The history and heritage of Islam in Europe can be traced back to the very first generation that lived around the time of the Prophet Muhammad. A Muslim fleet is known to have successfully landed on the island of Cyprus around 649 CE, a mere 15 years after Muhammad’s death. This is still acknowledged locally on the island by the claim that a woman called Umm Haram, a contemporary of Muhammad, is buried in a tomb at the Hala Sultan Tekke, a mosque and Sufi lodge built overlooking salt plains close to the town of Larnaca in southern Cyprus.^[1]

Less than a century later, in 711, Muslims from North Africa made their way across the straits of Gibraltar to establish an Islamic presence in the Iberian Peninsula that would last seven centuries and shape modern Portuguese and Spanish culture: from local languages through to the food, music, art and architecture of the region. However, the most spectacular reminder of the Islamic presence here is probably the physical remnants. They include the Moorish Castle in Sintra, near Lisbon; Europe’s first mosque, now the Mezquita Cathedral in Cordoba; and the Alhambra Palace City in Granada. This period of European Muslim history is largely remembered for its tolerant and inclusive attitude to followers of other faiths, in particular to the Jews of Europe, who were often persecuted elsewhere on the continent and whose culture was also influenced by Iberian Muslim culture.

Simultaneously, in southern Italy, between the 9th and 11th centuries, Muslims from North Africa established the Emirate of Sicily, a similarly flourishing and tolerant kingdom that also had a lasting effect on local Sicilian – and thereby, Italian – culture and heritage. This is most apparent, firstly, in the way later rulers of Sicily, in particular the Normans (1038–1198 AD), adopted many of the Muslim social and cultural traits to become ‘Arabized’. For this reason, the Normans of Sicily are remembered today as Arab-Normans and much of their architecture, including their splendid churches across Sicily, are noted for the influence of the Sicilian Muslim architectural and artistic style. However, secondly, and probably the most fascinating living legacy of this period, is to be found in the Maltese language. The Maltese were also part of the historical Emirate of Sicily and, as a result, inherited the distinct Arabic spoken by the Muslims and later Christian Normans of the region known as Siculo-Arabic. In fact, so much of modern Maltese is made up of ancient Siculo-Arabic that it is the EU’s only official Semitic language.

After this period, the most lasting Islamic cultural influences on Europe and Europeans are broadly the result of four factors: the growth and expansion of the Muslim Ottoman Empire; the growth and expansion of the Muslim Khanates; post-colonial migration following the collapse of the European colonial powers in the second half of the 20th century; and, finally, refugees and asylum-seekers fleeing conflict from Muslim-majority nations such as Somalia and Syria.

The Ottoman and Muslim Khanate expansions are the reason for the conversion of many local populations to Islam in countries such as Russia, Ukraine, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Albania. As the historical Iberian and Sicilian Muslims were eventually expelled, these Eastern European Muslims now make up Europe’s indigenous Muslim population. It is no surprise that they mostly reside in lands once ruled by the Ottomans and the various Khanates, such as the Western Balkans and parts of modern-day Russia.

There are also isolated historical examples of other ways in which Muslim populations have found their way into Europe. One example of this would be the Baltic Muslims, who are among Europe’s oldest surviving Muslim communities. They are the descendants of a small group of Muslims who played a pivotal role in the survival of ancient Lithuania (and Poland and Belarus). They were Crimean Tatars who arrived – by royal invitation from Lithuania’s Grand Duke Vytautas – in 1398 to help defeat the threat of the Christian German Teutonic Knights and save what was then the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. After successfully doing so, the Muslims were invited to stay and settle in small villages south of the Duchy’s capital, Trakai. Over the course of the next six centuries, they went on to make considerable cultural and social contributions in their adopted nations of Lithuania, Poland and Belarus, and many of the descendants of the original migrant community still live in the same villages today. Several of these villages are home to the community’s unique Baltic wooden mosques and ancient Muslim cemeteries.

Other ways in which Islamic culture influenced European culture include trade and the inevitable exchange during the European colonial period, when countries such as Britain, France and the Netherlands ruled over large populations of Muslims in places such as the Indian subcontinent, North Africa and South East Asia.

One example of the long-term relationship can be found in Britain. In popular imagination, the influence of Muslim culture on Britain began following the mass migration of post-colonial Muslims in the second half of the 20th century and there is a widely held belief that Britain’s culture was not affected by Islam prior to this. However, Britain is home to one of the most curious ancient Islamic artefacts in Europe. Known as ‘Offa’s Dirham’, it is a gold coin minted by the Anglo-Saxon King Offa, which pays homage to Al Mansur, the Muslim Abbasid Caliph in Baghdad. It features the Islamic declaration of faith and is dated to the Islamic year 157 AH (c. 774 AD) – all in Arabic. The coin also has the Latin inscription ‘Offa Rex’ on it. The naïve nature of the Arabic script and the fact that coins from contemporaneous Muslim cultures have been found across Europe, has led scholars to lean towards the theory that trade was the likeliest reason that King Offa minted his curious coin, although in truth nobody actually knows the real reason. What is clear, however, is that Britain – on the opposite side of the European continent to Cyprus – also encountered Islam just over a century after the religion was ‘born’.

Britain is also a good place to appreciate the Islamic cultural exchange that came about due to European colonialism. Like every national museum found in the capital cities of former colonial powers, the British Museum’s Islamic collection is one such obvious legacy. However, a more fascinating example would be Britain’s first purpose-built mosque, the Shah Jahan Mosque, built in 1889 in the town of Woking. The mosque also led to the founding of two historic British-Muslim cemeteries: the Muhammadan Cemetery, founded in 1884, Britain’s first Muslim cemetery; and the Woking War Cemetery, the country’s only Muslim soldier’s burial ground, established in 1915.

As the name of the mosque suggests, there are links between the founding of the mosque and what was then the British colony of India. The mosque was largely financed by the Begum of the Indian princely state of Bhopal and the founder, Wilhelm Gottlieb Leitner, had spent several years living and working in India. He also established the cemetery, which became the final resting place of a number of individuals linked to Britain’s colonial activities, including former Yemeni kings and Malay princes.

Meanwhile, the military cemetery was built specifically to bury the Muslim colonial subjects that died fighting for Britain. The mosque and the cemetery are today used largely by a community of Muslims who migrated there following the end of the British colonial period, from countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. As well as inheriting the historic mosque and cemetery, like all Muslims who migrated to Europe during the latter part of the 20th century, they are now influencing European culture, as did their Muslim forebears over the past thirteen centuries or so – whether the British-Bangladeshis changing the culinary landscape of a nation with their curries, or the North Africans building spectacular French mosques that echo the architectural heritage of historical Muslim Iberia.