At the borders of the coroNATION: samfundssind, Muslim immigrants and suspicious solidarity in Denmark

ABSTRACT

Muslim immigrants are vulnerable to COVID-19. They are not only at risk being infected due to extended households and frontline jobs, but they are also vulnerable to moral panics, stigmatization and corona-racism. When Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen in March 2020 closed down society, she appealed to the samfundssind (civic consciousness) of all citizens in Denmark, as a means to fight the invisible enemy of the global pandemic. The idea of samfundssind outlined a moral community between those citizens who did their best to follow the instructions of the authorities and those who deliberately ignored them. This article discusses the establishment of “Taskforce COVID-19”, an ad hoc network of Danish-Pakistanis that in 2020–21 collaborated with municipalities and different health authorities in order to fight the virus. However, despite their aspiration to be accepted and included in the collective of citizens exhibiting samfundssind their efforts were questioned and regarded with suspicion.

KEYWORDS:

• COVID-19
• racism
• Pakistani community
• Muslims
• civil society
• Denmark

In the introduction to the anthology “Det epidemiske samfund” (The epidemic society), Nicolas Schultz and Ole B. Jensen suggest that COVID-19 opened “a sociological window” that exposed some of the fundamental processes, values, and principles that organize society (Schultz and Jensen 2020, 15). Several authors have started a critical discussion of the impact of COVID-19 in terms of racism and nationalism, and how it affected migrants and refugees (Elias et al. 2021; Isaac and Elrick 2021; Meghji and Niang 2021; Perry, Whitehead, and Grubbs 2021; Solomos 2021). In this article, I focus on the case of Denmark and argue that the national campaign and action launched in March 2020 to prevent the spread of COVID-19 resulted in a specific version of the nation as a community of ethnos, the “real” Danes (Rytter 2010), who systematically excluded and marginalized Muslim immigrants. Inspired by Homi Bhabha’s seminal chapter “dissemiNATION” (1990), in which he emphasizes how nations are always narrative constructions, I propose the term “coroNATION” to address and discuss the specific version of the Danish nation that emerged during the first phases of the pandemic.

The emerging coroNATION was created from three connected elements. First, the idea that a unique samfundssind (civic consciousness) characterized the Danes during the pandemic; second, the idea of Danish exceptionalism, highlighted when national media discussed the numbers of infections and deaths in Denmark compared to other countries on a daily basis; finally, the coroNATION is the result of “real time data” produced by researchers and Danish health authorities to monitor the spread of the virus in different regions, neighbourhoods, and ethnic communities. The result was an ongoing stigmatization and exclusion of Muslim immigrants suspected to lack the moral virtues that supposedly characterize the majority population. In this article, the emerging contours of solidarity, membership, and belonging are discussed as a particular kind of coroNATION. However, the paper begins with a concrete example of how Muslim immigrants were stigmatized in relation to the spread of COVID-19.

In the first week of August 2020, statistics showed that 179 out of 341 citizens infected with COVID-19 in Aarhus had a Somali background. The alarming number resulted in a moral panic. Some suggested that it was by the celebration of Eid al-Adha in late July; others pointed to the funeral of the local rap musician “Schmur”, with the birth name Abukar Hassan Ali, who was shot and killed in Aarhus on 22 July 2020. According to the local police, approximately 500 guests participated in his funeral. National politicians would soon go on national and social media to suggest various radical measures to prevent the spread of the virus. In an interview about the spread of COVID-19 among Danish-Somalis in Aarhus, Inger Støjberg, the then vice chairman of The Liberal Party (Venstre), suggested forced admission of groups that do not follow the government’s instructions on social distancing and self-isolation.¹ Pia Kjærsgaard, one of the founders of The Danish People’s Party (Dansk Folkeparti), suggested enforced testing and simply “shut[ting] down the ghettos”,² in order to prevent the spread of COVID-19.³

In the days that followed, there were reports of Danish-Somalis who were harassed and treated with suspicion by their neighbours. A Danish-Somali mother was asked by her daughter’s day nursery (vuggestue) to keep the little girl at home because the teachers were afraid of being infected with the virus. Several citizens in Aarhus contacted the bus company “Midttrafik” and requested that Danish-Somali bus drivers be removed from the job, and a boy was harassed during football practice and called a “corona Somali” (corona-somalier).⁴

The suspicion and fear of black bodies that suddenly surfaced had many similarities with the way African refugees were constructed as a particular threat in relation to the spread of HIV/AIDS in Denmark in the 1980s. Back then, the black, foreign African body was misrepresented as dangerous, contagious and potentially damaging to the (white) Danish population and nation (Seeberg 1996; see also Farmer (1992) 2006). Similarly, Danish-Somalis all over Denmark were suddenly subjected to a particular kind of “corona racism”. They were portrayed as a segment of the population that either did not understand the information provided by the health authorities or did not possess the adequate mental capacity to understand how to protect themselves and their fellow citizens from the virus – or perhaps they deliberately ignored the instructions from the Danish Health Authority (Sundhedsstyrelsen) and the government?⁵

Some weeks later, the infection numbers among Danish-Pakistanis reached an alarming 30 per cent of all infected citizens in Copenhagen. The racist treatment of the Danish-Somali community in Aarhus was a strong motivation for a group of resourceful middle-aged Danish-Pakistanis to establish a new ad hoc organization within a few hours: the “Taskforce COVID-19”. The taskforce was established with the hope of preventing family members and the migrant community in general from falling victim to the same kind of stigma and corona racism that had surfaced in Aarhus.

