Through conversations with Norwegian youth of Muslim background, this article explores how such young people negotiate religious identity, intimacy and sexuality within Norwegian youth culture. In light of recent statistics on marriage patterns in Norway, it further investigates norms and approaches significant to these youths’ choices. Marriage and intimate relationships are central to how this study’s participants connect the expectations of their minority background with the norms of Norwegian society. Some choose to engage in informal religious marriages—such as “halal dating”—while others are in love relationships and define for themselves the boundaries of what is and is not allowed.
In this article, we document and discuss transnational links and localising dynamics that are relevant for a young Shia community in the making in Norway. The Shia community is a minority in the Muslim minority population of Norway, and has been an almost neglected field of research. With this article we therefore aim to add knowledge to this field. First we provide an overview of the development of Shiism in Norway, and then we examine what kind of dynamics have come to the fore in ritual practice and in shaping a Norwegian Shia Muslim identity, through institutionalisation, knowledge, production and visibility.
In what ways can teaching Islam through controversial issues be useful in religious education? Can it serve to counter problems of representation of Islam, and what are the benefits and possible pitfalls of adopting such an approach? In this article, I will explore the use of Muslim internal feminist critique of conservative and patriarchal interpretations of women’s religious leadership in Islam as a controversial issues approach to teaching Islam in non-confessional religious education. The approach can be relevant for students in upper-secondary religious education, but also in teacher education. Building on secondary research documenting the problems of teaching Islam in non-confessional religious education in the Nordic countries as well as research on Muslim feminism spanning over a decade, this article investigates the didactic potentials and challenges that adopting the controversial issues approach may hold for teaching Islam. The main argument of this article is that the internal feminist debate on Islam provides an alternative entry to teaching Islam. It provides didactic resources and tools for understanding the discursive aspects of Islam, i.e., how Islam is conceived, interpreted, debated and practiced by Muslims, which in turn highlight power aspects and authority that are central to the production of religious knowledge. Consequently, the controversial issues approach may serve to counter certain “grand narratives” that seem to permeate current representations of Islam in religious education.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.