The Making of a Mosque with Female Imams

Front matter

The Making of a Mosque with

Female Imams Serendipities in the Production of Danish Islams

Jesper Petersen

Contents

Acknowledgements XI List of Figures XII

N oof WwW DY FB

Finding an Aim 4

Chapter 1

“The time is now 6:14AM. Islam and homosexuality may sound incompatible, but even though homosexuality has always been frowned upon in Islam there have been times in history when it did not cause much concern ...”! It was early in the morning 10 March 2015. I had just turned on the car radio while driving the 450 kilometers from my home in Copenhagen to the northern part of Jutland where I was to give a series of lectures on first-wave Arab feminism in commemoration of the upcoming 100-year jubilee for universal suffrage in Denmark on 5 June. Saliha Marie Fetteh, a female part-time lecturer in Arabic studies—and a Muslim, the announcer added—was on the radio explaining that Muslim poets and singers in the Abbasid era composed poems about their love for young boys, giving the example of Abu Nuwas (d. 813- 815) and al-Kisa’i (d. 805). The latter, she expounded, is famous for his skills in Quran recitation but according to some sources he openly had sexual relations with men. This, however, did not cause much concern among his contemporaries.

It had been International Women’s Day two days earlier, so it was no surprise that the first radio broadcast of the day focused on gender and sexuality. The preceding week, I had taken students to Brussels, so I had not listened in on this year’s debate but I suspected that most discussions had centered around the upcoming jubilee, looking back at a century of Danish women’s struggle. Of course, the debate that interested me the most as a part-time lecturer on Islam and gender was that involving Muslim voices. The woman on the radio continued,

I actually think that the imams’ handling of it is inadequate. There are examples of young people who have come to them because they have been sad ... in despair, and feeling uncomfortable with their own sexuality. They turn up to get help and moral support and instead they are almost asked to suppress their sexuality—or they are told that it is a disease— and I think that is inappropriate ...

FETTEH

1 Pi Morgen, 6:14AM (10 March 2015). Accessed from Mediestream. My translation.

© JESPER PETERSEN, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004523029 002 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Cc BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.

As in many European countries, Islam is a hot topic in public debate in Denmark but most debates are mere reruns of earlier ones where everyone takes predictable positions and repeats the same statements (Jacobsen 2017; Jacobsen et al. 2013; Petersen and Vinding 2020). However, this morning’s debate contained a surprise. Four minutes into the interview, the journalist set a new frame with a final question:

Together with the chairman for Critical Muslims, Sherin Khankan, Saliha Marie Fetteh is working towards getting female imams in Denmark, and they have already found a place where, within a short time, they will issue an invitation to Friday prayer, which will be led by a woman. But will homosexual Muslims be welcome to take part in the Friday prayer? Saliha Marie Fetteh says: “I can’t answer on behalf of Sherin Khankan, but for me, I have no hesitation praying a Friday prayer side by side with a homosexual.” [pause] In the program, Religion Report, later today you can meet a homosexual with Muslim background ... the time is now 6:19 AM.

This was the first time I heard about Sherin Khankan’s initiative, and I was quite surprised that it was not the main story of the broadcast. A mosque with female imams in Denmark seemed like quite a story and its being a secondary issue in the interview suggested that the initiative had been around for along time and that I had somehow missed it. A month later, on 13 April, I therefore wrote an email to Khankan and invited her to deliver a guest lecture:

Dear Sherin Khankan,

I teach the course “Muslims in the West” at the Danish Institute for Studies Abroad and I would like to invite you to give a guest lecture in the fall of 2015 in our module about women in Islam. The module focuses on women’s struggle in Islam and the students read texts by Amina Wadud, Fatima Mernissi, Alifa Rifaat, Mona Eltahawy, and many others. However, it would be interesting to get a Danish perspective on women’s struggle in Islam, and it would no doubt be enriching for both me and my students if you could spare us 142-2 hours in the fall to tell us about your exciting project.

Best regards, Jesper Petersen?

2 Ihave edited out the salary information and definition of audience.

Meanwhile in Beirut, a Danish documentarist, Marie Skovgaard, was leading a workshop and wrapping up her work on a documentary on the life of a female radio journalist. She also heard the news and on 19 March she sent an email to Khankan:

Dear Sherin,

My name is Marie and I have enthusiastically followed the debate on female imams and your [singular]/your [plural] initiative to start a mosque for women and with time hopefully a mosque for all ... I am myself a documentarist and ... I would really like to make a movie about you [singular] and your [plural] Femimam mission. It could be interesting to follow your work towards the opening of the mosque and the whole start-up phase—maybe even longer ... I am very much looking forward to hearing from you, Marie?

