Language Use and Islamic Practices in Multilingual Europe

2018

This paper draws on the fieldwork conducted into the language practices of Muslim individuals in the Nordic countries and the Netherlands. All the informants in the study were born in the Muslim quarter in the Indian sub-continent, with the exception of one informant who is from Suriname. Few works (Schor, 1985; Haque, 2014, 2012; Zolberg & Woon, 1999) in sociolinguistics seem to focus on the practice of Islam by immigrants in their daily lives, in which a plethora of languages are used for different functions. Previous works (Peach & Vertovec 1997; Ogan et al. 2013) have shown that the perception of Muslims in Europe is not favourable, and this factor has become a constraint when seeking to collect data for a large sample of the population. Sociolinguistic and ethnographic tools such as questionnaires, interviews, field notes and participant observation were employed to gain insight into socio-cultural practices and linguistic attitudes. The diachronic case studies have provided an...

Numen

This article empirically explores the interplay between the secular, post-Lutheran majority culture and Muslim immigrants in Sweden. It presents the ambiguous role of religion in the country’s mainstream discourse, the othering of religion that is characteristic to this, and the expectations of Muslims to be strongly religious that follows as its consequence. Four results of a web-panel survey with Swedes of Muslim and Christian family background are then presented: (1) Both groups largely distance themselves from their own religious heritage – the Muslims do this in a more definite way; (2) the Muslim respondents have more secular values and identities than the Christians; (3) contrary expectations, Christian respondents show more affinity to their religious heritage than the Muslims do to theirs; and (4) the fusion between the groups is prominent. The article concludes that equating religious family heritage with religious identity is precipitous in the case of Swedish Muslims.

Muslim Communities in the Scandinavian Countries (1960-2011), 2017

Islam and Muslims in Scandinavia are new and also had some previous contracts with Muslim countries. They have a definite historical stance and evidence in the Scandinavian countries. Scandinavians are renowned for saving Jews during World War II. At the same time, Scandinavian countries accepted a large number of Muslim immigrants and refugees from Asian and African countries. From an outsider’s perspective, these tend to be regarded as an entity, and undoubtedly the origin of the Scandinavian Muslims lies in the migration of Muslims from other parts of the world. Of the three Scandinavian countries, Sweden was the first to come into close contact with the Muslim world and the first known conversion to Islam was in the late seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, Sweden dwindled as a world power and the Ottoman Empire was in decline. These two powers allied to keep the rising Russian empire in check. This alliance, coupled with the fact that the Swedish king Carl XII lived under the protection of the Ottoman caliph Sultan Ahmad III from 1709 to 1714. For this, the Swedes made interested in the Muslim world. These links also paved the way for Sweden to grant freedom of worship to Muslims. Historians trace the origin of the present Scandinavian Muslim communities to some main waves of migration that the Muslims of Eastern Europe and then the Afro-Asian Muslims wave. After World War II Muslim immigrants started to come to Sweden when Turkish-speaking Tartars came from Finland and Estonia. The first Islamic Union of Sweden was established by these immigrants in 1948. Scandinavia has this reputation for tolerance and openness and it also has seen rising levels of racism and anti-immigrant prejudice and hostilities. The Muslims in these countries; Sweden, Norway, and Denmark are certainly a minority community concerning the Christians. This paper analyzes the historical background and present situation of the Muslim communities and new Muslims in these countries and deals primarily with the shaping of Islam in the Scandinavian Peninsula. This kind of research helps us understand the multi-religious character and sense of tolerance of society.

2014

This essay discusses the religious upbringing experiences and reflections upon them articulated by 53 Muslim American youth who were interviewed as part of a larger sociological study of Arab American teenagers living transnationally. On extended sojourns in their parents' homelands, these youth-most were born in the US although some migrated to the US at a young age-were taken "back home" to Palestine and Jordan by their parents so they could learn "their language, culture, and religion". They were asked about learning to be Muslim in the US and overseas in the context of a much larger set of questions about their transnational life experiences. The data provide insights into the various types of early religious learning experiences Muslims have access to in a US Christian-majority context. The essay then examines how these youth later experienced and interpreted being Muslim in a place where Muslims are a majority. The study found that while a majority of youth said they learned more about their faith, almost half (42%) said that it was the same as in the US, that they did not learn more, or that the experience contributed both positively and negatively to their religious understanding. Key to these differences was the character of their experiences with being Muslim in the US. A majority of girls and of youth who attended full-time Islamic schools and/or were part of a vibrant Muslim community in the US gave one of the latter responses. On the other hand, most of the boys who grew up isolated from other Muslims in the US reported learning more about Islam. They were especially pleased with the convenience of praying in mosques and with being able to pray in public without stares. The data show that living where one is part of the dominant religious culture does not necessarily make for a deeper experience of religion. What seems to matter more is the type of experience with being Muslim each youth brings into the situation, as it was these that informed their subjective interpretations of what it means to be Muslim.

1997

This insightful volume treats the world of the learned classes in the region of Awadh, in Muslim North India, with its famous capital Lucknow, from the fifteenth to the twentieth centuries. It focusses on those circles which carried, promoted, and reflected acculturation and interference in ...

Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 2007

Crossing Over: Comparing Recent Immigration in …, 2005

In Gibney, Matthew J. and Hansen, Randall (Eds.) Immigration and Asylum: From 1900 to the present. Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-CLIO., 2005

The literature suggests that religion may play an important role in the acculturation process of immigrants by contributing to the maintenance of the heritage culture and preventing identification with the mainstream. With few exceptions, studies on this topic have focused on religion as a whole by assessing specific aspects or dimensions (such as religious identification, beliefs and practices) and creating a composite measure without analyzing the contribution of each dimension to the acculturation process. In this study, the relationships between specific religious dimensions and acculturation were assessed with a sample of 282 Muslim immigrants who were recruited in the Northern part of Italy. Two regression models show that religious identification drives the maintenance of Muslim culture but is unrelated to the acculturation to Italian culture, whereas beliefs and practices do not contribute to heritage acculturation but are negatively associated to acculturation to the host c...

This course introduces students to the social, political and historical dynamics that shape the lives of Muslim minorities in Western Europe and North America. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 situates Islam and Muslims within the larger European and American polities, by comparing how church-State relations, colonial history, immigration and racial inequalities have affected the representation of Islam in the European and American imaginations. Part 2 unpacks a series of public controversies over Islam and Muslims that have occurred over the past few decades and explores what they reveal about Euro-American societies. Part 3 investigates how Islam is lived among ordinary European and American Muslims, with several sessions devoted to ethnographic reading about Muslim life. This course exposes students to a variety of perspectives across the social sciences (history, political science, anthropology, sociology). It takes a comparative stance by covering a plurality of national contexts (France, the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, the Netherlands, Denmark, Canada, Belgium, etc.). By the end of this class, students will be familiar with the various public and academic debates surrounding European and American Muslims and will be able to mobilize tools from the social sciences to critically discuss religion, secularism, citizenship, discrimination and violence in Western contexts.