Methods and Contexts in the Study of Muslim Minorities

Visible and Invisible Muslims

Nadia Jeldtoft, Jørgen Nielsen, Nadia Jeldtoft, Jørgen Nielsen, Nadia Jeldtoft, Jørgen S. Nielsen

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN: 9781317978589
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In the past decade Muslims in Europe have been the subject of heated debates on the place and role of religion in the public space. Research into the issues involved has often used visible and formalised expressions of Muslim religiosity as its empirical point of departure. This book instead examines the microlevel workings of Muslim minority religiosity to offer a new perspective on these debates.

Contributors to this volume examine the forms of Muslim religiosity which are not dependent on the official or semi-official settings of organised religion. These ethnographic studies investigate a range of examples of non-organised Islam, ranging from salafi-jihadism, to converts to Islam, to everyday spiritualities of Muslim in Europe. By exploring these neglected forms of Muslim religiosity, this book is able to build up a more nuanced picture of the role of Muslims in Europe. It will be of interest to academics, researchers and graduate students of Religion, Ethnic Studies, Migration Studies, Sociology and Political Science.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Introduction: Methods and contexts in the study of Muslim minorities

Nadia Jeldtoft and Jørgen S. Nielsen

Research on Islam and Muslim minorities in Europe has generally been focused on the active representatives of these groups, in the form of research on the development of movements and organizations, their legal and political status, activities and relations with the wider political contexts both at home, in the countries of origin and in the Muslim world at large. On the other hand, social sciences research on Muslims and Islam has tended to be focused on Muslims as ethnic minority groups linked into the broader fields of race relations and migration research. Since the 1980s researchers in the fields of race relations and migration have increasingly mobilized ‘Muslims’ and ‘Islam’ as a common denominator. Initially, among social scientists the motivation seems often to have been the necessity of refining larger unmanageable ethnic groupings. It is interesting, looking back, to see how large-scale British studies several decades ago began to distinguish Hindu, Muslim and Sikh among immigrated populations of South Asian origin but were not as interested in religious categorization among people of Arab or sub-Saharan African origin (Smith 1976; Sillitoe 1978 etc.). These historical and contemporary categorizations of Muslims as ‘Muslims’ are related to the increase in studies, surveys and polls on this exact group. These categorization processes are part of a European political and social landscape in which Muslims, and the description (qualitative and quantitative) and mapping of Muslims, has become a sociological fact and a hegemonic endeavor (Sunier 2009). Counting, describing and talking about Muslims has obtained commonsensical status: researchers, media, and politicians rarely reflect explicitly on the ontology which lies behind the categorization and subsequent knowledge production on Muslims as a religious minority (Asad 2003; Galal, Hocke and Khawaja 2010).

This volume both addresses and reflects the issue of categorization of Muslims as Muslims. It addresses the issue of categorizations because part one of this book is concerned with the study of non-organized Muslim minorities as a way of reflecting on and discussing how the methods we adapt for studying Muslims determine our analytical outlooks and the images we leave behind of the people we are describing. The volume thus also engages in the categorization process by adding to the knowledge production on Muslims as a distinct group.

Part two provides a context for the study of Muslim minorities. The four chapters in the second section of the book present results on how Muslims perceive e.g. democratic values, to what extent they are integrated in European societies and how Muslims are perceived by majorities.

Part I: Methods in the study of ‘non-organized’ Muslim minorities

The First International Conference on Muslims in Europe was held in Stockholm in 1986 with the title ‘The New Islamic Presence in Europe’ (Gerholm and Lithman 1988). While some of the papers did focus on Muslim/Islamic dimensions, not all did. A decade later it was possible to produce a bibliographical survey indicating that researchers had moved towards making a distinction between ‘ethno-national’ groups and groups for whom Islam is a significant element of their identity (Dassetto and Conrad 1996).

The main focus during this period was on the establishment and networking of Muslim organizations, education and social adaptation, all areas with significant political interest. In the process there developed something of an argument between those social scientists and others who supported and those who rejected the use of religion in the analysis of immigration, ethnic minority and race. This discussion took place in most European countries although on different terms. In a 1994 seminar John Rex and Tariq Modood considered the matter (Rex and Modood 1994) in a British context which was impressed partly by the echoes of the affair of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and partly by a longer and often sharp debate about the nature and role of racism. Interestingly, John Rex points out already at this time the extent to which a security-led dimension is entering research on Muslims in Britain, a trend which has become increasingly emphasized in the research on Muslims since 9/11.

