This issue of the Journal of Muslims in Europe consists of a number of individual articles about a wide variety of topics. As regular readers of jome know, we alternately publish issues with individual articles and special issues. As editors of jome, we are convinced that a good academic journal must provide enough opportunity for individual authors to submit their work, not least because it shows the richness and increasing sophistication of research, in our case on Islam and Muslims in Europe. The current issue proves this.

The first article, by Arndt Emmerich, deals with quietest Salafi activism in the UK. It engages not only with the study of Salafism in general, but also with social movement theory (smt). The author convincingly argues that an urban, elite bias within smt and the fusion of smt with terrorism studies, has created a blind spot in both fields.

Anne-my Flyvholm’s article addresses the various ways in which Muslim organisations in Denmark deal with the increasing level of hate crime against Muslims. Although organisations in general agree on what hate crime is, their intersectional identities affect the socio-political contexts they articulate as relevant in relation to hate crime, thus generating different strategies.

Tema Pauha writes about a dispute in Helsinki about the construction of a large new mosque. The author shows that the dispute increasingly revolved around the question of whether or not the mosque would increase tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Finland. The unsubstantiated assumptions about sectarian tensions and secret money flows are used as a pretext to prevent such initiatives.

The article by Muhammad Azeem Qureshi on housing policy in Norway may at first sight look like an odd one in jome, but it is a fine example of research showing how extremely complex the position of Muslims in Europe can be. Norwegian housing policy aims for a very high rate of homeownership in the expectation that it will lead to social integration of communities and enable active citizenship. As many Muslim citizens in the country do not own a house, the author argues that this may lead to increasing marginalisation.

The article by Egdunas Racius focuses on the relation between the socio-legal status of national Orthodox Churches and their role in the legal, institutional and social “othering” of Islam and ethnic groups of Muslims in Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Serbia. Racius argues that there is an alliance between political and Church elites to keep ethnic groups of Muslim background either altogether outside the “national Us” or at least at its outer margins.

With this issue we also start a new series, titled Current Debates. Apart from the book review section, we intend to regularly publish essays based on a number of publications from one country, or from different countries about the same topic. The Current Debates series has two aims. One is to provide an overview of relevant publications published in languages (e.g. Russian, German, Dutch, Bosnian, French, Italian, Finnish, Lithuanian, Spanish) that are not accessible to the general reader of jome. This, we hope, will contribute to a better scholarly exchange in our field of study. The other aim is to address ongoing scholarly or public debates as they appear in recent publications around a particular theme or trend.

By way of opening, we have two Current Debate essays in this issue. The first, written by Laura Mijares is based on literature in Spanish and deals with the changing perceptions about Muslims in Spain. The other, written by Simon Stjernholm focuses on recent literature in the UK about youth and education.

We invite our readers to send us ideas and proposals for Current Debate essays.

Thijl Sunier

Executive editor JOME