Producing Islamic Knowledge

Transmission and dissemination in Western Europe

Martin van Bruinessen, Stefano Allievi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415661621
• eBook ISBN: 9781136932854
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

How do Muslims in Europe acquire discursive and practical knowledge of Islam? How are conceptions of Islamic beliefs, values and practices transmitted and how do they change? Who are the authorities on these issues that Muslims listen to? How do new Muslim discourses emerge in response to the European context?

This book addresses the broader question of how Islamic knowledge (defined as what Muslims hold to be correct Islamic beliefs and practices) is being produced and reproduced in West European contexts by looking at specific settings, institutions and religious authorities. Chapters examine in depth four key areas relating to the production and reproduction of Islamic knowledge:

• authoritative answers in response to explicit questions in the form of fatwas.
• the mosque and mosque association as the setting of much formal and informal transmission of Islamic knowledge.
• the role of Muslim intellectuals in articulating alternative Muslim discourses.
• higher Islamic education in Europe and the training of imams and other religious functionaries.

Featuring contributions from leading sociologists and anthropologists, the book presents the findings of empirical research in these issues from a range of European countries such as France, Italy, the Netherlands and Great Britain. As such it has a broad appeal, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Islamic studies, anthropology, sociology and religion.

1 Producing Islamic knowledge in Western Europe

Discipline, authority, and personal quest

Martin van Bruinessen

What is Islamic knowledge?

In this chapter, I shall be using the term ‘Islamic knowledge’ for whatever Muslims consider to be correct or proper belief and practice – in the widest meaning of those words, and including non-discursive, embodied forms of knowledge. Since Muslims hold different views of what is properly Islamic, there cannot be a single, unified and universal knowledge (though some Muslims make such claims for their particular conception of it), and Islamic knowledge is inherently contested. What makes it Islamic is not necessarily its congruence with some broadly accepted standard of orthodoxy and orthopraxy, but its reference to the ongoing series of debates that constitutes Islam as a living tradition. I find Talal Asad’s conception of Islam as a discursive tradition, as he first formulated it in a paper on the anthropology of Islam (1986), very useful, though I would broaden the understanding of tradition to include non-discursive elements as well. Not everything Muslims do is Islamic; Muslims engage in many activities and debates that are not informed by any relation with Islamic tradition. The ‘local knowledge’ of Muslim communities similarly includes much that has nothing to do with their ‘Islamic knowledge’, although the latter may also contain numerous elements that are local. As Asad writes, ‘[a] practice is Islamic because it is authorized by the discursive traditions of Islam, and is so taught to Muslims – whether by an ^عalim, a khatib, a Sufi shaykh, or an untutored parent’ (Asad 1986: 15). This obviously includes much belief and practice that in the opinion of at least some other Muslims is non-Islamic, such as Sufi ritual, shrine visits, and certain healing practices; the legitimation by some form of authority deemed to be Islamic is the crucial aspect. I would even argue for the inclusion of rituals such as the Alevi cem and semah, even though these appear to be alien to the mainstream scriptural tradition of Islam and are widely perceived as having pre- or extra-Islamic origins. Both are embedded in a complex of myths and concepts that clearly relate to the broader Islamic tradition, and they share this feature with the rituals of various other heterodox communities that have been present as a counterpoint to the dominant melody of Sunni Islam.

My interest in this chapter is in the processes by which Muslims, and especially young Muslims growing up in the West, acquire or themselves produce Islamic knowledge. In the existing literature on this subject one encounters – I simplify for the sake of the argument – two different models of production and dissemination of Islamic knowledge. One is the religious market model, in which on the supply side there is a variety of religious specialists or religious movements and associations involved in producing and marketing Islamic knowledge, and on the demand side a public of potential consumers who more or less critically make a choice out of what is on offer. The second model, found especially in the literature on individualization, assigns a more active role to (at least some) young Muslims in rejecting the Islam of their parents and established institutions and constructing their own forms of Islamic knowledge in an eclectic and creative process.¹ In the first model, there is a strict distinction between producers and consumers of religious knowledge; in the second, everyone is to some degree involved in its production. My interest here is not so much in how religious specialists arrive at authoritative formulations of Islamic knowledge in the context of European secular societies (the chapters by Caeiro, Mariani and Sedgwick do engage with this, however) as in how ‘ordinary’ Muslims, aided or not by such specialists, develop their Islamic knowledge.