On the receiving end of this communication, Khankan was reading through an endless stream of emails and text messages, and answering phone calls. She had made the front page of one of Denmark’s nine national dailies, Information, on 3 March with the headline, “Denmark's next imam?” (see Figure 1 in Chapter 6). Two days later, she laid out her plans to open a mosque with female imams in an opinion piece in the biggest newspaper in Denmark, Politiken, explaining that it would be inaugurated in August 2015 and that Friday prayer would be mixed gender and led by a woman. The announcement immediately became part of several other debates such as those on Islamic terrorism, integration, Islamophobia, women’s suppression, and—as the radio interview with Fetteh demonstrates—LGBTQ-Muslims’ struggle for acceptance by Islamic authorities.4

While Skovgaard started the recording of her documentary on 26 April 2015, I did not meet Khankan and the co-founder of the Mariam Mosque, Hicham Mouna, until 30 October 2015 when Khankan gave the abovementioned guest lecture in my class. At that time, the inauguration of the mosque had been postponed to an unspecified date in the future, but after the lecture we agreed that I would join the group as a researcher. During the spring, Khankan invited me

3 Ihave received this email from Marie Skovgaard and have her permission to publish the content.

4 I later found out that Politiken had run a series of articles on being an LGBTQ-Muslim in Denmark and that the announcement of Femimam therefore was tied into an already existing debate.

to several activities such as the fourth and fifth nikah (Islamic marriage) ceremonies she performed and to a viewing of a room in an apartment that a famous Danish photographer, Jacob Holdt, had put at her disposal for Friday prayers. The apartment is depicted on the cover of the book, on the first floor in the yellow building where the windows are open. This is where the Mariam Mosque was eventually inaugurated on 26 August 2016. However, my teaching obligations and some travel arrangements got in the way of my attending the nikah ceremonies, but I got a tour of the apartment on 2 June 2016. I talked to Khankan on the phone a few times in relation to my application for funding as a PhD student at Lund University, but it was not until1 April 2016 when Khankan gave a second guest lecture in another class of mine that we met again. In May 2016, I was accepted as PhD student at Lund University with a start in September.

I joined Femimam as a researcher on fieldwork and was admitted to the group’s internal Facebook forum on 5 August 2016, three weeks before the inauguration. My fieldwork started on 21 August 2016, which is the day Femimam, as the group called itself back then, started converting a room in a downtown apartment in Copenhagen into a mosque.

1 Finding an Aim

I originally went into the field with a preconceived notion that Khankan’s idea of opening a mosque with female imams was activism inspired by Islamic feminist discourses as represented by authors such as those mentioned in my email to her. This seemed like a fair assumption at the time because Khankan made references to world-wide Islamic feminist activism when talking about her initiative. I imagined that Femimam was institutionalizing a theoretical discourse as a mosque and thereby converted discourse into bricks and mortar, so to speak. This is also reflected in the funding application and the original title of my project: “The Institutionalization of Islamic Feminism”. However, I soon realized that this was not the case, largely because only a few individuals in Femimam were familiar with the literature, and then only to a limited degree.

In the subsequent months I adopted multiple theoretical frameworks in my attempt to understand the phenomenon I was observing. However, it persistently fell between models. My initial explanation was that the Mariam Mosque somehow constituted a new social movement and an institution at the same time (Eyerman and Jamison 2007; Jepperson 1991; Melucci 1996a; Vinding 2013). It recruited as a movement and worked through activism, but it also performed nikah ceremonies, aqiqah (name giving), and issued Islamic divorces as an institution.

Compared to other mosques, the Mariam Mosque displayed some odd features. It is located in an apartment, but it has no temporal permanence; it only exists for a few hours at a time. The room where the monthly Friday prayer takes place is fitted out in the hours just prior to the prayer, and when the prayer is over, the calligraphy and other objects are taken down and stored until the next prayer a month later. Between Friday prayers, the room is employed for a range of other purposes by the apartment’s tenants and other users.

These were just a few of the oddities that I had observed, and I did not find an overall theoretical framework that was suitable to my initial impulse. Instead, I attempted to describe the phenomenon, using multiple theoretical frameworks as inspiration. I devised a new concept, the pop-up mosque (Petersen 2019b), as an analytical term for recurring temporary conversions of an otherpurposed space into a mosque.

