation and presentation of the cultural heritage’ and ‘public reflection and debate on the opportunities and challenges which the cultural heritage represents’.^[3] This makes cultural heritage a two-way street. Established heritage institutions, such as museums, now have an obligation to encourage participation of minorities and excluded communities. At the same time, these communities have a right to develop their own heritage and bring it to the awareness of the wider public. This ambition makes heritage a key domain in which Europeans can participate in democratic life, create common values and encourage civic engagement. Youth and adult education has an opportunity to contribute to this, but to date this has been given little attention.

Although educators working in grassroots organizations, museums and universities are aware of the need to make heritage inclusive, they often lack the skills and means to make this a reality. This was the finding of a needs analysis for the follow-up project to REBELAH, called MIRETAGE (European Pathways to Minority Religious Heritage: Inclusive Heritage in Adult Education), which was launched in 2023 by partners in the Netherlands, Belgium and Spain. In a discussion conducted with members of the Rotterdam-based Moslim Archief, Anissa Foukine, an art historian and museum educator specialized in Islamic art, stated that: ‘Dutch museums want to work with minority groups, but often don’t know how to reach them. If they are hosting a group, say students from an Islamic secondary school, they need to know how to make them enthusiastic and feel at home’. Inclusive ‘co-creation of heritage’ is more easily talked about than actually undertaken. According to Kashif Amin, who is active in museum outreach and anti-discrimination agencies in the Netherlands, what we require is ‘a polyphonic approach to heritage’.^[4]

Kamel Essabane, founder of the Moslim Archief, connected minority religious heritage to Europe’s reckoning with its history of slavery and colonization now taking place across the continent: ‘Many people who come from societies with their own experience of colonization are moving to the Netherlands. They feel at home in the Netherlands, but the older generation is slowly passing away and with them there is the danger that we lose the connection to the past’.^[5]

A broader problem concerns the need to motivate younger generations to engage in the preservation, active care and appreciation of heritage monuments across Europe. Without this, many local religious buildings will fall into disuse and disrepair. The solution requires interreligious dialogue and communication about the value and social function of heritage.

With these issues in mind, REBELAH and MIRETAGE sought to develop the means to teach members of minority communities in a co-creative fashion, with the aim of helping them further develop into what the Faro Convention On the Value of Cultural Heritage for Society (2005) calls ‘heritage communities’: ‘A heritage community consists of people who value specific aspects of cultural heritage which they wish, within the framework of public action, to sustain and transmit to future generations’.^[6] We took inspiration from organizations and individuals representing minority groups who have begun their own heritage projects. These projects are involved in recalling obscured histories and giving them the breath of public life through their acknowledgement as heritage, and they are doing so from above as well as from below.

One example of the pluralization of heritage ‘from above’ is the ‘Jewish Country Houses’ project, which is a collaboration between Oxford University and the National Trust in the UK. Posh manor houses made available to the public by the National Trust are the jewels in the crown of British national heritage. While highlighting the Jewish identity of some of their owners may not seem revolutionary, diversifying this core area of British national heritage fractures its implicit identification with a Christian, white gentry, which is familiar to viewers worldwide through films and televisions series, from Upstairs Downstairs to Pride and Prejudice or Downton Abbey.^[7]

The UK has also been the site of innovative grassroots heritage efforts from below. For example, Marcus Roberts developed a walking tour of the Lincoln Cathedral which leads viewers to consider negative and positive depictions of Jews in the cathedral sculptures. It thereby integrates Jews into the history of medieval England prior to their expulsion in 1290. Moreover, Roberts’ work in Lincoln connects to a larger project called ‘J-Trails’, which inserts Jewish heritage into the network of pilgrimage and tourist routes across Europe.^[8] In a parallel development, the journalist Tharik Hussain has delved into the past of South England and designed a series of Muslim Heritage Trails that allow visitors to discover Muslim built heritage in and around the town of Woking. By inscribing these sites into the national heritage map, religious minorities are given purchase on the symbolic past of the country and disrupt the notion of a single national heritage.^[9]

Heritage can also be used to foster interreligious conversations, which are very much needed, particularly where the shared use of religious buildings by different faiths is concerned. In this regard, it is necessary to consider problems that arise from religious and cultural sensibilities. For example, some congregants of Reformed Dutch churches have objected to sharing their under-utilized churches with Pentecostal or Muslim congregations, while in other countries conflicts have recently flared over buildings that have interreligious histories.^[10] Hagia Sofia, for example, which had been a site of shared Christian and Muslim cultural heritage in Istanbul, was recently redesignated a mosque by Turkish authorities. Moreover, despite Spanish celebration of the interreligious heritage of the ‘convivencia’ of Jews, Muslims and Christians in medieval Spain, the Catholic Church has resisted efforts by some Muslim activists to allow dual use of the former mosque – and now cathedral – in Cordoba.^[11]