It hardly needs to be emphasized that the context in which Islamic knowledge is being produced and reproduced is likely to have a significant impact on the process of knowledge production and the specific forms of knowledge that emerge. Even those who would reject all sources of religious authority apart from the Qur^ءan and hadith will need to access these sources with specific questions in mind that derive from the encounter with the wider society around them. A wide range of persons and institutions of religious authority is available in Western Europe, or can easily be accessed through the new media. Moreover, most European governments have been making deliberate efforts to regulate the form and content of religious education.

So how is it that Muslims in Europe, especially second- and third-generation immigrant Muslims, acquire their knowledge of Islam? Whom do they seek out as teachers, counsellors or role models, and on what grounds? What is the impact of their linguistic competence on the type of knowledge demanded or acquired? To what extent does the life-world of young Muslims in Western Europe give rise to new questions, new values, new practices, new interpretations?

Learning Qur^ءan and prayer

For the most basic forms of Islamic knowledge, concerning the technicalities of ritual purification (wudu^ع), prayer (salat, namaz) and fasting (sawm), the process of knowledge acquisition appears quite straightforward. Children learn the details through emulation of their parents or, more frequently, explicit instruction by a teacher, often a mosque’s imam. This is one of the few areas of expertise in which the authority of the mosque imam is not seriously questioned. Virtually all mosque organizations have Qur^ءan courses, where children are taught to recite and perhaps to read (though not necessarily to understand) sufficient verses and invocations for use in prayer and where they are taught the other essentials of worship. Yalçin-Heckmann (1998: 171) reports that a surprisingly high percentage of the Turkish parents in Germany whom she interviewed acknowledged the need for such Qur^ءan courses. Those who actually sent their children to the courses in the neighbourhood were considerably fewer, however, though still more than half. (Note that this proportion is considerably higher than the 25 per cent of Turkish Muslim men who, according to various surveys, regularly perform the five daily prayers. Parents apparently want their children at least to know how to pray, even if they don’t do so themselves.)

The reasons given by parents for their failure actually to send their children to Qur^ءan courses were either lack of time or, more significantly, the perception that religious organizations were involved in politics (Yalçin-Heckmann, ibid.). Similar observations of Muslim parents’ attitudes towards Qur^ءan courses in Britain and France were earlier reported by Daniele Joly and Rémy Leveau, respectively (both in Gerholm and Lithman 1988). This indicates that in at least some parents’ perception the teaching of the basic ritual obligations cannot be separated from other dimensions of Muslim discourse and practice. On the other hand, it is true that the Qur^ءan courses of the Süleymanci movement, which are known for their thoroughness and strictness, are also attended by many Turkish children whose parents are not followers or sympathizers of this movement. In her study of the Süleymanci movement, Gerdien Jonker estimated that 60–70 per cent of the children following these courses in Berlin were from families that were not themselves Süleymanci, and that of all children who did take part in Qur^ءan courses the vast majority did so with the Süleymancis.²

The Süleymanci movement concentrates on children in the age group of 10–13 years, which is considered the best age to mould their personalities – ‘a branch should be bent when it is still green’, as was explained to Jonker. The training is more systematic than in other Muslim communities and involves rote learning of Qur^ءanic verses, the Arabic alphabet, and a basic catechism (ilmihal) with detailed instructions on the proper performance of prayer. The courses are in six stages, in which memorization is gradually complemented by understanding of grammar and the meaning of the verses memorized. Only few children, however, follow through beyond the first or second stage. Disciplining in the proper movements and utterances is considered as more important than discursive understanding: the moral person is shaped by such bodily disciplining, not by the intellectual grasping of subject matter that is privileged in Western didactic methods (Jonker 2002: 184–9). The Süleymanci movement is perhaps unique, at least among Turks, in the detailed training given in these courses; in other movements, children learn more through emulation of adults, simply taking part in prayer and gradually improving their performance. The acquisition of proper dispositions, embodied rather than discursive knowledge, is the aim of all Qur^ءan courses.

