Hajj is the most important one of the Five Pillars in Islam. Islam makes the Kaaba as the orientation of daily prayers (salat), and hajj as the linkage to maintain the global Muslim faith community. The sanctity of hajj rituals is of positive significance for global pilgrims to transcend the boundaries of countries and ethnic groups. In the era of globalization, hajj quota has...
Cultural and political alterity in China is levelled by disrupting local communities and networks, both necessary to keep memories and sense of identity alive through sharing and socialising. By taking Suzhou’s mosques as focal lens, the author assesses an experiential void which is politically and socially created, and shows the consequences of rewriting history. The broken...
Quintan Wiktorowicz’s typology and other methods of classification developed by other scholars from his approach have been the most popular when studying Salafism. However, such typologies, especially when examining Salafism in non-Middle Eastern and minority contexts, have their shortcomings. The first main problem with current typologies is that they discuss distinct Salafi...
While Ramadan in Western societies has been studied extensively in relation to health issues, no research to date has explored its representation through social scientific lenses. This article uses the Greater Western Sydney region in New South Wales, Australia, as a case study. This agglomeration of suburbs from the outer western suburbs of Sydney to the Blue Mountains has the...
This article investigates in depth the practices of a Stockholm-based raqi. In the first section, the principles and methods of his version of ruqya (Islamic exorcism) are described: which Qur’anic passages he perceives as being most suitable to read in the cases of different afflictions, how he complement his reading with the use of his right palm to detect the possession, and...
New media studies on Islam are focused on investigating the characteristics of Islamic discourse or Muslim practices in digital landscape. Since there is increasing visibility of knowledge production on Islam by non-Islamic, secular middlebrow spaces such as TED, it is significant to examine their way of communicating Islamic ideas to a global audience. By conducting a discourse...
This article advocates for an increased attention to how piously striving Muslims learn about, cultivate, and experience nearness to God. The empirical material is taken from our current research on Danish Muslims’ engagement with Islamic teaching and learning. We examine examples of oral teachings that instruct the audience to be constantly aware of God and address him directly...
Since the revolution in 1979, the Islamic Republic of Iran has imprisoned musicians, especially punk, hip-hop, and hard rock bands, as well as those playing heavy metal subgenres. Extreme heavy metal artists and fans emerged in the 1990s. The government soon targeted them as Satanists and began a systematic crackdown on metalheads. The metalcore band Confess is the most well...
The field of ‘Islamic Studies’, like ‘Religious Studies’, is a broad-church. It includes a number of epistemological and ontological positions associated with a range of disciplines. The diversity inherent in a category such as ‘Islamic Studies’ is challenged by a bifurcation of two predominant approaches found within the field, the textual and the sociological. In this paper, I...
This article explores how Javanese identity has shifted away from Javanese Islam (kejawen) to a more shari’ah-centric identity. This shift is evident within the trah, a Javanese bilateral decent group or social organisation consisting of generations of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren, including spouses and subsequent descendants. Long-term observations were...
This paper focuses on Muslim Civil Society structures and, more specifically, on the gap between the organizations from the first (migrant) generation and the new grammars of action of new generations of Spanish Muslims. The originality of this article lies in its power to address three fundamental questions: (1) Are the umbrella organizations silencing the demands of Muslim...
This article examines how the intersections of Singaporean Malay-Muslim women’s religious and gendered subjectivities influence their lifestyle habits and health attitudes. It explores the gaps between their practices, perspectives and discourses that discuss Islam’s relevance in health educational programmes. Individual semi-structured interviews with 19 local women of diverse...
Taking an ethnographic point of departure in the stories of three Syrian middle-class men in Amman, Jordan, in this article, I zoom in on the role of care in the everyday of exile, as I explore the young men’s attempts to be “responsible” young men despite challenging circumstances. Guided by Ahmed’s (2006) notion of lifelines, defined as those which direct us and allow us to...
In recent years, Muslims have become more visibly invested in humanitarian work in France. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Marseille, this article examines local initiatives to care for precarious others whose lives are neither materially supported nor socially recognized within the current French political regime. Engaging with critical French scholarship on humanitarianism...
What do we, as human beings—religious, non-religious, Muslim and non-Muslim—care about, and how do experiences of caring and being cared for come to shape the way we lead our lives with and among others? In this special issue, we set out to explore the relations between Muslims and various religious and non-religious others through the concept of ‘care’. Doing this, we dwell...
Critical thinking is a highly valued skill in the twenty-first century, and its incorporation into formal school curricula as a core skill is nearly ubiquitous globally. It is considered imperative for educational quality, employability, competitiveness, and for promoting democratisation and social integration. While schools are tasked to promote critical thinking, non-formal...
This article focuses on furnishing practices in the domestic space of the homes of white Flemish and Dutch Muslim female converts to Islam who made hijra (Islamic migration) to Morocco. Fed up with European Islamophobia and longing for a place that supports and strengthens their faith, they decided to emigrate to a Muslim country. However, remarkably, once settled in Morocco...
Drawing on long term research – including topical life stories, interviews and participant observation – we analyze how women converts to Islam in the Netherlands signify and experience making hijra. Our interlocutors, all observant Muslims, had left the Netherlands between the late 1990s and the mid 2010s. In the course of the last 5 years many have again returned to the...
The topic of hijra is very much present in the ideological messages of IslamicState and Al Qaeda as well as in many studies exploring why and how people are motivated to join the violent struggles in Syria. Yet, with a few exceptions, many studies mention hijra as something self-evident without exploring the meanings attached to hijra among the volunteers who joined Al Qaeda and...
Drawing on fieldwork at a large charity organization in Cairo, this article describes a bureaucratized Islamic ethics of care. Founded in 1975, the Mustafa Mahmoud Association today offers free and discounted medical services, funds micro-projects, and provides financial support to about 10,000 families each year. The bulk of that financial support comes from donors’ private...
Recent studies conclude that ethnic minority families in Denmark tend to be dismissive of senior housing and municipal homecare services for elderly family members. A large proportion of Muslim minority families in Denmark attach great importance to caring for the elderly as a tradition and prefer to take care of their own elderly family members at home. Nevertheless, the fact...