A Critical Assessment of Turkish Islamic Feminism: A Simone de Beauvoirian Perspective

From the early years of the Turkish Republic to the end of the 1990s, the individuals who constitute the Turkish Islamic feminist movement have been the ‘other’ to Kemalist secular women. In the mid-2000s, having found a solution to the ‘headscarf question’, Muslim women started to express their demands, ranging from equal opportunities in education to the transformation of patriarchal structures and the reconstruction of female identity. The article’s main objective is to develop arguments for how dilemmas can be transcended in the process of identity-building. The main hypothesis put forward is that the participants in the Turkish Islamic feminist movement, who could turn their dilemmas into advantages if they managed to establish their relationship with the ‘other’ in line with the universal secular values of equality and freedom, will achieve their existential freedom only to the extent that they are able to act from an existential perspective.

Generalised Trust among Second-Generation Muslim and Non-Muslim Minority Groups in Europe

This study compares generalised trust between second-generation Muslim and non- Muslim migrant groups in Europe, and examines the effect on trust of discrimination and cultural transmission. Analysis of data from the European Social Survey of 4,687 respondents in 32 European countries shows that second-generation Muslim groups have lower levels of trust than second-generation non-Muslim minority groups. The findings provide no evidence that Muslims’ lower levels of trust are due to discrimination and exclusion. Rather, results indicate that the differences are due to cultural transmission: Muslim groups originate more often from low-trust societies, and generalised trust is transmitted from one generation to the next.

Ottoman History and the Islamic-Ottoman Cultural Legacy in Bosnia in the First Edition of the Encyclopaedia of Yugoslavia (1950–1971)

The article analyses how the first edition of the Encyclopedia of Yugoslavia (1955–1971) treated the Ottoman history and Islamo-Ottoman cultural legacy. The article is based on encyclopedic articles, documents related to the editing and writing of the encyclopedia and marginalia written by the editor-in-chief of the project. The first edition of the EJ was affected – albeit inconsistently – by the officially sanctioned anti-Ottoman discourse that presented this era as the time of oppression and backwardness. The Ottoman history in Bosnia was seen as an important topic and it was given a large space. In contrast to the articles on ideologically important topics, a large portion of articles on Ottoman history was written in a neutral manner. The Islamo-Ottoman contributions to Bosnian cultural legacy were marginalized as part of the deliberate editorial policy. This policy changed only in the last, 8th, volume reflecting political changes in the country.

The Practice of Two Danish Female Islamic Authorities Facilitating Divorce

Research on Muslim divorce practices in Europe often focuses exclusively on male Islamic authority, neglecting the role of women. This article compares the Islamic divorce practice of two female Islamic authorities with that of nineteen male Islamic authorities to demonstrate that women have important roles in relation to Islamic divorce. It also analyses how the two Danish female informants, Zaynab and Aisha, function as highly specialised volunteer social workers, referring Muslim women to shelters and guiding them through their Islamic divorce. Thus, the article points out a vacuum in the services provided by the Danish state – the lack of knowledge about conflicts relating to Islamic divorce – which makes professional social workers a less relevant option for Muslim women experiencing nikah-captivity (marital captivity within an Islamic symbolic frame of reference).

‘How is one supposed to sleep when the Ka‘ba is over there?’

The aim of this article is to present data from the first study using interviews with Swedish hajj pilgrims, conducted during 2016 and 2017 by the Institute for Language and Folklore, Gothenburg; the Museum of World Culture, Gothenburg; Södertörn University, Stockholm; and Gothenburg Univetsity. Among the questions asked within the framework of the project were, for example, how Swedish Muslims experience the hajj; how they prepare for the trip to Saudi Arabia; how the pilgrimage is organized by Swedish Muslim organizations (e.g. hajj travel agencies); whether the pilgrimage is only perceived as a religious journey; and whether the intergroup conflicts and variations that exist among Muslims effect the hajj? The last question will be addressed by focusing on how Swedish Ahmadiyya Muslims are affected by the fact that the Pakistani and Saudi states do not regard them as Muslims.

Who’s Afraid of Religious Extremism?

This article explores the dynamics of competition between Muslim organisations in Ukraine after the eruption of the Russian–Ukrainian crisis in March 2014. In particular, it deals with the issue of religious extremism as another ideological fault line between two main centres of Islamic religious authority, the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Ukraine (SAMU) and the Spiritual Administration of Muslims of Ukraine ‘Umma’ (SAMU-Umma). Although these structures agreed that Islam as a religion should be completely dissociated from all manifestations of extremism and terrorism, their inherent theological and cultural differences led to the SAMU and the SAMU-Umma adopting mutually exclusive discursive strategies for achieving this goal.

Hidden Aspects of Social and Historical Development of Islamic Community in Sisak, Croatia

This article presents the efforts of the Islamic community in Sisak, Croatia, to achieve better social status and recognition in the local environment from the 1960s until today. By applying anthropological perspectives, we present the Islamic community’s long-lasting efforts of building a mosque, presenting their personal experience related to cultural identity and belonging. The aim is to present aspirations of the Islamic community during and after socialism focusing on inter-institutional communication and diverse integration strategies. We approach the Islamic community from an ethnographic perspective, conducting interviews with community members and searching documents in archives.

Security and Religion: The Discursive Self-legitimation of the Chechen Authorities

This article analyses the official discourse of the Chechen authorities and posits that it reflects the government’s efforts as self-legitimation. This investigation seeks to identify the mechanisms exploited by the Chechen regime to boost self-legitimacy by examining the ‘News’ programme on the Chechen state television channel ‘Grozny’, which, in the authoritarian setting of Chechnya, became the government’s mouthpiece and a propagator of official discourse. To provide for the context and to boost findings, the study is complemented by a discursive analysis of one more historical-political television programme and a political advertisement that was broadcast by the same channel during the period in which the fieldwork took place. The collected data is processed using Critical Discourse Analysis.

Co-radicalisation of Islamist and Nativist Extremists in Europe

A vast amount of social science research has been dedicated to the study of Islamist extremism – in particular, to uncover its psychological and structural drivers. However, the recent revival of extreme-right extremism points to the need to investigate this re-emerging phenomenon. This article highlights some of the characteristics of the extremisation of Islamism in Europe in parallel with the rise of the extremisation of right-wing extremist groups. In doing so, we explore similarities between Islamist and right-wing extremist individuals and groups. The main premise of the article is that a threat-regulation approach fails to understand the role of contextual and structural factors in the political and religious extremisation of individuals. Instead, the article claims that a reciprocal-threat model can better explain extremist violence since it is based on the idea that nativist and Islamist extremist individuals/groups are mutually threatening each other.