Anthropologist Kristoffer Albris suggests that a catastrophe or crisis always has a double function: on the one hand, it is destructive and negative, on the other hand, it tends to foster altruism, social innovation, and a new form of solidarity (Albris 2017, 5). Similarly, this article discusses the establishment and work of Taskforce COVID-19 and how they aspired to be seen and recognized as accepted members of the coroNATION as they did their best to exhibit and perform samfundssind. However, the paper also argues that their aspirations were contested and seen as suspicious. In general, the coroNATION feeds on ongoing border-work, whereby different Muslim immigrants are excluded and their loyalty and belonging to the nation are questioned.

The article starts by giving some background information of the study and the socio-economic conditions of the Danish-Pakistani community in general. Then, it elaborates on the idea of samfundssind and discusses how it is linked to the production of “real time data” in the emerging coroNATION. Then, the empirical case of the establishment, accomplishment, and contestation of Taskforce COVID-19 is presented before a final discussion of the dynamics and borders of the coroNATION.

Data collection and the Danish-Pakistani community

The data presented in this article was collected as part of the international interdisciplinary research project “Solidarities: Negotiating Migrant Deservingness”.⁶

The case study of Taskforce COVID-19 is based on data collected from August 2020 to August 2021, when I followed the establishment, work and development of the taskforce. I interviewed several of the actors involved as well as civil servants of different municipalities who worked with the taskforce. I followed the campaigns of the taskforce on social media (SoMe) and presentations of their work and efforts in national media. I also attended seminars about immigrants and COVID-19. Finally, the data consists of the life stories and welfare biographies of fifteen elderly Danish-Pakistani citizens collected during the corona lockdown in the summer and autumn of 2020.⁷ Some of the interviews took place online and all of them were conducted in Urdu.⁸

When you write about a recent event, in this case, actions taken against the spread of COVID-19 in 2020–21, there is the risk of “presentism”. The pandemic is still with us, and the coroNATION may become manifested in new ways after this article is published. The members of the taskforce quoted in the article are not anonymized since much of their work has already been presented and communicated in public. Still, it should be emphasized that I am the one weaving a theoretical argument out of the individual interviews and activities of the taskforce (cf. Rytter 2013).

All members of Taskforce COVID-19 are related to the Danish-Pakistani community that consists of approximately 25,000 people with a family history related to Pakistan. A vast majority are settled in Greater Copenhagen. Many of the elderly members of the community came to Denmark in the 1960s and 1970s as labour migrants or on the family reunification scheme. Many of the migrants’ children, however, were born and raised in Denmark, which is also the case for several of the members of the taskforce.

As has been discussed in other European countries, immigrant communities are particularly vulnerable to the spread of COVID-19 (Saunes, Vrangbæk, and Byrkeflot 2021). Zooming in on the Danish-Pakistani Muslim community, many are engaged as frontline workers in the welfare state: as medical doctors, nurses, dentists, teachers, care workers or cleaners. Others risk being exposed to COVID-19 through jobs in the private sector, such as being taxi or bus drivers, working at restaurants or in the catering businesses, or working behind the till in small grocery stores and kiosks.

In addition, the household compositions make the Danish-Pakistanis particularly vulnerable. Register data show that 41 per cent of Danish-Pakistanis aged 65–74 live with extended family in households with at least one of their adult children, in-laws, and grandchildren (Liversage and Rytter 2022). By contrast, only 3 per cent of the total population aged 65–74 in Denmark live with one or more of their children.

The families that cannot afford a big house in the suburbs often organize their everyday lives in so-called “families with open doors” (Schmidt 2002), where elderly family members live in their own apartment or house but in proximity to their adult children. In this living arrangement they can not only share time, finances, and meals but also the responsibility of raising children and taking care of the elderly family members.

Finally, the Danish-Pakistani community has transnational links to villages and kinship networks in the old country and many citizens travel back and forth between Denmark and Pakistan on a regular basis (Rytter 2013). In June 2020, Danish media reported that a plane from Lahore, Pakistan, landed in Copenhagen airport carrying 18 passengers infected with COVID-19.⁹ Media stories like this fed into the concern that the immigrants’ transnational family relations posed a potential health threat to the Danish population and society in general.

In sum, most citizens of the Danish-Pakistani community were vulnerable to COVID-19 as result of their labour market attachment, their family and household structure, and their transnational connections – the elderly members of the community found it particularly difficult to isolate themselves.

Before presenting the work of Taskforce COVID-19, I will elaborate on the emic notion of samfundssind, which was crucial to the emerging coroNATION in Denmark.

Samfundssind as a unique Danish quality

On 11 March 2020, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen, representing the Social Democrats (Socialdemokraterne), spoke to the nation on national television. She explained that the government, advised by the health authorities, had decided to shut down Denmark in order to prevent an uncontrolled spread of COVID-19. She appealed to the courage and willingness of the population to understand and respect all the restrictions presented by the health authorities, but she also presented a solution as to how the Danes could fight the invisible enemy:

The health professionals’ infection analysis shows that there is one thing that works against the infection: that we humans do not interact with each other too much. We need to stand together and we need to take care of each other. But we have to do it differently to how we would usually. As Danes, we tend to seek community by being close to each other. Now, we must stand together by keeping our distance. And we will need samfundssind. We will need helpfulness. I would like to thank all citizens, companies, voluntary organisations, organisers – everyone who so far has shown that this is exactly what we have in Denmark – samfundssind. (Mette Frederiksen, 11 March 2020)

The concept of samfundssind soon became widely used in Denmark by politicians, CEOs, journalists and in everyday interactions, when citizens discussed the pandemic and tried to make sense of all the new rules for social interactions presented by the authorities. These included: not shaking hands, hugging, visiting restaurants and bars, no theatre or cinema, sport activities, etc. Instead, people were asked to stay at home and work online. The concept of samfundssind became so significant and widely used in Danish discourses that in December 2020, it won the annual “Word of the year” (årets ord) competition in the programme “Klog på sprog” broadcasted on the Danish radio station P1.

