Forord

Forord

The ‘Radical Muslim’ in the Swedish News

The aim of this article is to illustrate how highly rudimentary computer-assisted text analysis can aid the preliminary mapping of public discourse. The case that has been chosen is the use of a particular combination of words, ‘radical’ and ‘Muslim’, in a corpus of articles published in the Swedish printed news media which have been accessed through the database Mediearkivet. Texts in the corpus were accessed and analysed using custom-made code in the programming language Python. The article shows how even limited skills in computer-assisted methods can aid scholars in discovering patterns and trends in a large collection of texts which is difficult, if not impossible, to process manually.

Young Muslims’ estrangement from Swedish majority society

Resumé

The term ‘radicalisation’ (radikalisering) in the Swedish public debate as seen by an elderly retired professor of Islamology

Resumé

Lene Kühle & Malik Larsen: Danmarks moskéer. Mangfoldighed og samspil. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag, 2019

Resumé

Islamic Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in India and Pakistan

India’s and Pakistan’s governments, like most of the world’s governments, responded to the spread of the COVID-19 virus with lockdowns, which in principle also affected religious institutions and rituals. However, Sunni mosques in Pakistan were not closed, as the government has no authority over autonomous religious organizations. In contrast, the Islamic organizations and institutions in India complied with government orders, and tried to present themselves as a “responsible minority” during a period when relations with the Hindu nationalist government were strained, and because a convention of the Tablīghī Jamāʿat had contributed considerably to the spread of the disease in the country and abroad. In Pakistan, the role of the “responsible minority” was played by the Shiites, who closed their mosques. On the whole, Muslim religious leaders and organizations showed little interest in taking a stand on the pandemic. Those few who make extensive use of the internet tend to address the better-educated social strata, and tend view pandemic-related restrictions more favorably.

Home prayer, unattended funerals and social responsibility: Muslims in Italy and the coronavirus outbreak (March-May 2020)

Sadly, in 2020 Italy was one of the countries hardest hit by coronavirus (by 26 February 2021 2020: 2,868,435 infected; 96,974 dead). All religious communities in Italy had to respond quickly and clearly to a common and invisible threat, while providing guidance and support to their local congregations and complying with government provisions in order to curb the spread of the virus. From 9 March to 2 May 2020, Italy’s approximately 2.9 million Muslims, like all other residents, had to abide by the country’s strict stay-at-home orders, refraining from going out except for emergencies and to buy food. In the present article, I will make use of selected texts published on the official websites of the Unione delle Comunità e Organizzazioni Islamiche in Italia (UCOII – Union of Islamic congregations and organizations in Italy – اتحاد الهيئات والجاليات الإسلامية في إيطاليا ) and of the As sociazione Islamica Italiana degli Imam e delle Guide Religiose (Italian Islamic Association of Imams and Religious Guides; الجمعية الإسلامية الإيطالية للأئمة والمرشدين ) to deter mine and discuss: 1) which practices of the Italian Islamic community were most affected by the epidemic, and 2) how Italian Muslims carried out various symbolic and social initiatives to demonstrate their active participation in the common fight against the spread of the virus.

Med bønnens kraft: Et islamisk og kristent arabisk perspektiv på covid-19

I de arabiske lande har covid-19, ligesom andre steder i verden, ført til restriktioner af den religiøse praksis, blandt andet i form af periodevis lukkede kirker og moskeer. Ligeledes har religiøse autoriteter med henvisning til religionen deltaget i debatten om covid-19’s betydning og håndtering. På denne baggrund analyseres i denne artikel, hvordan religiøse argumenter bekræfter henholdsvis udfordrer de arabiske staters håndtering af covid-19 i foråret 2020, og hvordan disse afspejler samspillet mellem stat og religion. Mens staterne gør brug af sundhedsvidenskabelig og sekulær argumentation, identificeres tre positioner blandt religiøse autoriteter: de, der støtter op om og med henvisning til religionen legitimerer staternes håndtering af covid-19; de, der finder alle svar i religionen og undgår at tale om politik; og de, der afviser og mistænkeliggør statens linje. Således afspejler debatten om håndtering af covid-19 i de arabiske lande gængse religiøse positioner i spørgsmålet om religionens rolle i samfundet.

The Russian Orthodox Church and the Pandemic: Problems, Challenges, Responses

The article discusses the reaction of the Russian Orthodox Church on the pandemic of COVID-19. This research identifies and analyzes major ideological cleavages on this issue, such as the possibility of transmitting viruses via the Eucharist, the religious meaning of the pandemic, and possibilities of digitalizing the rituals. The article pays special attention to the camp of Orthodox fundamentalists, whose reaction to the corona-crisis partially follows the international model of “COVID-dissidence” and partially taps into the domestic Russian sources, such as the mainstream ideology of geopolitical Messianism, entertained by the authoritarian regime. The author argues that the Orthodox take on COVID-19 magnifies major problems of the post-Soviet Church, including the excessive reliance on the state, “magical-fundamentalist” inclinations of the religious believers, and fears of digitalization.

GOD IS TELLING US SOMETHING

The conflicting and different reactions to Covid-19 pandemic, ranging from a willingness to cooperate with health authorities to a violent rejection of all decisions and measures suggested or taken by local and international authorities are but expressions of framing meanings of and finding answers to why Covid-19 broke out on a such global scale beyond biological boundaries. This is to show why epidemics such as Covid-19 deserve to be investigated within their broader cultural, political, scientific, and geographic contexts. Religion or the religious rationale once again has made itself a site of interest in the public space; both as one of the many competing explanatory frameworks and as a scapegoat for contributing to the breakdown of the social order and for promoting unscientific, irrational and superstitious understandings and interpretations of Covid-19. As a matter of fact, certain religious communities across all the Abrahamic religions do present theological and eschatological interpretations of the pandemic. As we shall see, Messianic Jewish groups actually present a hermeneutical framework that consists of a theological-eschatological framework of the Covid-19 pandemic and a socio-political pantheism plan of action the aim of which is to maintain the believer immune to the attacks of secularism and its ills. On the latter point, I find Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak’s explanatory framework of the Covid-19 pandemic very informative as both to how the religious rationale is still at work in post-secular societies, and why Jewish ultra-orthodoxy’s theological-eschatological explanation and social pantheist response are worth investigating. In this article, Rabbi Amnon Yitzhak’s “perception, interpretation and response” to the Covid-19 pandemic and its global impact on both the biological and the social aspects shall be the primary subject of our analysis.