Islam and Culture: Dis/junctures in a Modern Conceptual Terrain

Abstract

Over the last decades, Europe debates on Islam have been framed increasingly through the lens of cultural difference. In this discursive climate, culture constitutes a crucial terrain of investment for European Muslims in their struggle for inclusion and recognition. Based on two different ethnographic research projects among European Muslims, this essay examines two distinct types of culture discourses. One employs an Islam-versus-culture trope that serves to disconnect Islam from certain patriarchal practices perceived to exist within Muslim communities. The other discourse defends the intrinsic and symbiotic link between Islam and culture, especially in order to elevate the place of artistic practices within Muslim communities. To make sense of these seeming contradictions, I explore the multivalent meanings contained in my interlocutors’ uses of the culture concept by tracing the respective genealogies of these meanings. This includes an investigation of culture's conceptual histories, formulated successively by Enlightenment thinkers, Romanticists, and early anthropologists, as well as by Islamic reformers and their more recent successors. My investigation into these conceptual histories exposes broader concerns about individual freedom and agency on the part of cultural theorists, which have furthermore enabled various claims about modernity and backwardness. While European Muslims creatively integrate various articulations of the culture concept into their world-making projects, I argue that the ontological assumptions underpinning the culture concept continue to haunt and render precarious efforts to demonstrate Muslim belonging to Europe via culture.

Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage

“…In Europe, and more globally due to i,Slam's connections with groups in Tunisia, Egypt, Malaysia and Singapore, the collective became part of what Annelies Moors and Jeanette Jouili have named 'Islamically inspired artistic scene' (2014; see also, e.g. Herding 2013;Jouili 2019). Other genres are represented too, such as rap and hip-hop which influenced the popularity of spoken word and slam poetry in those circles.…”

Love Jihad in Contemporary Art in Norway

“…There exists an important literature on Christian, Jewish, and Muslim communities in medieval and early modern Iberia, and several studies are aimed at establishing the historical presence of Muslims in different European nation states or the relationship between that nation state and the world of Islam (for example, Coller 2011;Simonsen 2004;Sorgenfrei 2018). Finally, scholarship of the last ten years on Islam in Europe has increasingly addressed the issue of art and popular culture (Peter et al 2013;Jouili 2013Jouili , 2019.…”

Common sense politics: religion and belonging in French public space

“…61 Choosing silence strategically allows for flexibility and case-by-case decision-making. 62 Silence represents another, perhaps less familiar, strategy by which Muslims negotiate belonging in France, alongside unveiling (Fadil 2011), the assiduous separation of culture and religion (Jouili 2019), the drawing of symbolic boundaries around Muslim religiosity (Beaman 2016), and informal negotiations of everyday life (Dessing et al 2016;Selby et al 2018). Adopting public silence strategically demands an intimate grasp of sensory norms structuring public engagement.…”

“…It also offers further support for arguments that point to the ways in which concept of laïcité, despite its widespread usage, has been emptied of consensual substantive meaning and, in consequence, is commonly coopted for wildly different political ends. The hollowing of the concept of laïcité has been traced profitably through the lens of gender and racism (Fadil 2011;Fernando 2014;Selby 2012 andScott 2007); through understandings of culture and identity (Barras 2013;Bowen 2010;Jouili 2019;Kastoryano and Escafré-Dublet 2016); and through public policy and debate (Ahearne 2014). This article complements this body of work by interrogating the entanglement of laïcité and the senses.…”