The emic concept of samfundssind is difficult to translate as it encapsulates a range of connotations and associations related to common ideas of Danish society and what it means to be Danish. Literally, the concept combines the word samfund, meaning society, and sind, meaning mind, mentality, or consciousness. After consulting different colleagues, I suggest that the best translation of samfundssind is “civic consciousness”. Others have suggested the translation “community spirit” – as an echo of Emilie Durkheim, this translation makes you think of society as an organic whole containing a community with a common spirit or attitude. Still, the concept of samfundssind has religious connotations. Carsten Jensen links Christian love and charity (næstekærlighed) with the notion of samfundssind (Jensen 2014), while Linda Lapina links it to the national romantic celebration of the Danish nation, history and people by the nineteenth century theologian, philosopher, poet, and politician N.F.S. Grundtvig.¹⁰

No matter which historical trajectory you emphasize, samfundssind is both an individual and inherent quality. You can have and exhibit samfundssind – it is proven by your deeds and the way you behave in public spaces – but it is also a capacity and a practice that constitutes the larger collective, as the spirit, mind, or mentality of the entire nation. As Mette Frederiksen put it “ … it is exactly what we have in Denmark – Samfundssind”. When samfundssind was used by the Prime Minister in her speech to the nation, it afforded a certain way to talk about, see and understand the nation and the relationship between each individual in the entire population.

However, samfundssind is also defined by its own negative opposition. You only have samfundssind as long as you exhibit, show and practise it – otherwise you lose it and do not have it anymore. Samfundssind primarily becomes salient and pertinent when people violate tacit norms and rules, e.g. a man refusing to wear a facemask in public transportation or a couple that insists on having twelve people over for drinks on a Friday evening. If this is the case, they obviously prove that they have no samfundssind.

Finally, samfundssind is also a moral demand that provides each citizen with a unique opportunity to prove his or her dedication and loyalty to the national imagined community. In this respect, samfundssind is an act of patriotism whereby citizens work for the common good to protect fellow citizens and the Danish nation itself.

Samfundssind was not a random concept chosen by Mette Frederiksen for this specific occasion. The concept was introduced in political discourse by the Social Democratic Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning (1873–1942) in the 1930s during the economic crisis, when he appealed to the Danish people not to hoard the limited supply of groceries in shops. Stauning is often presented as the founding father of the welfare state, and by aligning herself with him, Mette Frederiksen implicitly appraised her own status and leadership. By reinvigorating the concept of samfundssind, the Prime Minister linked the outbreak of COVID-19 to an (almost) mythical time: the birth of the welfare state before the immigration of labour migrants, family reunifications, and refugees (which began in the 1960s). Frederiksen invoked a time when Denmark was a largely ethnically homogeneous society (Gundelach 2002; Schmidt 2020) and an all-white nation. In this respect, the appeal to the population’s samfundssind was racialized from the very beginning.

After the Prime Minister’s speech to the nation, politicians, journalists, and CEOs from private companies repeatedly conjured up the idea of samfundssind when they addressed the Danish exceptionalism and unique collective capacity to fight COVID-19. Although samfundssind is not supposed to distinguish people based on income, gender, or generations, it soon became clear that the samfundssind of Muslim immigrants were less obvious – illustrated by the outbreak of corona-racism in Aarhus.

Even though the concept of samfundssind offered ways to conceptualize the relationship between the pandemic, the nation-state and emerging contours of solidarity between individuals and segments of the Danish population, the emic concept also expanded the suspicion towards Muslim immigrants that for many years have been constructed as having a questionable relationship to the nation and welfare state (Hervik 2011, 2021; Kublitz 2010; Jensen, Schmidt, and Vitus 2019; Rytter and Pedersen 2014; Rytter 2019a).

The next section explores how the production of “real time data” contributed to the stigmatization and separation of the Muslim minority from the majority of the Danish population that was able to exhibit the desired samfundssind.

Constructing the coroNATION

It is well known that social research is often influenced by “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer and Glick Schiller 2003) whereby knowledge is produced within the frame of the nation-state and as such contributes to the reproduction of the imagined community and the idea of a coherent society.

Sociologist Willem Schinkel (2013) discusses the significance of “ocular centres” in the construction of society and the nation as a coherent entity. Ocular centres are the public or private research institutions that, based on register data, quantitative surveys, and statistics, produce knowledge about the entire population, but with a special focus on the segments of the population categorized as immigrants, refugees, or foreigners. Such statistics often focus on how minority groups deviate from the majority population in relation to labour market attachment, family forms, health, religion, engagement in civil society, etc. The result is twofold: the majority of the population is constructed as the unmarked standard and norm, while immigrants and refugees are reduced to someone standing outside society that is encouraged (has) to change and adapt to the standard of the general population through the transformative processes called “integration” (Olwig and Paerregaard 2011). In this respect, the statistics produced and circulated by ocular centres seem to contribute to a particular kind of “numerological racism” (Hage 2014).

