Advising and Warning the People: Swedish Salafis on Violence, Renunciation and Life in the Suburbs

The chapter analyses the public discourse of a Swedish Salafi group, concerned with concrete social ills in the local community. The group is against violence, carrying out missionary activities focused on piety, correct practice and behaviour. Three topics are analysed using material from their YouTube-channel: 1) Reaching Paradise through Renunciation, 2) Establishing a Non-Violent Strategy, and 3) Social development. Through missionary activities (daʿwa), they respond to the current situation with foreign fighters, terrorism and gang criminality. The message is straightforward and self-assured as it attempts to disrupt the positive images some young people may have of violent lifestyles and create new role models to emulate. They are thereby striving to present a positive message: if people join their project of moral reform and renunciation, they will contribute to strengthening suburbs and create a peaceful environment. At the same time, in-group identity construction is strong and exclusionist.

Brief Reminders: Muslim Preachers, Mediation and Time

This chapter explores a willingness on behalf of certain Muslim preachers to move beyond traditional preaching styles and create material that fits well within current social media practices. Focusing on the media productions of two Muslim preachers in Sweden, the chapter analyses how they experiment with oratory genres and modes. Using self-imposed brevity and multimodal communication in a type of media production defined here as a ‘reminder’, these preachers try to exhort their audiences to consider matters felt to be of pressing religious nature. The examples illustrate attempts to expand the reach of Islamic religious discourses beyond mosque environments and into the everyday life of an audience, with the potential of achieving a different kind of rhetorical work than a regular lecture or sermon.

Epilogue

In this epilogue, the volume’s editors comment on some of the shared themes throughout the book’s chapters. Two important forces of change that have affected Muslim preaching are especially highlighted: the emergence of the nation-state and media developments.

Introduction

On 4 July 2014, about a month after Islamic State had conquered the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, the jihadist group's leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi (1971–2019), now declaring himself caliph, led the Friday sermon – the khuṭbat al-jum ‘a – from the city's famous al-Nuri mosque. The fact that this ...

Discourses on Marriage, Religious Identity and Gender in Medieval and Contemporary Islamic Preaching: Continuities and Adaptations

Because homiletics has been associated with marriage since the origins of Islam, analysing sermons on marriage from different historical periods allows us to identify continuities within the homiletic tradition and detect developments reflecting the preacher’s adaptation of his message to suit the needs, expectations and values of his audience. This chapter explores Islamic homiletic discourses about marriage, gender, and marital relations in an anonymous sixteenth-century Egyptian hortatory sermon (mawʿiẓa) on ‘the inalienable rights of the two spouses’ and a contemporary Friday khuṭba on ‘the path to a healthy marriage,’ preached by a Los Angeles-based American Muslim in 2016. This cross-cultural diachronic analysis seeks to explain how each preacher interprets the meaning of marriage, represents spousal relations and defines gender identities and roles for his audience. It then addresses the broader question of how to account for the continuities and adaptability of Islam as a religious tradition in light of changing circumstances.

The Framework of Islamic Rhetoric: The Ritual of the KhuṬba and its Origin

The Friday sermon in the mosque (which is not explicitly referred to in the Qur’an) has a structure that has been practiced at least since the beginning of the 8th century. Several scholars have pointed out that its structure with a two-part sermon as the basic element can be derived from the Jewish (or Judaeo-Christian) sabbath service with its supplications, Torah-reading and subsequent supplications. Sources indicate, however, that the Islamic ceremony may have been quite different in the first Islamic century. The word minbar originally designated the throne of a ruler and has many parallels in the ancient Middle East and Ethiopia from where the word actually comes. It can be argued that the Friday sermon in the beginning was a proclamation of the ruler seated on a throne, a custom which was discarded by circles opposed to the Umayyads.

Friday Sermons in a Secular State: Religious Institutionbuilding in Modern Turkey

By virtue of its secularism (laicism), Turkey holds a unique place in the Muslim world concerning centralization and state control of religious life. Less secular-oriented Egypt and Jordan, have increasingly entered a similar path, and in that context Turkey offers a telling example of the dynamics involved in such processes. The chapter’s focus is on Diyanet, the institution charged with the implementation of religious streamlining, but it also addresses questions related to official Friday sermonizing, where central control has created its own dilemmas. What happens when very different mosque audiences are addressed with the same hutbe (Friday sermon)? What about the unifying impact on the national community of discourses produced by an increasingly powerful and distant religious agency? Such issues are discussed in the light of the tensions encountered, when religion and official homiletics are subordinated to the aims of a secularism-oriented Muslim nation-state.

Instructive Speech Among Bosnian Muslim Women: Sermons, Lessons or Guidance?

The chapter analyzes teaching traditions among Muslim women in Bosnia and how Islamic knowledge is transmitted, embedded in practices such as prayers, Quran recitation, singing and teaching. A case is provided of some Sarajevo women’s recitation gathering (mukabela) at the end of Ramadan which included instructive speech of some length. A young preacher (vaiza) made use of the common genre elements for a Muslim sermon and moved with confidence between comments on the Quran, paraphrases of narratives from the hadith and moral stories set in the present. The vaiza’s legitimacy to speak in the mosque was based on her formal education, reputation of personal piety and knowledge of local prayer and song traditions. Hence the audience accepted the preacher’s authority to give ethical guidance and included her interpretations of contemporary Muslim life with their conceptions of national heritage.

The Khuṭba Scene in Arab Religious Films and TV Dramas

An imam delivering a khutba is a standard scene in Arab films and tv-serials. It can, however, convey different intended meanings, depending not only on the words pronounced, but also on the camera’s focus: do we see the preacher’s face and state of mind, or the impact he makes on his listener? And how about the distance and hierarchy between them? Analyzing these scenes, this chapter points to a development whereby the top-down sermon has gradually become unpopular and today is mainly used to depict extremist preachers addressing their loyalist followers. More positive depictions of preachers have often moved to more level-field discussion circles where they take the concerns of their listeners to heart.

Preaching and the Problem of Religious Authority in Medieval Islam

Popular preachers, known by various terms including qāṣṣ (storyteller) and wā`iẓ (admonisher), played an important role in medieval Islamic society as conveyors of religious knowledge to the common people. Their prominence, and what their critics viewed as their unreliability and corruption, provoked an effort by the `ulamā’ (religious scholars) to restrict their activities. The scholars’ campaign against the popular preachers was part of their larger struggle against what they viewed as illicit innovation (bid`a). The popular preachers, however, had their defenders, including some prominent Sufis. The preachers were able to take advantage of the persistent informality of religious authority in medieval Islam, and so remained influential figures in shaping Islam as it was experienced by the general Muslim populace.