Contemporary Muslim Lay Piety. Interpretations, Performance and Mobilization
A Nordic research group for explorative workshops funded in 2022–2024 by NOS-HS.
The purpose of the series of workshops is to bring together junior and senior Nordic scholars who have a shared interest in the study of contemporary developments in Muslim ritual practices, aesthetics and mobilization.
This research group intends to investigate contemporary Muslim lay mobilization by reconsidering how Islamic interpretive domains develop, with attention to subjectivities, agency and spatiality. We claim piety practices, soundscapes and visual culture to be understudied key tools in transmission of Islamic knowledge. These creative operations mostly take place outside the dominating Islamic institutions and therefore require comprehensive methodological considerations as well as ethical reflection.
The issues addressed by the research group span a broad field: from conservative stands on disciplining personal devotion to attempts to formulate modes of pious interaction in line with liberal theological thinking. The communicative means chosen by smaller groups will represent a multitude of expressive modalities: ritual and performative genres, guidance and sermons, literary and visual repertoires, modest fashion.
Taking transnational mobility and global communication as decisive conditions, the ambition is to investigate the following range of questions: How do these lay interpreters reflect different appreciations of what they esteem as tradition in the contemporary world? How do they establish and defend new interpretive domains? On what theological grounds do such developments relate to new pious performance genres, mobilization and Islamic authority claims? How do local actors navigate between traditional Islamic reluctance to accept overly exuberant communication forms and contemporary modes of expression in art and popular culture?
By engaging with these questions, we will be able to develop a novel perspective on grassroot actors’ ambitions to teach and transmit Islamic knowledge within their communities. This practice-oriented approach to religious knowledge production and its forms of transmission recognizes the existence of spaces, speakers, genres and means of communication other than those conventionally encountered in the study of religion. The original contribution of the research group is thus twofold. Firstly, its analyses are based on the identification of often overlooked lay activities, and the collection of data will offer a focus on the content of religion, not only its social formations and political implications. Secondly, the juxtaposition of ethnographic and aesthetical studies facilitates exploration of transformations in religious repertoires.
Cooperating Nordic departments
- Anders Ackfeldt, Lund University and The Swedish Institute in Istanbul
- Ingvild Flaskerud, University of Oslo
- Susanne Olsson, Stockholm University
- Catharina Raudvere, University of Copenhagen
- Simon Stjernholm, University of Copenhagen