Preface
Chapter 1: Setting the Scene (Jørgen S. Nielsen)
Part One: National Perspectives
Chapter 2: Denmark, Islam and Muslims – Socio-Economic Dynamics and
the Art of Becoming (Jørgen Bæk Simonsen)
Chapter 3: Muslims in Denmark - a Critical Evaluation of Estimation
(Brian Arly Jacobsen)
Chapter 4: Religion and State: Recognition of Islam and
Related Legislation (Lisbet Christoffersen)
Chapter 5: Mosques and Organizations (Lene Kühle)
Part Two: Particular Perspectives
Chapter 6: Nørrebro and ”Muslimness”: A Neighborhood Caught Between
National Mythscapes and Local Engagement (Garbi Schmidt)
Chapter 7: How Did ‘the Muslim Pupil’ Become Muslim? Danish
State Schooling and 'the Migrant Pupils' since the 1970s (Mette
Buchardt)
Chapter 8: Gender as a Tool in Danish Debates about Muslims (Rikke
Andreassen)
Chapter 9: Conversion to Islam in Denmark (Tina Jensen and Kate
Østergaard)
Chapter 10: Muslims as a Danish Security Issue (Mona Kanwal Sheikh
and Manni Crone)
Part Three: Perspectives on the Ground
Chapter 11: ‘To be Something’ – the Role of Religion in the
Formation of Protest Identity among Ethnic Minority Youth (Lissi
Rasmussen)
Chapter 12: Counseling in the Health Service (Naveed Baig)
Chapter 13: Interreligious Relations (Safet Bektovic)
Chapter 14: Towards a European Understanding of Islam (Abdul Wahid
Pedersen)
Editor:
Jørgen S. Nielsen is Danish National Research Foundation Professor
and director of the Centre for European Islamic Thought, Faculty of
Theology, University of Copenhagen. His main field of research is
Islam in Europe. He is the author of Muslims in Western Europe (3rd
ed. Edinburgh University Press, 2004) and chief editor of Yearbook
of Muslims in Europe (Leiden: Brill, annually from 2009). He is
currently a member of the steering group of the EU research program
program RELIGARE, Religious Diversity and Secular Models in
Europe.
Contributors:
Rikke Andreassen is associate professor of communications at
Roskilde University with a focus on gender roles and equality and
holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. She was a member of the
EU research program VEIL, Values, Equality & Differences in Liberal
Democracies, which looked at the significance of Muslim female
dress patterns in Europe. She is currently involved in a major
research project on Social Cohesion and Ethnic Diversity: National
Discourses and Local Implications.
Naveed Baig has trained in Islamic studies in Pakistan and
chaplaincy at the Markfield Study Centre near Leicester, UK.
Safet Bektovic holds a PhD from the University of Copenhagen on
Søren Kierkegaard and Sufism from 2000, and did his post.doc. on
meetings between cultures and religions in Denmark in 2002. His
research is primarily on Islamic theology and philosophy, and
secondarily on modern Islamic thought in the Balkans.
Mette Buchardt has a teaching background specializing in religion.
Following the completion of her PhD she moved to the Faculty of
Humanities, University of Copenhagen, where she is now an associate
professor in the Department of Education. Her recent research has
focused on Islam and Muslim children, about which she has published
"When Muslimness is pedagogized: ‘Religion' and ‘culture' as
knowledge and social classification in the classroom", British
Journal of Religious Education, 32,3 (2010), 259-273.
Lisbet Christoffersen is professor of law and society at the
University of Roskilde and professor of law and religion at the
Faculty of Theology, University of Copenhagen. She is co-editor
with Jørgen S. Nielsen of Shari'a as Discourse: Legal traditions
and the encounter with Europe (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), and
co-editor of Law & Religion in the 21st Century: Nordic
Perspectives (Copenhagen: DJØF Publishers, 2010). She is currently
a researcher on the EU research program RELIGARE, Religious
Diversity and Secular Models in Europe.
Manni Crone is senior researcher at the Danish Institute for
International Studies. She has degrees in political science, and
her research focuses on Islam, the Middle East and radicalization
processes. Among her recent articles is “Religious secularism”, in
Secularism in the Arab Levant, ed. Louai Husayn (Damascus: Atlas
Publishing, 2007).
Brian Arly Jacobsen holds a PhD in the sociology of religion from
the University of Copenhagen, where he is currently a post.doc.
researcher specializing in religion and migration with a special
interest in Islam in Denmark. He has published extensively in
Danish and is the author of the entry on Denmark in Jørgen S.
Nielsen et al (eds), Yearbook of Muslims in Europe (Leiden: Brill,
annually from 2009).
Tina Jensen holds a PhD in anthropology and is a researcher at the
Danish National Centre for Social Research, where she works on
immigrants and ethnic minorities in Denmark with a focus on Muslims
organizations and movements. She is a member of 'Ethnobarometer –
International Research Network on Interethnic Politics and
Migration'.