Just like in Schinkel’s Dutch case, the Danish state collects data on the entire population via their personal security numbers. There are several ocular centres in Denmark – for example, VIVE – The Danish Centre for Social Science Research or The Rockwool Foundation’s Research Unit – that produce numerous reports and surveys on the well-being of the Danish population but also monitor groups categorized as immigrants, refugees, or foreigners. A third example is Danmarks Videnscenter for Integration (Denmarks’s Knowledge Centre for Integration), which closed after two years in 2021, but in this time still managed to publish 40 reports focusing on aspects of everyday life among immigrants and refugees. Finally, the Ministry of Immigration and Integration also publishes reports and statistics that monitor the status of immigrants and refugees in Danish society.

I present this (incomplete) list of ocular centres simply to establish the fact that there are many similarities between Schinkel’s observations in the Netherlands and the case of Denmark. In both countries, ocular centres constantly produce numbers and statistics on various subjects relating to the welfare state while reinforcing the idea of a delimited society containing a nation with an unmarked majority population and a (Muslim) minority of immigrants, refugees and foreigners who are positioned outside of society, constantly having to aspire to be classified as “integrated”. The latter groups always lack something that the majority population possesses per se (Schinkel 2017). The omnipresent demand of “integration” resembles a Sisyphean task to which every immigrant and refugee is subjected (Rytter 2019a). The result is a systematic production of exclusion and non-belonging (Korteweg 2017).

However, only eight days after the Prime Minister’s speech to the nation, a new ocular centre, the so-called HOPE Project, was launched. On 19 March 2020, the Carlsberg Foundation announced that:

As a direct result of the spread of the Corona virus and the acute health crisis in Denmark and the rest of the world, the Carlsberg Foundation grants DKK 25 million to a new Semper Ardens project to investigate behaviour in both the public space and on social media.

The general idea was to engage in what they called “real-time data collection” on the attitudes, feelings, opinions, and behaviour of the Danish population in relation to the spreading virus.¹¹

Soon after the launch of the HOPE Project, the principal investigator, Michael Bang Petersen, professor in political science at Aarhus University, appeared on national television, in newspapers and on the radio on a regular basis to present the latest surveys and statistics. There was a mere matter of hours or days between the production of new statistics and their dissemination to a wider national audience. In this respect, the HOPE Project contributed to the production and reproduction of the coroNATION. In Benedict Anderson’s classical presentation of “the imagined community” (Andersson 1983) he emphasizes how the morning ritual of reading the daily newspapers across the country contributed to creating the idea of a coherent nation; In 2020–21, the daily report on national radio and/or TV from the HOPE Project (and other corona-experts) about the status of the spread of COVID-19 had the same effect, and most likely influenced how the Danish population reacted to and understood the pandemic.¹²

Furthermore, the media regularly compared the numbers of COVID-19 infections and deaths in Denmark with the situation in neighbouring countries – especially Sweden, which, in the beginning, chose a much more liberal, laissez-faire approach than the strict lockdown that was the official strategy in Denmark (cf. Saunes, Vrangbæk, and Byrkeflot 2021).

All in all, the HOPE Project became an ocular centre that provided a vocabulary of what to think, feel and how to react to the spread of COVID-19. Soon, the HOPE project and other COVID-19 experts (Søren Brostrøm, Lone Simonsen, Allan Randrup Thomsen, Kaare Mølbak, etc.) and politicians began to focus on the groups with high infection numbers or less willingness to be vaccinated. In both cases, the (Muslim) immigrant population was singled out in the surveys and statistics as “a problematic group” – this was the case with the outbreak among Somalis in Aarhus and later in August 2020 when suddenly 30 per cent of the infected citizens in Copenhagen turned out to have a Pakistani family background.

The first phase: the campaign of Taskforce COVID-19

When the infection rate in Copenhagen showed a significant overrepresentation of citizens with a Pakistani background, an immediate response was needed. The city hall contacted Anser Hussain, the chairman of DPAC – Danish Pakistani Affair Council,¹³ and invited him to gather some people and attend a meeting later that evening. In addition to some members of DPAC, Hussain also reached out to Progressive Citizens X, an informal network of Danish-Pakistanis that had hosted several events on education and career planning with the DPAC. Many of the people involved in Progressive Citizens X had a background in activism from their previous involvement in Muslim Youth League (MYL) and Women Youth League (WYL), the male and female youth organizations in the local Danish branch of the international, religious organization Minhaj-ul-Quran (Rytter 2003).

At the meeting, it was decided to establish Taskforce COVID-19, that should reach out to the Danish-Pakistani community and especially to the elders who might have limited proficiency in reading and understanding Danish. Dr Urfan Ahmad, a medical doctor aged 40, with his own medical practice in a suburb south of Copenhagen, was elected as spokesman. He was well-spoken in Danish and Urdu and had the medical expertise to answer questions related to COVID-19 and the activities of the taskforce.

The taskforce agreed on a three-step strategy: (1) to distribute information material, posters, and pamphlets; (2) to create an information campaign on SoMe; (3) to use TV and radio to communicate the message of isolating and social distancing and to inform Danish-Pakistani families about COVID-19.

The first element of the strategy was straightforward. The taskforce divided the different local areas and neighbourhoods between them. They did not restrict themselves to Copenhagen but also included the municipalities south of the capital where many Danish-Pakistanis live (Rytter 2013). They went to the kiosks, grocery stores, sweetshops and restaurants selling South Asian food, and they visited all the mosques. The information material was in Urdu and Danish, and since it was handed out by members of the taskforce, the shop and restaurant owners and the mosques all agreed to participate and hand out the material at their venue. Soon, posters with messages like “keep social distancing” written in Urdu could be seen all over Greater Copenhagen (if you knew where to look).

