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What is it like to be a Muslim possessed by a jinn spirit? How do you find refuge
from madness and evil spirits in a place like Denmark?
As elsewhere in
Europe and North America, Danish Muslims have become hypervisible through
intensive state monitoring, surveillance, and media coverage. Yet their religion
remains poorly understood and is frequently identified by politicians,
commentators, and even healthcare specialists as the underlying invisible cause
of ‘integration problems’.
Over several years Christian Suhr followed
Muslim patients being treated in a Danish mosque and in a psychiatric hospital.
With this book and award-winning film he provides a unique account of the
invisible dynamics of possession and psychosis, and an analysis of how the
bodies and souls of Muslim patients are shaped by the conflicting demands of
Islam and the psychiatric institutions of European nation-states.
The book
reveals how both psychiatric and Islamic healing work not only to produce relief
from pain, but also entail an ethical transformation of the patient and the
cultivation of religious and secular values through the experience of pain.
Creatively exploring the analytic possibilities provided by the use of a camera,
both text and film show how disruptive ritual techniques are used in healing to
destabilise individual perceptions and experiences of agency, so as to allow
patients to submit to the invisible powers of psychotropic medicine or God.
This collection of essays examines the place of ‘saints’ and sanctity in nineteenth-century Britain. It argues that holy men and women were pivotal in religious discourse, as subjects of veneration and inter-confessional contention. Protestants were as fascinated by such figures as Catholics were. Long after the mechanisms of canonization had disappeared, they continued not only to engage with the saints of the past but continued to make their own saints in all but name. Just as strikingly, it claims that devotional practices and language were not the property of orthodox Christians alone. Even in an age of confessional strife, doubt and secularisation, devotional practices and language remained central to how both Christians and their opponents reflected on that changing world. Making and remaking saints is significant, then, because until now no-one has explored how sainthood remained significant in this period both as an enduring institution and as a fruitful metaphor that could be transposed into unexpected contexts. Each of the chapters in this volume focuses on the reception of a particular individual or group. Together they will attract not just historians of religion, but those concerned with material culture, the cult of history, and with the reshaping of British identities in an age of faith and doubt
by the general, rather than the particular, world of the spiritual or numinous. But the dilemma is that, despite this urge away from particular dogmaticism, the Irish writer, in representing a culture in which the religious has been so pervasive, can hardly be expected to avoid the terminology of the religious. This problem was addressed interestingly, if not entirely satisfactorily, by John F. Deane in the introduction to his valuable anthology Irish Poetry of Faith and Doubt: The Cold Heaven.8 Deane says that his material is: poetry that has sprung from a
Faith and Doubt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 19–40. 14 George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, 4 vols (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1871–72), I: pp. v–vii; IV: p. 371. 15 Rowland E. Prothero, The Life and Correspondence of Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, 2 vols (London: John Murray, 1893), I: p. 116. 16 Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Almond, Heretic and Hero: Muhammad and the Victorians (Wiesbaden: O. Harrassowitz, 1989); Clinton Bennett, Victorian
the most comprehensive discussion of evangelicalism, see D. Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989). For the Oxford Movement, see P B. Nockles, The Oxford Movement in Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 ). For Broad Churchmen, see E. Jay, Faith and Doubt in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke & London: Macmillan Education, 1986 ), Chapter 3
Victorian schoolchildren looking for references to Tarshish, Tyre and Ophir would find them in Rider Haggard's 1885 adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines , but they were designed to give a sense of the exotic rather than to bolster belief. Conclusion Like much current work on nineteenth-century religion, this chapter has sought to nuance received assumptions about the direction of cultural and intellectual travel. On the one hand it shares the scepticism of recent work towards the now tired paradigm of ‘faith and doubt’ that takes
Venice, 1550-1670 , Oxford, 1983 , p. 117. For further debate on this subject, see Edwards, ‘Religious faith and doubt in late medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450-1500’, Past and Present , 120, 1988 , pp. 4-5 and ‘Why the Spanish Inquisition?’, Studies in Church History , XXIX, 1992 , pp. 227-9. 34