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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.
Comments (London: Routledge, 2009). Kennedy, H., Muslim Spain and Portugal: A Political History of Al-Andalus (London: Longman, 1986). Kennedy, H., ‘Sicily and al-Andalus under Muslim rule’, in T. Reuter (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 3: c. 900 – c. 1024 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 646–69. Kennedy, H., ‘The Muslims in Europe’, in R. McKitterick (ed.), The New Cambridge Medieval History, Vol. 2: c. 700 – c. 900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 249–71. Kennedy, H., The Prophet and the Age of the
3 Haunted presents: the Holocaust as a yardstick The memory of the Holocaust is intensively used, often as a theoretical and practical yardstick, by both Muslim migrant minorities and the European ‘white’ majority. The fate of European Jewry in World War II is highly discernible in the perceptions and mutual relations between Europe and its Muslim migrants. Muslim migrants’ attitudes towards the Holocaust’s legacy constitute a useful starting point. With necessary caution one can say that, with exceptions, Muslims in Europe are ill-disposed to accept that the
assimilability of Muslims in Europe. Since the early 2000s, political actors and commentators have raised distinct challenges in response to various acts of terrorism conducted by European-born Muslims of South Asian, Middle Eastern, or North African backgrounds. Young men implicated in these attacks have presented their acts of violence in the name of Islam, despite the palpable but under-reported outcries by Muslims everywhere. Solutions identified by states converge on pressing the need for deeper loyalty to a set of dominant cultural values, which are
This volume aims to disclose the political, social and cultural factors that influenced the sanitary measures against epidemics developed in the Mediterranean during the long nineteenth century. The contributions to the book provide new interdisciplinary insights to the booming field of ‘quarantine studies’ through a systematic use of the analytic categories of space, identity and power. The ultimate goal is to show the multidimensional nature of quarantine, the intimate links that sanitary administrations and institutions had with the territorial organization of states, international trade, the construction of national, colonial, religious and professional identities or the configuration of political regimes. The circum-Mediterranean geographical spread of the case studies contained in this volume illuminates the similarities and differences around and across this sea, on the southern and northern shores, in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Greek, Italian, English and French-speaking domains. At the same time, it is highly interested in engaging in the global English-speaking community, offering a wide range of terms, sources, bibliography, interpretative tools and views produced and elaborated in various Mediterranean countries. The historical approach will be useful to recognize the secular tensions that still lie behind present-day issues such as the return of epidemics or the global flows of migrants and refugees.
questions and difficulties encountered by 170 Haunted presents minorities. It has developed since the mid-1990s, mainly for Muslims living in North America and Europe, that is, for those who do not dwell in Muslim countries as Muslims are meant to. Fiqh al-Aqalliyat was first developed by Taha Jaber al-Alwani mainly for North American Muslims, and by Yusuf al-Qaradawi for Muslims in Europe. Both are graduates of Al-Azhar University in Cairo.7 Specifically, these transplanted Muslims are no longer living in Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam, where Muslim law prevails
-three teenagers, it explores factors mediating exclusion and inclusion, examining the strategic and innovative approaches of Muslim youth to negotiating their inclusion in Irish society. Age at the time of immigration is underlined as a major factor affecting the experiences of young migrants which is frequently overlooked in policies and initiatives aimed at fostering inclusion. The chapter engages with wider debates regarding expressions of ethnic and religious identity by young Muslims in Europe. It critiques essentialist views of contemporary pluralist society which
and Schönwälder, ‘How the Federal Republic became an immigration country’. See Zachary Shore, Breeding Bin Ladens: America, Islam, and the Future of Europe (Baltimore MD, 2006); and Bruce Bawer, While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within (London, 2006). For an insight into the relationship between Islam and Europe more widely, see Bernard Lewis, Islam and the West (Oxford, 1993); and Iftikhar H. Malik, Islam and Modernity: Muslims in Europe and the United States (London, 2004). 3940 Foreigners, minorities and integration:Layout 1
Muslims in Europe, but he also attracts extraordinary hostility. He is frequently identified as a spearhead of the Muslim Brotherhood, charged with spreading Sharia to Europe and North America, but in an insidious way that permits him to be intermittently critical of the Brotherhood. The principal evidence supporting this theory, which cannot be decisively refuted because the
exceed 5,000. (It is not rare to find estimates three, four or more times greater than this figure.4) Fighting in the name of Islam wherever it is attacked by the kufr, the infidels, is seen as a means to solidify the nation of Islam, the ummah. In a nutshell, second- and third-generation Muslims in Europe have lost any affiliation to their parents’ and forefathers’ countries of origin. This is coupled to a deep sense of alienation and estrangement within their European host countries. These young people become Jihadists who nurture a contempt for the artificial