The second step was to launch an information campaign on SoMe, as Anser Hussain explained:

Our target group does not read Danish newspapers, or follow national TV or radio. They use Viper, Line, WhatsApp, Pakistani news media in Pakistan and Denmark, Facebook groups, etc. The Danish authorities do not have access to these media platforms. When we present health instructions, we reach a different audience than when Søren Brostrøm¹⁴ presents the same instructions. (Anser Hussain)

On the very first evening at the City Hall, the taskforce took pictures and produced a small video where they instructed people on how to behave and keep a distance.

Soon after, they produced a second video that went viral on SoMe. It was uploaded on 17 September 2020 and featured Faiza, a Danish-Pakistani woman in her 30s. The video is produced with a smartphone. Faiza is sitting in a hospital bed with oxygen tubes in her nostrils. Gasping for breath, she explains that she has been infected with COVID-19 and has ended up in the hospital because she also suffers from asthma. Crying, she declares that this is the worst experience she has ever had, since she cannot breathe and she fears that she will not survive the night. She just wants to go home to her children. At the end, she warns other families to stay home and to take care of their elders.

The video was seen by many people (at the time of writing, it has been viewed 3,500 times on Facebook) and discussed among families and networks. It was a testament to how serious COVID-19 actually could be in some cases.

The taskforce also produced small videos with Frank Jensen, the mayor of Copenhagen (representing the Social Democrats), and later similar videos with the mayors of Albertslund and Hvidovre. Similarly, the taskforce approached the Pakistani ambassador and convinced him to participate in a SoMe campaign. The rationale was that elderly members of the Danish-Pakistani community would most likely listen if they received the message from high-ranking people who they knew, trusted and respected.

The final strategy was to be present in the media and to describe the work and contribution of the taskforce. Dr Urfan Ahmed (and a few times his substitute Tanwir Ahmad) appeared on national TV, on the radio and in newspaper articles, where he explained the specific challenges Danish-Pakistani families (and Muslim immigrants in general) faced in relation to protecting themselves against the virus. Further, the taskforce presented their work via livestreams from mosques, and they contacted local Pakistani media in the Copenhagen area where a couple of radio stations broadcast in Urdu. Finally, they reached out to media in the Kharian and Gujrat areas in Pakistan where most Pakistani families in Denmark originate from (Rytter 2013). Despite living in Denmark, many elderly people still follow Pakistani news, so in this way, they could now read about the work of Taskforce COVID-19 in the local Pakistani newspapers.

In general, the media campaign raised awareness of how to protect oneself and fight COVID-19, but it also promoted members of the taskforce as people who were dedicated to helping other Danish-Pakistani families in the migrant community. They stood out as representatives of the new generation of Danish-Pakistanis who did their best to exhibit and practise the samfundssind called for by the Danish Prime Minister. Furthermore, the taskforce offered the municipalities of Greater Copenhagen unique access to the infrastructure of the migrant community. In other words, they made it possible for the municipalities and health authorities to reach citizens who are often out of reach of different Danish authorities.

On 1 October 2020, the taskforce announced on Facebook that only three weeks after their first meeting with representatives from the municipality the number of infected citizens with a Danish-Pakistani background in Copenhagen was reduced from 30 per cent to 3 per cent. They ended the post with these words: “The latest numbers show that our efforts have made a difference. We had a common mission and that was to reduce the high numbers of infected – we succeeded.”

The second phase: the national vaccine programme

After the first lockdown, the pandemic moved into its second phase in early 2021 when the vaccine from Pfizer was made available free of charge to the entire population of Denmark. One of the first 35,000 citizens to get the Pfizer vaccine was Dr Urfan Ahmad. As a medical practitioner, he was included in the segment of healthcare personnel who were offered the first vaccines. On 25 January 2021, he posted a short video on Facebook that documented him receiving the vaccine while explaining in Urdu why it was important to get the vaccine, and that he would make sure his own family received it as soon as possible.

Despite the efforts, numbers and statistics showed that especially in the suburbs south of Copenhagen, the vaccination rate in Muslim immigrant groups lagged behind. Various explanations for this were discussed – was it due to language difficulties, ignorance, or the outcome of a deliberate decision not to follow the instructions given by the Danish Health Authority and the government?

In this period, Dr Ahmad was extremely busy. He appeared in several livestreams from mosques, where Danish-Pakistani families could sit at home and watch prominent community leaders and Dr Ahmad discuss the COVID-19 precautions of social distancing, improved hygiene, self-isolation and the importance of accepting the vaccine in order to protect yourself and your family. Several of the elderly Danish-Pakistani citizens we interviewed for the project in 2021 actually related, how they received information about the virus from listening to Dr Ahmad on the internet.

Dr Ahmad also gave presentations of care workers (SOSU assistants) in Ishøj municipality and trained the volunteers from “Bydelsmødre”¹⁵ (Neighbourhood Mothers) in reaching out to teach their peers about precautions against the virus. The training became helpful when the local branch of Bydelsmødre in Brøndby literally went from door to door to inform people in the local neighbourhood about COVID-19 and the vaccine programme.¹⁶

In sum, Dr Urfan Ahmad used himself, his platform as head of Minhaj Ul-Quran and his medical expertise to reach out and convince fellow Danish-Pakistanis that they should practise social distancing and accept the national vaccine programme.

