Islam in Denmark: The Challenge of Diversity

Little has been published in English about Islam in Denmark although interest grew after the cartoons crisis of 2005-6. Danish research on the subject is extensive, and this volume aims to present some of the most recent to an international audience. While many of the circumstances which apply across western Europe — the history of immigration and refugees, settlement, the growth of Muslim organizations and international links, challenges of social and cultural encounter, and more recently Islam as a security issue — also apply in Denmark, there are also differences. A small, compact country with no recent imperial history, Denmark's unified institutional, religious and social culture can make it difficult for newcomers to integrate. The fourteen chapters in this book cover the topic in three parts. The first part deals with the history and statistics of immigration and settlement, and the religious institutional responses, Christian and Muslim. Part two looks at specific issues and the interaction with the developing national debate about identity and minority. Finally part three presents the experience of four active participants in the processes of integration: youth work and hospital chaplaincy, interreligious dialogue, and the views of an imam.

Table of Contents:
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)

About the Author :
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 Sheikhholds 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.

Review :
[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. 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. 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. 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.