A considerable proportion of children of Muslim parents never attend Qur^ءan courses, and many of those who do attend a course give up before the course is completed. The data from surveys that ask questions about actual performance are inconsistent but suggest that only a minority of young Muslims performs the prayers regularly. However, significant numbers turn to a more strict Islamic practice later in life. Such ‘internal’ conversions (including conversions of practising Muslims to another pattern of religious practice) are a fascinating phenomenon that has not received much scholarly attention yet.³ Proselytizing movements such as Tablighi Jama^عat, Hizb ut-Tahrir, and the Salafi movement (about which more below) have contributed much to such ‘internal’ conversions as well as conversions of non-Muslims to Islam. In these movements, the basics of prayer and Qur^ءan recital are mainly acquired through peer learning and participation in congregational prayer, besides simple written manuals; Salafi groups offer also more systematic instruction. Numerous Islamic websites offer detailed instructions for prayer, which appear to be directed at nominal Muslims as well as new converts, and simple prayer instruction booklets can be found in many shops that cater to a Muslim clientele.

The actual performance of salat, as John Bowen has argued in one of the few anthropological analyses of Muslim prayer, besides producing and expressing pious self-control and discipline, may also involve various forms of boundary creation. Differences in the performance of salat may be read as signs of social distinctions; in his Indonesian examples this concerns distinctions between reformists and traditionalists, or boundaries between sectarians and the mainstream community, besides of course the primary distinction between believers and non-believers (Bowen 1989).⁴ These distinctions appear, however, irrelevant to the basic Qur^ءan courses offered in most Western European mosques.

There exist, of course, some differences between the four Sunni schools (madhhab), and between traditionalists and reformists, concerning minor details of the movements to be made in salat, notably concerning the position of the hands, the prescribed time of the early morning and afternoon prayers, as well as the actions and events that bring about ritual pollution and necessitate renewal of wudu^ع. As long as most parents send their children to a mosque of their own national background, they are not even confronted with the existence of such minor differences. Mosques with North African congregations teach according to the Maliki madhhab, Turkish and Pakistani mosques according to the Hanifi madhhab. It appears to be language rather than the difference in madhhab that keeps the congregations separate. Most Kurds from Turkey, for instance, are not Hanafis but Shafi^عis, but Kurds and Turks worship in the same mosques and send their children to the same Qur^ءan courses. The differences between the two schools of law tend to be played down, unless there are other reasons to emphasize them. Turkish and Kurdish Naqshbandis or Nurcus often feel more strongly united by their common adherence to a particular Sufi order or pious movement than they feel divided by the difference in madhhab. There exists a small distinctly Kurdish Islamic association that controls a few mosques in Europe, but the reasons for its establishment were political rather than religious, and Kurdish ethnicity rather than the Shafi^عi madhhab is its reason of existence.⁵

Within communities of the same national origin there may, however, exist grave differences between traditionalists and the various reformist movements. In Europe, this is perhaps most strikingly so among South Asians, among whom the reformist Deobandis and Ahl-i Hadith do have different conceptions of proper ritual practice than the traditionalist Barelwis. Among these South Asian Muslim denominations the performance of salat is one of a whole array of markers of distinction. Barelwis and Deobandis in Britain and increasingly elsewhere too have their separate institutions and do not mix socially, so that there has been relatively little active contestation between them over ritual practice. The active proselytization by newer religious movements such as Tablighi Jama^عat, Hizb ut-Tahrir and various Salafi groups, which are in various degrees critical of existing attitudes and practices, has been making dents in the boundaries of these well-established mainstream groups (as well as those of other nationalities). This has given rise to some dissension over ritual practice when recruits to these movements insisted on ‘correcting’ the practice of other members of their congregation.

In matters of performance of the salat, it has been especially Salafis who have given rise to much unease ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. Producing Islamic knowledge in Western Europe: Discipline, authority, and personal quest
• 2. Muslim voices, European ears: Exploring the gap between the production of Islamic knowledge and its perception
• 3. An emerging European Islam: The case of the Minhajul Qurءan in the Netherlands
• 4. Religious authority, social action and political participation: A case study of the Mosquée de la rue de Tanger in Paris
• 5. The pattern of Islamic reform in Britain: The Deobandis between intra-Muslim sectarianism and engagement with wider society
• 6. Transnational ulama, European fatwas, and Islamic authority: A case study of the European Council for Fatwa and Research
• 7. Cyber-fatwas, sermons, and media campaigns: Amr Khaled and Omar Bakri Muhammad in search of new audiences
• 8. Guénonian Traditionalism and European Islam
• Glossary
• Index