‘Anthropologists are Talking’:About Islam, Muslims and Law in Contemporary Europe

Abstract

In contemporary Europe, Islam and Muslims are rightly or wrongly often perceived as the ‘other’. Among the central foci of concern in many Western European countries with a significant presence of Muslims, the law has featured prominently in recent years. What can anthropology tell us about the multiple ways in which European Muslims engage with liberal and secular laws and the state? Perhaps no other contemporary scholar in anthropology has written more extensively about these issues than Professor John R. Bowen. As part of an ongoing series in public anthropology, Professor Bowen engaged in a public conversation with Professor Oddbjørn Leirvik and Postdoctoral Fellow Sindre Bangstad at The House of Literature in Oslo, Norway on 27 September 2011. Due to technical failures, the conversation had to be re-recorded at the Grand Hotel in Oslo on 28 September 2011.

Keywords:

• Europe
• Muslims
• Islam
• shari‘a
• shari‘a councils
• France
• Britain

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Cato Fossum for transcribing this conversation, and referees and editors at Ethnos for useful comments and suggestions. Financial support from the Fritt Ord Foundation is gratefully acknowledged, as is practical assistance and facilitation from the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, the Faculty of Theology at the University of Oslo, the trans-disciplinary PluRel-programme at the University of Oslo, and the think-tank Minotenk.

Notes

1. For studies of the EDL, see Treadwell and Garland (2010) and Allen (2011).

2. See Bowen (2010).

3. In a more specific sense, the term ‘the community of the middle way’ refers to Islamic scholars and activists who adhere to the wasatiyya (‘centrist, moderate’) trend within contemporary Islamism, which emerged in the Arab Middle East in the 1970 and 1980s, and is more amenable to a reconciliation with human rights, democracy and women's rights than classical Islamist thinking was. See Browers (2009) for a study of the wasatiyya trend in the Arab Middle East. In Europe, adherents to this trend include Tariq Ramadan and Tareq Oubrou. See Peter (2006) for this.

4. See Bowen (2010: 4).

5. See Manji (2004).

6. See Asad (1986).

7. For an in-depth exploration of this particular fatwa, see Caeiro (2004).

8. The Hanbali madhab, which originated with Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855), dominates in Saudi Arabia, and is often regarded by academic scholars as more rigid and less flexible than other Sunni madhahibs (see Hallaq 2009 for this).

9. Hudud punishments are practiced for example in (Sunni-dominated) Saudi Arabia and (Shia-dominated) Iran.

10. See Bowen (2009).

11. See Center for Security Policy (2011). The Director of this neo-conservative think-thank is Frank Gaffney, named in Ali (2011) as one of the central figures in the US right-wing Islamophobia network. The research for the report was undertaken by the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish lawyer and activist David Yerushalmi, who also developed the blue-print for the ‘anti-shari‘a’-bills adopted by a number of US state legislatures. Gaffney alleged in the aftermath of US President Barack Obama's speech in Cairo in Egypt in 2009 that Obama was in fact a Muslim (see Ali 2011: 31), and Yerushalmi is described by the Jewish Anti-Defamation League (ADL) as having a long record of ‘anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant and anti-black bigotry’ (see Elliott 2011).

12. See Ishaq (2009).

13. As from 2011, Jean and John L. Comaroff are based at Harvard University in the USA. The interview with the Comaroffs was published as Bangstad et al. (2012).

14. See Bowen (2007).

15. Contemporary academic usage of the Aristotelian term habitus can be traced back to the work of the late French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (see Bourdieu 1977 in particular).

16. See Bowen (1993).

17. See Bowen (2003).

18. See Bowen (2012) for more on this.

19. Collections of the deeds and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.

20. See Rawls (1993).

21. See TV2 (2006).

22. See Botvar and Wyller (2009).

23. See Døving et al. (2012).

24. See Bowen (2004).

25. Yusuf al-Qaradawi is a graduate of al-Azhar in Cairo, Egypt, but has since the 1970s been based in Qatar. See Gräf and Skovgaard-Petersen (2009).