Lene Kühle is Associate Professor in the Department of Religious
Studies, University of Aarhus. She has for a number of years been
involved in a study of religious pluralism in the city of Aarhus
and has published extensively on questions of religious pluralism.
Her article "Excuse me, which radical organization are you a member
of? Reflections on methods to study highly religious but
non-organized Muslims" appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, 34,7
(July 2011), 1186-1200.
Abdul Wahid Pedersen converted to Islam in 1982. He was librarian
and later board member at the Islamic Cultural Centre from 1984
until the late 1980s. Co-founder of and principal for ten years at
three Muslim schools in Denmark. He is currently imam of a
multi-ethnic Muslim congregation in Copenhagen and board member of
the Federal Council of Muslims in Denmark.
Lissi Rasmussen holds a PhD in theology based on research into
Christian-Muslim relations in Africa. She is a pastor in the
Copenhagen diocese of the Lutheran state church and the founder of
the Islamic-Christian Study Centre in Copenhagen. She has spent
extended periods as a prison chaplain, most recently focusing her
work on ethnic minority prisoners, about which she has published a
book. Her PhD was published as Christian-Muslim Relations in Africa
(London: British Academic Press, 1993).
Garbi Schmidt is professor at Culture and Identity, University of
Roskilde. Her field of research is sociology of religion, and she
has researched extensively in the multicultural suburbs of
Copenhagen. She currently leads a major research project on Social
Cohesion and Ethnic Diversity: National Discourses and Local
Implications. Her most recent publication is "Law and Identity:
Transnational Arranged Marriages and the Boundaries of Danishness",
Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 37,2 (2011), 257-275.
Mona Kanwal Sheikh holds a PhD in Political Science and is research
fellow at the Danish Institute of International Studies. Her
research relates to topics of religion and security, comparative
secularism and terrorism. Among her recent articles is “How does
religion matter? Pathways to religion in International Relations”
(Review of International Studies, 2011).
Jørgen Bæk Simonsen is Professor of Middle East Studies at the
University of Copenhagen. Having studied early Islamic history he
moved his research attention to the modern period. He is a former
director of the Danish Institute in Damascus. He has published
about Islam in Denmark and is the editor of Youth and Youth Culture
in the Contemporary Middle East (Århus: Aarhus University Press,
2005.
Kate Østergaard is a post.doc. researcher at the Faculty of
Humanities, University of Copoenhagen. An anthropologist her
research fields have been Morocco and Denmark. In recent years she
has worked on teaching materials for schools while her research has
been focused on Danish converts to Islam.
[T]he book offers some apprehensions of Islam and Muslims in
Denmark. Readers will get insights into the history of Muslim
settlement in the country and learn some things about the process
of the institutionalization of Islam. The book also mediates a
feeling of how a specific type of multiculturalist Danish scholars
and activists position themselves in the Danish debate about Muslim
immigration and Islam.
*ID: International Dialogue, A Multidisciplinary Journal of World
Affairs*
The 2006 responses to Danish cartoons depicting the Prophet
Muhammad thrust Islam in Denmark into the news, but Danes and
immigrant Muslims had been interacting for many years prior to this
event. This volume is the first in-depth treatment of Muslims and
Islam in Denmark, with a fine combination of ethnographic,
historical, political, and demographic perspectives. We learn about
the lived realities of Muslims and non-Muslims in schools,
neighborhoods, and religious settings. Denmark's particular
self-perception as a mono-cultural state makes the Danish
experience importantly different from those in France, Germany, and
Britain, and adds in important ways to our overall understanding of
Islam in Europe.
*John R. Bowen, Washington University in St. Louis*
Jørgen S. Nielsen, an internationally-renowned scholar on Islam,
has in collaboration with fifteen other scholars produced a
brilliantly comprehensive book on all aspects of the integration of
Islam and Muslims into Danish society. Danes who used to be
regarded as among the most tolerant people in Europe have in recent
years acquired a reputation for anti-Muslim sentiments. This book
tells a more nuanced story about a fifty-year long history of
acculturation and gradual accommodation to a pluralist society. The
chapters range from the history of Danish converts and
not-in-my-backyard resistance to mosque building to fertility rates
and an ethnographic study of why Muslim youths join extremist
groups. The contributors who are drawn from all fields of the
social sciences and include two imams present their research on
Danish Muslims grounded in the theories and facts of comparative
migration research. The book will appeal to readers who want to
know what the real story is about the Danish reaction to the
presence of Muslims in their midst as well as to those interested
in migration studies.
*Jytte Klausen, Lawrence A. Wien Professor of International
Cooperation, Brandeis University*
Denmark in recent years has become an epicenter of the debate on
Islam and Muslims in Europe. Islam in Denmark: The Challenge of
Diversity demonstrates that it is also producing some of the best
scholarship on the topic. Nielsen's edited volume is the definitive
multidisciplinary study of Islam in Denmark.
*Peter Mandaville, author of Global Political Islam*
Ask a Question About this Product More... |