Intercultural conversations are only possible when both sides have at least some understanding of whom they are speaking with. Yet, interviews conducted with adult education partners as part of the Miretage project found that the required cultural sensibility and knowledge are not being sufficiently taught in classrooms, nor are they present in many museum collections. Often, when minority communities do get attention, “they feel like their stories are an excursus or tucked away in limited exhibitions, reinforcing the idea that this is the heritage of the other.” Interviewees felt that “a lot of ground is to be won here by integrating the past of minority communities into the larger narrative, while imbuing projects with educational tools to encourage a better understanding of Jewish and Muslim religion and culture.” ^_[12]

While the shared religious use of historic buildings has sometimes proven problematic, the shared caring for these buildings as heritage has been less so. For example, without the help of non-Jewish volunteers, many of the historic synagogues across Europe could not remain open to the public. An analogous situation is faced by under-utilized or unused churches in immigrant neighbourhoods in European cities. As the Christian congregations there dwindle and residents with past family ties to the churches move away, who will care for the churches? A pioneering example in this regard is the collaboration between the Churches Conservation Trust and a local activist, Inayat Omarji, who is Muslim, to jointly transform the All Souls Church in Bolton into a community centre.^[13]

Heritage sites can and are being used for interreligious education. In 2020, the Groningen Historic Church Foundation inaugurated its ‘School Church’ in the town of Garmerwolde, which features an exhibit in the church tower that uses Muslim and Christian holidays as a fun way to entice school-age children into understanding these two religious cultures. The focus on holidays highlights the cultural side of immaterial religious heritage, but the makers of the exhibit did not shy away from conceptual artworks that try to provoke reflection on spiritual matters.^[14]

There is a growing consensus among heritage organizations that they should promote minority heritage, but how is this to be balanced with the need felt by many Europeans to also honour dominant religious traditions? Certainly, the notion of a shared heritage of Latin Christendom played an important role in the drive for European unity in the 1950s by an international alliance of Christian Democrats.^[15] The public power of traditional churches is still very much present today in the heritage of this past era of state churches, and it can also be seen in the religious education in schools, special broadcasts in the public media and even in the nature of our public holidays.

National courts have also generally upheld the right of public institutions to display their religious symbols – such as the crucifix – related to those churches that once enjoyed the status of being established by law, arguing that these form cultural heritage. The European Court of Human Rights has generally supported member states in these decisions.^[16] Local community identity, particularly in Southern Europe, is very often wrapped up with processions and festivals celebrating patron saints of towns and villages. Such attachments need to be taken into account when promoting more inclusive forms of heritage. If inclusive efforts do not take place in dialogue with majoritarian conceptions of heritage, they run the risk of contributing further to social polarization, given that it is already being used by right-wing populists for this purpose.

Cultural historian Willem Frijhoff has likened heritage to a buoy that anchors the present to events and places in a real historical past. Yet, as it is jostled by the waves of memory, culture and politics, heritage drifts far from its original anchorage site. In other words, heritage is constantly being constructed and is subject to competition and negotiation.^[17] This means that although critical research can uncover neglected or suppressed histories that can help minority communities create public space for their heritage or enter into the imagined ‘national’ heritage, these developments are not solely or even largely driven by the scholarly quest for more accurate understandings of historical reality. This would be to confuse the buoy with the anchorage. Thus, the reason why the diversification of heritage has become a ‘best practice’ for heritage organizations is, I would argue, not because this will provide society with a more accurate depiction of its history. Rather, it is because a diverse society requires a diverse heritage.

As the other chapters of this handbook illustrate, heritage education requires creative methods to help minority communities achieve the aims set out by the Faro Convention, which is the democratization of European heritage. The creative methods presented here and the exercises in the activity book can be utilized for teaching any of the myriad heritage communities throughout Europe, based on all sorts of identity, as well as ethnic and historical connections that bring these communities together.

However, in the following modules in this section, we focus on two minority communities that the 2018 Special Eurobarometer on Discrimination highlighted as suffering high levels of discrimination in Europe: Roma and Muslim communities. Both are native European cultures, whose heritage has been present across wide territories of the European continent for centuries. The next two modules provide some basic historical introductory information about Roma and Muslim cultural groups in Europe. We encourage trainers, or any reader of this handbook, to explore and document the past and present of any heritage community that might be of interest to them.