‘The Sweet Taste of Sin’—A Muslim Drug Dealer in a Nordic Welfare State

Abstract

Moa is a 22-year-old Muslim dealer selling drugs at a street drug market in Oslo. The main part of the paper consists of long interview extracts from three interviews with him. The aim is to capture some of the ambivalence and complexity that might otherwise be lost in traditional scholarly analysis. In short, Moa tells how he got into drug dealing in the first place, the help he received from a well-meaning welfare state apparatus, his feelings of remorse, guilt, and shame, and the attempts he made to break with the drug trade and its life-style. Moa's story highlights differences between street life in a benevolent welfare state with a penal system famous for its open-handedness, and street life under harder socio-economic and penal conditions. Even though Moa has more opportunities than offenders elsewhere, failing in a society where most others succeed is different from failing in a larger marginalized community. Moa's story also challenges the public view of Muslim offenders and questions established assumptions about the relationship between Islam and crime.

Keywords:

• Drug dealing
• Islam
• Qualitative method
• Wacquant
• Welfare state

Notes

¹ There are important differences between Sweden, Norway, and Denmark in this regard, but I will not comment upon these in this paper. After all, the similarities are much more striking than the differences, especially when compared to the United Kingdom and USA.

² For some of these statistics see, for example, http://www.ssb.no/emner/03/05/rapp_200018/, http://www.ssb.no/emner/03/05/notat_200633/notat_200633.pdf, and http://www.ssb.no/emner/00/02/notat_200466/notat_200466.pdf.