On 31 July 2021, DPAC hosted the annual Mango Festival in Albertslund. In course of the day, several hundred people, mostly Danish-Pakistanis, participated in the festival and enjoyed the numerous stalls with food and handicrafts, and different musicians promoted on a stage. DPAC wanted to include a pop-up vaccine centre at the festival, but the municipality could not gather the necessary healthcare personnel as the event took place on a Saturday in the middle of the holiday period. Instead, DPAC offered to bring their own healthcare personnel. Consequently, Dr Urfan Ahmad and others spent a full day offering the vaccine to festival guests. More than forty citizens were vaccinated that Saturday. At the end of the day, Steen Christensen, the mayor of Albertslund, attended the festival in order to thank DPAC, Dr Ahmad and the other volunteers for their efforts to fight COVID-19 in the local area.

The second phase of the pandemic offered an opportunity for the members of Taskforce COVID-19 to prove themselves as good citizens that have and exhibit samfundssind. They did everything (and maybe even more) that could be expected of them, and they worked hard to circulate information in the migrant community and encourage Danish-Pakistanis to accept the vaccine programme.

The third phase: merging religion and health campaigns

From the outset, a major player in circulating information about COVID-19 were the mosques. Each of them made an effort to follow the rules and guidance from the Danish health authorities and to instruct the congregation on how to behave and socialize (or rather, not socialize) during the pandemic. In March 2020, the mosques suspended the common Friday prayer and later in April, during the month of Ramadan, the daily tarawih prayer, iftar dinner arrangements and the public celebration of Eid were suspended – instead Muslim citizens were encouraged to celebrate at home with only their closest family.

The mosques were included in Taskforce COVID-19’s campaign in September 2020, as they provided a perfect venue to distribute brochures and posters. The taskforce also received 2,500 small bottles of hand sanitizer, and members of the taskforce manually changed the labels on all the bottles to ones that provided information about COVID-19 in Urdu. The bottles were distributed during Friday prayers at mosques in the Copenhagen area.

The Danish authorities were also aware of the important role of the religious communities and the mosques when it came to encouraging and convincing Muslim citizens to accept the vaccine. Consequently, on 7 May 2021, the Danish Health Authority published the pamphlet “Spørgsmål og svar om islam og vaccination mod COVID-19” (Questions and answers on Islam and vaccinations against COVID-19) (Sundhedsstyrelsen 2021). The reason for producing the pamphlet is stated on its first page:

The COVID-19 vaccines are an effective weapon in the fight against the pandemic, but they can also cause concern – including religious concern. Therefore, the following organisations, Dansk Islamisk Center, Diyanet (Dansk-Tyrkisk Islamisk Stiftelse), Den Islamiske Union i Danmark, Dansk Marokkansk Forum, Muslimernes Fællesråd, Dansk Muslimsk Union and Minhaj-ul-Quran Denmark, in collaboration with the national Health Authority have tried to address some of the most common concerns and questions raised by Danish Muslims regarding the vaccines against COVID-19. (Sundhedsstyrelsen 2021, 4)

The pamphlet had two prefaces. One written by Søren Brostrøm, Director of the Danish Health Authority, and one written by Imam Naveed Baig, representing the Danish Islamic Center (DIC). This was done to emphasize the collaboration between the Health Authorities and the religious organizations.

The first part of the pamphlet was devoted to health-related questions, while the second part tackled some of the rumours about COVID-19 that circulated in Muslim immigrant networks. The pamphlet addressed questions like: “Are the vaccines halal?”, “Are they based on animals and/or alcohol?”, “Will the vaccine have an impact on my fertility?” and “Am I allowed to get the vaccine during Ramadan?”

The pamphlet furthermore emphasized that: “to care for your health and well-being is an obligation for every Muslim. Trust in God and active self-help goes hand in hand; they are not contradictions but supplementary” (Sundhedsstyrelsen 2021, 10). Finally, the text referred to the Sunna and how “The Prophet Muhammad received and recommended medical treatment and said ‘tadawu’ (seek treatment)” (Sundhedsstyrelsen 2021, 10). The pamphlet was published in Danish, Arabic, English, Farsi, Somali, Turkish and Urdu.

At first sight, the pamphlet seemed like a timely intervention to counter the negative rumours that circulated about the national vaccine programme and to encourage Muslim immigrants to accept and embrace the vaccines. However, the response from politicians in the national parliament was a combination of surprise and outrage. Marcus Knuth, representing the Conservative People’s Party (Konservativt Folkeparti), soon called the Minister of Health, Magnus Heunicke (representing the Social Democrats) to attend a hearing in the health commission (Sundhedsudvalget) to explain why the Danish Health Authority had initiated a collaboration with Islamic religious authorities, and why religion was merged with a national information campaign.

The hearing took place on 24 June 2021. Magnus Heunicke explained the process that lead to the production of the pamphlet and reassured the commission that the pamphlet was disseminating health information authorized by the authorities with the important goal to inform certain (Muslim) segments of the population about COVID-19. Even so, the Minister was met with numerous critical questions about the connection between health information and religious guidance. At the end of the hearing, the Minister had to express regret and apologize for the fact that the Danish Health Authority had initiated the collaboration and included imams and religious organizations in their campaign. Today, the pamphlet has been removed from the Danish Health Authority’s website.