In recent years research categorization on ‘religion’ and public debates on Islam ‘secularism’ and the role of Islam and Muslims populations in the West have all contributed to the shaping of a usually unquestioned category of ‘Muslims’ (Allievi 2005). This category constitutes the object of study when researchers describe how Muslims in the West are reacting to globalization (Roy 2004), are engaging in transnational practices (Mandaville 2001, Werbner 2002), and how they are engaging in civil society by initiating Muslim organizations and councils of various forms (Silvestri 2005; Klausen 2005). Much socio-legal research also focuses on how Islamic law is implemented in Europe, and employed by Muslims (Rohe 2006; Menski and Shah 2006). Lastly the process and nature of Muslim organizations and how they differ, in part in response to the given structural paradigms of the country in which settlement has taken place, have been treated (Fetzer and Soper 2005).

Much of this research takes its empirical point of departure in Muslims who are active in organizations or who are in other ways visible and vocal about their religion. Much less attention has been given to another dimension of differentiation, namely how, at the individual level, Muslims (here very broadly considered) locate themselves in relation to the organized expressions of the religion and/or how they relate to and live out their religion in other aspects of life.

It is inherent in the study of religion that focus will be on the public and private expressions of religion which tend to find some form of institutional expression (McGuire 2008). On the one hand, religious institutions, groups and organizations etc. are all expressions of religion which in one way or another find a public face and, in the case of Muslims particularly, attract media attention. The focus on institutionalized forms of religion can also be attributed to the fact that they are easier to locate and to contact when researchers are looking to carry out fieldwork and interviews. On the other hand, it is also often through their organizational expressions that religious communities, including Muslims, and public authorities can enter into the processes of mutual negotiation which the organizations need to secure services and legitimacy internally as well as achieve some form of public recognition of their representative role in civil and political society. The public authorities seek through this negotiation process to find ways of delivering public services to ethnic minority communities, which otherwise can be difficult to engage with, as well as to manage community relations and minimize conflict.

Research and public debate have made it increasingly clear that substantial proportions of those communities, which are lumped together as ‘Muslims’ when the topic is approached from a macro-level, have a sometimes very uncertain relationship to Islam, or at least to the socio-political category ‘Muslim’¹. Taking the case of Denmark, estimates based on ethno-national origin give a total of just over 220,000 Muslims in 2009, but a rough calculation of active numbers judged by membership of organizations gives only about 35,000 (Jacobsen 2009). Some Muslims refute any public identification with Islam and a few publicly attack Islam and fellow ‘Muslims’. In the broad middle of the spectrum are many who will personally and/or privately identify themselves with Islam in some form or other but do not have anything to do with any form of institutionalized Islam, which may or may not include avoiding, for example, mosque attendance. This group can be characterized as having an ‘implicit relationship’ to Islam, meaning that they self-identify as Muslims although they may not have a very active relationship to their religion. This type of religiosity, termed “implicit religion” (Davie 1990), does to a certain degree resemble majority populations’ relationships to the Christian faith which can be characterized as “believing without belonging” (ibid.). But especially in the case of Muslims, the nature of public debates, as well as the assumptions of researchers, in recent decades has also meant that the environment imposes the definition in more than merely a statistical sense. Dassetto’s term “attributed Muslim” expresses this well (Maréchal et al 2003, pp. xxii). A third characteristic has been suggested by Ehab Galal, who proposes the attribute “believing through belonging” (Galal 2009: 46), meaning that it is the very sense of a collective community and feelings of interconnectedness which establishes the faith for many Muslims. When it comes to studying religious minorities – such as Muslims in Europe for such purposes – a more explicit focus on the fact that Muslims are not ‘one group’, but many heterogeneous groups who have different approaches to Islam and being Muslim, is not only in order but a sine qua non.

It seems that research on Muslim and Islam in Europe has had a strong organizational focus which contributes to the reproduction of a category of Muslims, who are thus studied with reference to Islam. The present collection of articles places its focus on Muslims outside the institutions and organizations as an attempt to observe what insights we can gain from looking at Islam and Muslims in the more fuzzy structures. The focus on ‘non-organized’ Islam and Muslims does not mean that we see all organized Muslims as the same or that non-organized Muslims are one group. What we do believe is that the focus on ‘non-organized’ Muslims will contribute with valuable insights into how our object of study is also determined by what methods we use to study it and how we conceptualize the category of ‘Muslims’. The chapters in this book problematize and discuss how we can approach and understand Muslim religious identities and practices that are not necessarily dependant on organizational structures, or take place in institutionalized religious contexts.

