Islam is often studied as a distinct and uniform phenomenon that is or should be kept private, and stands apart from any other human activity, be it in the field of economics, law or politics.

Such an approach greatly influences the ways in which Islam and Muslims in the West are portrayed in the media, in the public debate, but also in scholarship.

The LUCIS research programme Islam in the West turns away from this idea of Islam as a separate phenomenon. By contrast, it takes the blurriness of daily reality as a starting point and looks into how Islam is intermingled with other activities in the daily life of Muslims in the West. The programme contributes to scholarship on the diversity of Islam in context and deeply engages into debates about the relational dimensions of representations of Islam in the West.

In the coming years, the LUCIS research programme Islam in the West will bring together existing scholarship on everyday Islam, it will facilitate ethnographic research into daily life of Muslims at the neighbourhood level, and it will explore new ways of representing Muslims and Islam in the West through collaborative projects with artists.