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All societies have their own customs and beliefs surrounding death. This handbook explains how to offer appropriate and sensitive support to those from other cultures who are dying or bereaved.
The permanent presence of Islam and Muslims is a comparatively recent phenomenon in most countries of the European Union. Over the last few decades many initiatives have been launched by Muslim communities in the European Union to create infrastructural provisions for their religious life, within the existing legal and social frameworks. In fact, all countries of the European Union share the principles of religious freedom and non-discrimination in their respective Constitutions. However, the precise way in which these principles are interpreted and applied to Islam depends largely on the historical traditions concerning the relation between State and Religion, which differ from one country ...
What happens when the idea of religious progress propels the shaping of modernity? In The Ahmadiyya Quest for Religious Progress. Missionizing Europe 1900 – 1965 Gerdien Jonker offers an account of the mission the Ahmadiyya reform movement undertook in interwar Europe. Nowadays persecuted in the Muslim world, Ahmadis appear here as the vanguard of a modern, rational Islam that met with a considerable interest. Ahmadiyya mission on the European continent attracted European ‘moderns’, among them Jews and Christians, theosophists and agnostics, artists and academics, liberals and Nazis. Each in their own manner, all these people strove towards modernity, and were convinced that Islam helped realizing it. Based on a wide array of sources, this book unravels the multiple layers of entanglement that arose once the missionaries and their quarry met. This title is available in its entirety in Open Access.
In contrast to most migration studies that focus on specific “foreigner” groups in Germany, this study simultaneously compares and contrasts the legal, political, social, and economic opportunity structures facing diverse categories of the ethnic minorities who have settled in the country since the 1950s. It reveals the contradictory, and usually self-defeating, nature of German policies intended to keep “migrants” out—allegedly in order to preserve a German Leitkultur (with which very few of its own citizens still identify). The main barriers to effective integration—and socioeconomic revitalization in general—sooner lie in the country’s obsolete labor market regulations and bureaucratic procedures. Drawing on local case studies, personal interviews, and national surveys, the author describes “the human faces” behind official citizenship and integration practices in Germany, and in doing so demonstrates that average citizens are much more multi-cultural than they realize.
This study addresses encounters between Jews and Muslims in interwar Berlin. Living on the margins of German society, the two groups sometimes used that position to fuse visions and their personal lives. German politics set the switches for their meeting, while the urban setting of Western Berlin offered a unique contact zone. Although the meeting was largely accidental, Muslim Indian missions served as a crystallization point. Five case studies approach the protagonists and their network from a variety of perspectives. Stories surfaced testifying the multiple aid Muslims gave to Jews during Nazi persecution. Using archival materials that have not been accessed before, the study opens up a novel view on Muslims and Jews in the 20th century. This title is available in its entirety in Open Access.
This volume is the first to bring together analysis of contemporary female religious leadership in ideologically-diverse Muslim communities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America, with chapters discussing the emergence, consolidation, and impact of female Islamic authority.
Clearly, "God is changing in Europe": religious faiths and beliefs are increasingly making their presence felt in the public arena, at all levels. Because religions are more and more often behind the forging and assertion of multiple identities, the authorities have a duty to take the utmost account of them when establishing democratic rules and arrangements for "living together". Local authorities are ideally placed to lead this work, which requires creativity, imagination, a willingness to engage in dialogue and the opening of meeting places. Such an approach needs to go hand-in-hand with an analysis of this new state of affairs. It also calls for the sharing of experience. It is for this ...
Globalisation and transnational migration have altered people's understanding of as well as their relationship to their ?dwelling places? and ?places of origin?. Taking the empirical case of the South Lebanese Shi'ite village of Zrariye and its migrant population in Abidjan/Côte d'Ivoire, the book shows how ?place?, which has become a vital political, economic and social resource, continues to be of tremendous significance in the age of mobility and change. ?Lebanese in Motion? explores how villagers ?at home? and ?abroad? are involved in producing a ?translocal village-in-the-making?, which emanates as a social field through their practices and narratives. Travel and the means of communication make it possible to keep in constant touch and thus renegotiate kinship, generational and gender relationships beyond local, regional and nation-state boundaries. Particularly interested in understanding how female identities are redefined, the study delineates how gender and place are mutually constituted in the translocal village under study.
This book takes into view a large variety of Muslim actors who, in recent years, made their entry into the European public sphere. Without excluding the phenomenon of terrorists, it maps the whole field of Muslim visibility. The nine contributions present unpublished ethnographic materials that have been collected between 2003 and 2005. They track down the available space that is open to Muslims in EU member states claiming a visibility of their own. The volume collects male and female, secular and religious, radical and pietistic voices of sometimes very young people. They all speak about »being a Muslim in Europe« and the meaning of »real Islam«.
Islam is slowly becoming part of Europe's social, cultural, and, to some degree, political landscape. This work considers the best way of accommodating Islam in Europe and establishing cooperative relations between Muslims and the followers of other religious or secular value systems.