The development of Islamic landscapes in Europe, is first and foremost related to Islamic authority. Religious authority relies on persuasiveness and deals with issues of truth, authenticity, ...legitimacy, trust, and ethics with reference to religious matters. This study argues that Islamic authority-making among European Muslims is a social and relational practice that is much broader and versatile than theological proficiency and personal status. It can also be conferred to objects, activities, and events. The book explores various ways in which Islamic authority is being constituted among Muslims in Western Europe with a particular focus on the role of ‘ordinary’ Muslims.
The development of an Islamic infrastructure by Muslims with a migrant background in European contexts has hardly been addressed as expressing a sign of putting down local roots, but rather as an ...activity that contradicts such a process. However, the various ways in which Muslim migrants have built up local Muslim spaces, both now and in the past, are ordinary modalities of locality production. This is a contentious, complex, and multi-faceted dynamic. By unpacking a historical and a contemporary case, I shall address three broad questions: (1) What are the conditions for Muslim space-making? (2) What are the evolving and contested notions of space and locality that are being produced over time, and what are the religious underpinnings of this process? (3) Who are the main actors and what are the power configurations in which this process unfolds?
Social media contributions surrounding the Charlie Hebdo attacks have been key in the creation and evolution of the image of Islam online. While the attacks were seen as an affront to French values ...and ways of life, online exchanges have traveled around the globe. Especially with social media platforms, such as Twitter and Instagram, offering immediate translations of captions has increased the reach of posts immensely. Specifically, hashtag use has the ability to transcend national boundaries and helps in the creation of echo chambers and or fuels trench warfare online. This article extends on this work by examining how the image of Islam is transmitted and changed on Instagram through the use of the hashtag #CharlieHebdo. Specifically, the following three primary research questions are examined: (1) How does hashtag co-occurrence, in the discussion surrounding Charlie Hebdo, indicate echo chamber behavior? (2) How does trench warfare impact the debate surrounding the image of Islam within the #CharlieHebdo conversation? (3) Which categories can posts be put into based on other hashtags that are used simultaneously? To answer these questions, Instagram posts, posted nearly 6 years after the Charlie Hebdo attack was perpetrated in Paris and during the time of the trials of the suspects took place, are used as a case study. It was found that Islamophobia within the Charlie Hebdo debate online indeed indicates echo chamber behavior. The significance of this study was found to be two-fold. First, it extends the research on detecting echo chamber behavior through social network analysis and sentiment analysis of co-used hashtags. Second, it highlights the fact that trench warfare is a well understood tactic by Instagram users, for the hijacking of hashtags, and the role it plays in the polarization of hashtag communities.
The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York in September 2001 and subsequent events not only ignited a 'war on terror', but also marked a crucial change in the policies on integration of migrants of ...Islamic background in Europe. Most countries departed from integration policies based on some sort of recognition of cultural diversity and emphasized national culture as the only legitimate format for citizenship. The result is a strengthening of a frame of governance with the aim to regulate Islamic practices and to mould outlooks, institutional settings and legal arrangements into the nation-state format. This has been referred to as the 'domestication of Islam'. One of the consequences is the narrowing down of research agendas and academic knowledge production. In this article I explore this process and address important fields of study that tend to be neglected in the study of Islam in Europe.
Global conditions, under which an increasing number of Muslims in the world currently live, do not just generate idioms of purity often adduced to global Islam, but also new and diverse forms of ...sociability and notions of global citizenship. This article addresses, as an example in case, Hizmet, one of the fastest growing contemporary Islamic movements. Hizmet and its founder Fethullah Gülen propagate a global Islamic doctrine with explicitly cosmopolitan underpinnings. However, there seems to be a contradiction between the cosmopolitan inclusiveness and universality of Gülen's global message, and strong internal hierarchical structures and the disciplining modes of teaching and training that are applied by the movement to teach the doctrine. I will argue that there is no contradiction between these two aspects when we focus on the central position of 'hermeneutics of the self' and civic responsibility in Gülen's theology.
Global conditions, under which an increasing number of Muslims in the world currently live, do not just generate idioms of purity often adduced to global Islam, but also new and diverse forms of ...sociability and notions of global citizenship. This article addresses, as an example in case, Hizmet, one of the fastest growing contemporary Islamic movements. Hizmet and its founder Fethullah Gulen propagate a global Islamic doctrine with explicitly cosmopolitan underpinnings. However, there seems to be a contradiction between the cosmopolitan inclusiveness and universality of Gulen's global message, and strong internal hierarchical structures and the disciplining modes of teaching and training that are applied by the movement to teach the doctrine. I will argue that there is no contradiction between these two aspects when we focus on the central position of 'hermeneutics of the self' and civic responsibility in Gulen's theology.
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