In this publication, we will see studies of ‘non-organized’ Muslims ranging from non-organized Jihadi-Salafis to non-organized ‘new age’ Muslims who practise meditation and reiki healing. In between is a large group of non-organized Muslims who simply feel that they belong to a cultural and ethnic common identity as Muslims – a sense of belonging, in other words, to a vague collectivity where Muslim is one important signifier among others, which would include an ethno-national or regional dimension as well as a European national one. Usually, because of only a vague sense of belonging, it is not normally necessary to acknowledge, let alone manage, potentially rival claims of such dimensions of belonging.

Focusing research on this broad category of ‘non-organized’ Muslims offers some challenges to the researcher. For a start it is inherently diverse, and the individuals involved are likely to be self-identifying in a much more autonomous fashion than are those who are related more closely to forms of organized Islam, where a choice among ready-made ‘packages’ is usually on offer, even when individuals frequently move among them. The category is also one which is in constant flux, as the individuals in it develop and respond to the pressures and attractions of the environment. Through the borders between the two categories, the ‘organized’ and the ‘non-organized’, there is a regular osmosis both within the organized forms and, on the other side, with the trends which are opting out or even going into opposition. Such research has already touched on these questions suggests that we are often dealing with forms of Islamic expression which have adapted, even assimilated, to the forms of religion prevalent in the immediate socio-cultural environment, forms which could be – very tentatively – termed ‘privatized’ or ‘secularized’.

While the focus of the chapters in this collection is on individuals, it is clear that Muslim organizations, including mosques and mosque-related ones, are adopting organizational forms which are prevalent in the environment, whether we are referring to those prevalent among voluntary associations or, for that matter, among some forms of church structure (Fetzer and Soper 2005). The gradual approximation of organized Islam in Belgium to the church structures prevalent there, since the recognition of Islam in 1974, is one example, as is the spread of ‘Islamic cultural centres’ across Europe’s cities, a form which has no precedent in the majority Muslim countries or in Islamic tradition.

Among the problems associated with understanding ‘non-organized’ are:

1) Finding some workable definition of ‘organized’ across a variety of European countries where the concept of organization, legally and socially, can differ substantially, as well as among a range of Muslim cultural and theological understandings of ‘organized’;

2) How to approach ‘invisible’ or ‘private’ expressions of Islam? What methods can we use for studying any form of religion that is not directly accessible? And does the study of non-organized religion, and Islam in particular, demand special methods or just that we revisit the existing ones?

The theoretical, methodological and empirical challenges of researching ‘non-organized’ Muslims are worth meeting, as it is expected that the research will open broader perspectives on a field which has become excessively politicized and in the process contributed to marginalizing, if not making invisible, a substantial proportion of ethnic and religious minority communities with some form of Muslim heritage. It will also serve to at least question the ‘ethnification’ and the more recent ‘securitization’ of Islam in Europe.

The empirical focus on ‘non-organized’ Muslim minorities that we will see in this publication will, it is hoped, contribute further to opening up for study of a broad variety of Muslim identities and expressions. The change of empirical focus has inevitably led to new focus points and explicit methodological considerations which will contribute to the general picture and knowledge production of Muslim minorities in the West.

Part II: Contexts for the study of Muslim minorities in Europe

The four chapters in section two of this book consist of four studies which are all based on statistical methods. Methodological approach is not all that these four studies have in common. They are all concerned with, broadly speaking, what Muslims think and what others think of Muslims. The chapters treat how Muslims are perceived by majorities in relation to discrimination and negative attitudes (Bevelander and Otterbeck), the relationship between religious attachment and different generations of Muslims (Maliepaard, Lubbers and Gjisberts), the relation between democratic values and religious affiliation (Gundelach), and lastly the relationship between level of Muslim religiosity and integration policies in different countries (Connor).

At first sight, it might seem contradictory to bring these four chapters with their explicitly quantitative approach within the same set of covers as the individually focused chapters in Part I. However, we see the two parts as constructively complementary. Connor’s chapter provides a larger European perspective, while the other three provide aspects of local context for a number of the chapters in Part I. All four seek to capture attitudes and their impacts at a macro level and thus illustrate a number of the environmental elements which the individuals, who are the focus of those papers, at the micro level, seek to respond to and to manage in their own lives.

These issues are among the topics which much research on Muslims in Europe has centered on in the past decade. As such they provide a context for the study of Muslim minorities in the sense that they reflect one contextual dimension (among others) which has become increasingly important for the interpretation of Muslim population presence in Europe: the perceived and real conflict between Muslims and majorit...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction Methods and contexts in the study of Muslim minorities
• Part I: Methods
• Part II: Contexts
• Index