Muslim religious oratory on Swedish public service radio

ABSTRACT

This article analyses religious Morning Services, delivered by eight Muslim speakers, broadcast on Swedish public service radio during 2013 and 2014. Morning Services have been broadcast on Swedish radio since 1930, but only in recent years have non-Christian speakers been invited to contribute. Inviting religious minority speakers is understood as a strategy for incorporating selected representatives of religious minorities into hegemonic practices and discourses. The analysis identifies four shared discourses produced in the material and relates these discourses to hegemonic views regarding legitimate public expressions of religiosity in Sweden. The discourses are: 1) a positive discourse on religious pluralism, 2) a discourse that emphasises practical self-help-like effects of Muslim religious practice, 3) a discourse that articulates religiosity as challenging purported negative aspects of current society, 4) a discourse that raises difficulties which Muslims in Sweden face. The Muslim Morning Services illustrate a complex dialectic, as, on the one hand, they endorse hegemonic values and ideals and thereby contribute to and legitimise the status quo, while, on the other hand, their individual voices, personal narratives, and religious messages signify change through their use of public space which was previously unavailable to Muslims.

KEYWORDS:

• Islam
• oratory
• radio
• religion and media
• discourse
• hegemony

Acknowledgements

The research resulting in this article was funded by Åke Wiberg’s Foundation, Helge Axson Johnson’s Foundation, and The Krapperup Foundation. I thank the anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Contemporary Religion as well as the participants of the research seminar for the Study of Religion at Lund University for helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. In a conversation with one of the producers of the show, plans to invite an imam were mentioned.

2. All the studied Morning Services were downloaded on 16 October 2015. All the quotes from the Morning Services were transcribed and translated from the original Swedish by the author. This article focuses on the textual content of the services, leaving out intonation, music sections, and other auditory aspects.

3. The film Not without my Daughter (1991) is based on a novel by Betty Mahmoody and tells the story of a woman whose Iranian husband abducts their child. Its orientalist framing of Muslim men is widely acknowledged; there are several academic analyses of this topic (e.g. De Hart 2001; Goodwin 2016).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Simon Stjernholm

Simon Stjernholm is Associate Professor of History of Religions at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. CORRESPONDENCE: Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen, Karen Blixens Plads 8, building 10, 2300 Copenhagen S, Denmark.