As soon as I had defined the pop-up mosque concept I started to see the pattern everywhere and I therefore arranged seven semi-structured interviews with leaders of pop-up mosques in the summer of 2018 to saturate the concept (Petersen 2019b). I also observed, through a small literature study, that some of the first mosques-as-buildings founded by Muslim guest workers in Germany and Sweden in the 1950s and 1960s existed as pop-up mosques before they became permanent (Petersen 2019b: 179). In other words, what I was observing in the Mariam Mosque was not odd; it was just a pattern of social action that had not previously been theorized. Furthermore, it is a pattern that often leaves no trace as it may be erased by a narrative about how and why a mosque-asbuilding came into being or, as frequently happens, the pop-up mosque activity dies out before it is recorded. Thus, this study sheds light on a phenomenon (pop-up mosques), many of which have not yet been identified because of erasure. The pop-up mosque will be introduced more thoroughly in Chapter 9.

2 The Revised Aim

All pop-up mosques I have observed have emerged in contexts with a religious demand but insufficient economic resources to cater for it (Petersen 2019b). While the demand that produced the Mariam Mosque is unique, the form of social action taken by Khankan and others who tried to cater for the demand is not. As explained above, the first Muslim guest workers in Europe also made pop-up mosques, but that was mainly because there were no mosques at all, and they needed a place to perform the Friday prayer. The Mariam Mosque emerged in a context where this general demand was already satisfied, and therefore it is rather produced by new, emerging demands.

Islamic female authority is not a new phenomenon. It has existed in various forms since the time of Mohammad (Ahmed 1993; Katz 2014; Nadwi 2013) and its emergence in ever new forms is a continuous field of research (e.g. Bano 2017; Hill 2018; Mahmood 2012). However, in Europe, phenomena like the emergence of female imams, female-led Friday prayer, and interfaith nikah between Muslim women and non-Muslim men are new. For example, female imams do not feature in Jeanette Jouili’s and Schirin Amir-Moazami’s article on female authority in Europe from 2006; nor are they mentioned in Anne Sofie Roald’s study of Muslim converts in Scandinavia (2004) or Garbi Schmidt’s study of Danish Muslim youth movements (2007). However, these studies have demonstrated the importance of gender in contemporary productions of Islam in Europe.

It may be viewed as remarkable that Femimam has managed to standardize what may appear to some as heterodox practice by posing as an institution. However, to categorize Femimam with the emic category, heterodox, is a theological undertaking, which is incommensurable with research epistemology. From an etic perspective, emic labeling is an exertion of power within a social field; it means that the power to define Islam is vested elsewhere and Femimam is challenging this position. This study focusses on the etic perspective.

The Mariam Mosque is not outside tradition; it is one among numerous producers of tradition (an extreme case), and while many Danish Islamic authorities object to some of the practices in the Mariam Mosque, they understand it to be a mosque with Khankan as the imam. In other words, the Mariam Mosque is at least part of the Copenhagen Islamic tradition, and maybe even part of an urban West-European—and possibly also a Euro-American—Islamic tradition (Levitt and Schiller 2004). Jan Hjarpe (1997: 268) explains, “That which does not function disappears, just as many phenomena in the history of religions have disappeared.” Whether this Islamic tradition will be reproduced by subsequent generations of Muslims is yet to be seen; however, innovation is to be expected in the production of any religious tradition.

For this study I have chosen an extreme case as these “often reveal more information because they activate more actors and more basic mechanisms in the situation studied” (Flyvbjerg 2006: 229). That is, extreme cases often produce a rich empirical material, which is important in a single case study as their advantage is depth rather than breath. Based on the shared patterns of pop-up mosques and catering to religious demands (Bulliet 1994; Woodhead 2016), I also consider this a paradigmatic case that can highlight general characteristics of how Islam is produced (Flyvbjerg 2006: 232; Gerring 2007: 20). This means that I use the rich empirical material to describe the production of Islam in minute detail highlighting serendipities and non-Islamic sources of Islam, thus challenging common theories of what Islam is and how it is produced. Even if the Mariam Mosque (or the like of it) is not reproduced by subsequent generations of Muslims, the processes of its production highlights how religious innovations are institutionalized and why some practices are vetted out by history while others are reproduced.

