Authors: Maria Lindebæk Lyngsoe and Simon Stjernholm

Published in: Contemporary Islam, Vol. 16, pp. 173–191

Publication Date: October 27, 2022

Publisher: Springer

This article advocates for an increased attention to how piously striving Muslims learn about, cultivate, and experience nearness to God. The empirical material is taken from authors’ current research on Danish Muslims’ engagement with Islamic teaching and learning. The Authors examine examples of oral teachings that instruct the audience to be constantly aware of God and address him directly in prayer, examples of how an awareness of God is cultivated and practiced in everyday life, and individual narratives of experiences of being close to or helped by God. With inspiration from the anthropology of Christianity as well as Islam, they propose an analytical model for understanding the process whereby Muslim efforts to draw near to God can ‘work’. Three interrelated dynamics are crucial to this process, and Authors identify each through Their reading of existing scholarship. The dynamics at play are, respectively, a taqwa-infused faith frame, its related semiotic ideology, and a relationship of experienced reciprocal agency with God.

Read the full article HERE.

Source: Springer

The Queen, who is one of Europe’s most respected and long-serving royals, said politicians needed to “put their foot down” and strictly uphold the country’s principles of democracy and gender equality in her unprecedented rallying cry. Denmark has taken in just under 15,000 asylum seekers in the last nine months, according to Government statistics, and has reintroduced border controls to stem the flow heading northwards towards neighboring Sweden.

The arrival of predominantly Muslim refugees has sparked a heated debate about migration in the country, which earlier this year saw a new law passed allowing the authorities to seize migrants’ assets to pay for housing and benefits. Some right-wing politicians have linked asylum seekers to the growing threat of Islamic State (ISIS) with one, the deputy leader of the anti-immigration Danish People’s Party, Soeren Espersen, issuing a Donald Trump-style call for a six-year ban on Muslim migrants entering the country.

And now the Nordic country’s Queen has intervened in the national debate with an outspoken rallying call to Muslim migrants to integrate into the country’s free, tolerant society. She said: “It’s not a law of nature that one becomes Danish by living in Denmark. It doesn’t necessarily happen…We thought that these things would take care of themselves. That if you walked through the streets of Copenhagen and drank the municipal water and rode the municipal bus, you’d soon become a Dane. It was so obvious to us, and therefore we thought that it must also be obvious for those who settled and lived here. It wasn’t.

Source: The Daily Express

The deputy party leader of the anti-immigrant Danish People’s Party, Soeren Espersen, and other officials said the existing 270,000 Muslims in Denmark, a country of less than 6 million people, already posed a severe risk of harboring sympathizers to the Islamic State militant group. Denmark’s largest party, the opposition Social Democrats, condemned the comments and compared them to the anti-immigrant policies of U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump.

Social Democrat lawmaker Lars Aslan Rasmussen, whose father is Muslim, said the Danish People’s Party’s position amounted to “religious discrimination, religious apartheid. … It’s far out.” Martin Henriksen, the Danish People’s Party immigration spokesman, told The Associated Press that his party — which supports Denmark’s year-old minority government but holds no positions inside it — would not seek a law explicitly banning Muslim immigrants, but that would be a primary goal.

“Islam is a belligerent religion. One should not be blind that many who commit terror find inspiration in Islam. That is why there is a connection between the number of Muslims in a country and the general security risk,” Henriksen said.

“If we can get it to a total halt, it would be very, very good,” Henriksen said. “We would like to get it as close to zero as possible.”

He declined to back the details of a proposal attributed to party colleague Espersen calling for Muslim immigrants specifically to be banned for four to six years. Espersen, who was quoted as telling this to the Berlingske newspaper, declined to comment Thursday to the AP…Denmark has experienced little violence from Islamic extremist quarters. The most recent deadly strike came in February 2015, when a Danish gunman of Palestinian descent killed a filmmaker and a guard at a synagogue and wounded five police officers before being fatally shot himself.

Source: Associated Press