Despite the exemplary effort and strong collaboration between NGOs like Taskforce COVID-19, mosques and different municipalities, it was unacceptable to the national politicians that a health campaign was created in collaboration with imams and Islamic organizations. This can be explained by the general Islam-sceptical approach that has dominated Danish national politics and discourses about immigrants in recent decades (Kublitz 2010; Hervik 2011, 2021; Rytter and Pedersen 2014; Rytter 2019a). The fight against the pandemic was obviously at the top of the political agenda. However, the Islam-sceptical caretakers of the coroNATION could simply not accept that winning the fight meant collaborating with imams and Islamic organizations in order to reach out to citizens with a Muslim immigrant background.

Discussion: samfundssind and visions of society

After the lockdown in March 2020, the contours of a coroNATION took shape. The coroNATION included Danish citizens who were able to express, exhibit and perform the right kind of samfundssind. This was mainly done by docilely following the instructions, recommendations and restrictions provided by the government and various health authorities and experts that appeared frequently on national television and radio, from March 2020 until the end of the data collection period, August 2021. While the idea of samfundssind is appealing, it is a rather problematic way to delimit the nation, as it exposes and stigmatizes those groups who are singled out as not having or not exhibiting the desired samfundssind. Just as samfundssind conjures up the idea and image of an exceptional Danish national character as an inherent capacity of the population, it simultaneously excludes minority groups from the national community per se.

Some may find the thorough focus in this article on samfundssind redundant. On the contrary, I suggest that the concept is essential in order to analyse and understand the local constructions of racism, exclusion and othering that erupted in Denmark during the pandemic. The old notion of samfundssind, relaunched by the Prime Minister in her speech on national TV, promoted some very specific ways to imagine the Danish nation and population that ended up having severe consequences for the relationship between minorities and majorities.

Following the extended case of Taskforce COVID-19 and the moral outrage against the pamphlet produced by the Danish Health Authority, we begin to understand what kind of society the Prime Minister was referring to in her speech – it was obviously not a vision of a society that prioritized Islam. Rather, it was a society dominated by the Danish version of secularism, in which the national constitution (Grundloven) states that Folkekirken (The People’s Church) is Evangelic-Lutheran and that the monarch must belong to the church. By January 2020, 74.3 per cent of the total Danish population were members of The People’s Church.¹⁷ In 2016, the government presented a new Danish Canon (Danmarkskanonen) which was the result of a long process. The process included a committee of experts that, based on public meetings around the country, identified a list of twenty values that, after an election among the Danish population, were reduced to a list of the ten most important national values.¹⁸ Here, the common Christian heritage (den kristne kulturarv) was selected as one of the ten values. These examples indicate that although Denmark is often described as a secular society, it still prioritizes Christianity – it was that vision of society that Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen mobilized in her speech to the nation on 11 March 2020.

Furthermore, national politicians saw the Danish Health Authority’s campaign as highly problematic because it collaborated with religious authorities and used Islamic arguments. Especially the references to the sunna of Prophet Muhammad could not go unnoticed. Since the so-called “Cartoon Crisis” in 2005–06 (Klausen 2009; Kublitz 2010; Sinclair 2021), the Prophet Muhammad has been a contested character and symbol in the Danish public. Among Danish Muslims, the Prophet is loved and adored, but in the general public debate the Prophet Muhammad is treated with less respect – sometimes even with disrespect as a didactic strategy to teach Muslim immigrants about secular liberal values like freedom of religion and freedom of speech (Rytter 2016, 2019b). In this respect, the “community spirit” that the samfundssind was referring to, was definitely not Islamic.

The emerging coroNATION also emphasized the (growing?) differences between demos that include all citizens and foreigners with a legitimate right to live in Denmark and ethnos, the “community of value” (Anderson 2013) of the “real” Danes. The emerging coroNATION made it explicit how ethnos is only a subset of demos.¹⁹ People in the latter category may have been living, working and paying taxes in Denmark for decades, and many have a Danish citizenship and a legal right to participate in national elections – and still, they are seen and treated with suspicion and reservation due to their family background, phenotypical appearance and religious (Muslim) observation. By contrast, ethnos, the white majority population has a family name, a place of origin and genealogy that gives them the desired kind of attachment (tilknytning) and belonging (tilhørsforhold) and a legitimate claim to the Danish nation and welfare state (Rytter 2010; Bisenbakker 2019). The spread of COVID-19 and the insistence on samfundssind as being part of the cure have exaggerated this dynamic; repeatedly, immigrants, refugees and foreigners are presented as a segment of the population driven by a suspicious solidarity and with little or no samfundssind.

Finally, it should be mentioned that in recent years, Denmark has promoted different political initiatives that seem to widen the gap between majorities and minorities. The list includes a strengthened focus on immigrant families (Johansen 2022); an extra punishment for criminal activities in certain neighbourhoods – referred to by the Danish authorities as “ghettos” (Suárez-Krabbe and Lindberg 2019); and a general rejection of the existence of racism in the Danish public (Hervik 2018, 2021; Padovan-Özdemir and Øland 2022). On top of that, the so-called paradigm shift has since 2019 changed the official policy towards refugees from a trajectory of integration to repatriation as soon as possible – therefore Denmark has started to revoke the temporary protection of Syrian refugees and send them back to Syria (Tan 2020; Vedsted-Hansen 2022). It is in this specific political environment that the coroNATION came into effect after the outbreak of COVID-19.

Conclusion: at the borders of the coroNATION

I opened the article with some general reflections on how COVID-19 offered a window into some of the fundamental processes, values and principles that organize Danish society (Schultz and Jensen 2020, 15). Looking through this window, we begin to see some clear patterns.

