Museum Caught in a Maelstrom of Narratives

Abstract

It is not hard to argue that the terror attacks on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent horrific violent acts that have been carried out in the name of Islam in cities like, for example, Madrid, London, Paris, Brussels, Berlin, Nice or Stockholm have all had a serious impact on public perceptions of Islam and Muslims in the West. One way of understanding the outcome of these processes is to argue that they have contributed to and produced and strengthened what Riem Spielhaus and I call narratives of inclusion and exclusion (Larsson and Spielhaus 2013, 2017). In this article I will use narratives of inclusion and exclusion as a backdrop and heuristic tool for analysing and discussing the impacts of these two grand ideal-type narratives on museums planning to display so-called Islamic artefacts.