In the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Danish-Somalis in Aarhus were seen and discussed as a group that ignored or lacked the capacity to understand the instructions provided by the authorities. The incidents of corona-racism reported from Aarhus were mentioned by several members of Taskforce COVID-19 as the main motivation behind the taskforce. They worked hard to prove that they – and Danish-Pakistanis in general – have and exhibit the desired kind of samfundssind. The way the two migrant communities, nevertheless, were singled out as problematic and contagious was a direct result of the way ocular centres, like the Hope project, presented “real time data” that used national and/or ethnic backgrounds to delimit specific groups in surveys and statistics. This is an obvious dilemma: on the one hand, the dramatic rise in the infection rate among citizens with a Danish-Pakistani background presented to the Copenhagen Municipality by the Danish Health Authority made it possible to intervene and direct their information campaign towards this vulnerable group. On the other hand, it was the same statistics that casted different Muslim immigrant communities as a highly problematic segment of the population, that needed to be dealt with in order to fight the virus. Here the dissemination of “real time data” contributed to the racism, stigma and exclusion of Muslim immigrants that became an integrated aspect of the coroNATION.

Finally, the extended case presented in this article shows how Taskforce COVID-19 did an exemplary effort by providing the Copenhagen municipality and several other municipalities in Greater Copenhagen with an infrastructure and communication networks that made it possible to reach vulnerable and isolated citizens, families and elders in the Danish-Pakistani community.

However, as soon as the campaign was scaled up to the level of national politics, it was perceived as a huge problem and potential scandal in which the Danish Health Authority cooperated with Islamic religious authorities. In this respect, the case also exemplifies the disconnect between local politics, which seeks pragmatic solutions, and the more symbolic national politics, in which cases risk being turned into moral panics and are used to promote the national-conservative, Islam-sceptical – sometimes hostile – political agenda that Denmark has been infamous for in recent decades.

Acknowledgements

I first version of this paper was presented at “Open Mic” on 20 April 2022, at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. A later version was presented at the panel: “Migrants and New Contours of Solidarities: Negotiating Deservingness in Hostile Times” at the IMISCOE conference, 2022. I thank Marie Louise Tørring, Mads Daugbjerg, Karen Fog Olwig, Louisa Long, Bridget Anderson and Mette Louise Berg for important comments that helped me strengthen the argument. Finally, I’m grateful for the encouragement I received from Anseer Hussain, Tanwir Ahmad and Naveed Baig.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by NordForsk, project number 94891.

Notes

1 Inger Støjberg (V) on DR-TV, 12 August 2020: https://www.dr.dk/nyheder/venstre-vil-tvangsindlaegge-corona-smittede-som-bryder-karantaene#!/.

2 In Denmark, on an annual basis, certain areas are officially identified as “ghettos” on the basis of five criteria, see https://www.regeringen.dk/nyheder/2017/ghetto-listen-2017-to-nye-omraader-tilfoejet-fem-fjernet/ghettolisten-definition-af-en-ghetto/.

3 Pia Kjærsgaard (DF) in DitOverblik.dk, 4 August 2020: https://ditoverblik.dk/hver-anden-nye-coronasmittede-i-aarhus-er-somalier-helt-grotesk-mener-pia-kjaersgaard/.

4 https://avisendanmark.dk/artikel/debat-udskamning-og-diskrimination-af-danske-somaliere-er-uanstændig.

5 According to several Danish-Somali participants at the conference “Covid-19 Pandemien: Hvad har vi lært om migranter og etniske minoriteter?”, hosted by Dansk Selskab for Indvandrersundhed, they are still associated with corona and contagious bodies. They constantly have to prove their good intentions and samfundssind.

6 The project is a collaboration between the University College London, Linköping University and Aarhus University. The project is founded by NordForsk and headed by Professor Mette Louise Berg, UCL, see https://solidarities.net.

7 The project was approved by the Institutional Review Board at Aarhus University, no. 2021–28.

8 All the interviews in Urdu were conducted by research assistant Saira Mian Latif.

9 https://stps.dk/da/nyheder/2020/18-covid-smittede-har-relation-til-fly-fra-pakistan/#.

10 https://soundcloud.com/user-112901805/on-hand-sanitizer-grundtvig-and-yellow-brickswav.

11 https://www.carlsbergfondet.dk/da/Nyheder/Nyt-fra-fondet/Nyheder/25-millioner-kroner-til-forskning-i-social-adfaerd-under-Covid19.

12 It should be mentioned that the HOPE Project also produced several interesting ethnographic studies (see, Tørring and Seeberg 2020; Kristensen et al. 2022).

13 Currently DPAC has approximately 200 members, but reaches out to many more via social activities and SoMe, see https://www.facebook.com/DanishPakistaniAffairsCouncil/.

14 Søren Brostrøm is the Director of the National Health Authority (Sundhedsstyrelsen).

15 “Bydelsmødre” is a nationwide NGO peer-to-peer initiative in which immigrant women are trained as role models and helpers for other immigrant women. See: https://bydelsmor.dk/english.

16 https://socialtansvar.dk/2020/09/18/bydelsmoedre-og-baba-som-vaern-mod-oeget-smittespredning/.

17 https://www.kristeligt-dagblad.dk/historier/medlemstal.

18 https://www.regeringen.dk/nyheder/2016/danmarkskanon-befolkningen-har-valgt-10-vaerdier-for-fremtidens-samfund/.

19 The suggested distinction between demos and ethnos has similarities to the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism, promoted by different researchers (see Jensen and Mouritsen 2019; Simonsen and Bonikowski 2020).