Bent Flyvbjerg (2006: 238) explains that “case stories ... can neither be briefly recounted nor summarized in a few main results. The case story is itself the result.” Thus, writing an introduction to a study in which the conclusions are only intelligible after the case description has been made is paradoxical (Derrida 1983). This is evident by considering a more accurate title for the book, The making of a pop-up mosque. As the pop-up mosque is a neologism of mine it will not be recognized as a known phenomenon by potential readers; neither will many of the other patterns that I am going to describe. To resolve this paradox, I will present most of the study’s conclusions and relate them to ongoing academic discussions in the individual chapters where they belong rather than explicate them in the introduction. Thus, I only present two summarized conclusions below. First, I present the main argument of the book, which concerns serendipities in the production of Islam. Second, I argue the case for including non-Muslim Islam as a research object within Islamic studies. It should be noted that the book does not include a study of non-Muslim Islam in itself, but this phenomenon is too significant to exclude, even if it has not previously been theorized.

3 The Serendipitous Production of Islams

The difficulty of predicting future events is well known within economic theory, which occupies a great number of researchers creating models that supposedly can forecast economic development. However, the demonstrable inaccuracy of many economic forecasts has over the past decades led researchers to take a greater interest in unpredictability. Based on the observation that stockbrokers do not perform better than what would be expected if stocks were picked at random Daniel Kahneman (2011) has explained the cognitive biases involved in producing a coherent world and maintaining its stability when faced with empirical observations that contradict individuals’ core beliefs (cf. Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter 2009/1956). Faced with Kahneman’s conclusions stockbrokers continue to claim expertise in stock picking, even after his winning the Nobel Prize in 2002 for his psychological insights in economic theory, thus demonstrating the strength of cognitive biases.

The economist Nassim Nicholas Taleb (2010) argues that social scientific theory face a problem similar to Kahneman’s economists. He claims that history is primarily formed by highly improbable events such as World War 11,5 the Lebanese civil war,® al-Qaida’s coordinated attacks on the American East coast, the outbreak of COVID-1g,” etc. but social scientific theory does not seem to account for these events even though they determine the course of history. Rather, he argues, researchers are occupied with models within their respective fields, equivalent to the bell-shaped curves (normal distribution) so familiar to economists. That is, they occupy themselves with normality, but this is according to Taleb not what history is formed by. With a reference to highly improbable events as outliers (on the bell-shaped curve), he remarks that “The inability to predict outliers implies the inability to predict the course of history, given the share of these events in the dynamics of events. But we act as though we are able to predict historical events ...”® (Taleb 2010: xxiv). Samuli Schielke problematize the latter as a consequence of what social scientific theory sets out to accomplish:

The problem has to do with our expectations on social scientific theory. We want theories that predict, that tell what is going to happen, that give us a sense that we grasp what is going on. I, in contrast, am concerned with finding a theory that accounts for the sense of not grasping what is going on, one that describes how people face the unpredictable.

5 With reference to a study done by Niall Ferguson, which demonstrates the coming of war was not reflected in the imperial bond market (a good predictor of investors’ expectations of conflict), Taleb (2010: 14) argues that the mounting tensions and the escalating crises that are constructed after-the-fact in some historical narratives about World War 11 constitutes anachronistic retrospection. This unpredictability is more famously exemplified in Neville Chamberlain's Peace of our Time speech on 30 September 1938, after his negotiations with Adolf Hitler, in which he stated, “My good friends, for the second time in our history, a British Prime Minister has returned from Germany bringing peace with honor.” Less than a year later, Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

6 Taleb demonstrates how wrong predictions about the expected brevity of the Lebanese Civil War were erased and forgotten as soon as they were proven wrong and replaced with new predictions of the imminent end of the war. That is, Taleb describes history in prospect (without erasure), not in retrospect (with erasure).

7 Taleb does not mention CoviD-19 as his book predates this pandemic, but this is the kind of events that he points to.

8 Taleb’s emphasis.

Schielke (2015: 180) for example argues that during the Arab Spring, “not only was Egypt's political leadership surprised and overwhelmed by the events, so were the revolutionaries” (cf. Kurzman 2012). However, they had no reason to be surprised because even if the timing of events could not be predicted the Arab Spring constitutes the normal condition:

Historically speaking, this is the normal condition... it is the condition of a society with deep unsolved conflicts and mutually irreconcilable powers. January 25, 2011, was not the opening of a new era in Egypt. It was the return to the historical normality of a nation in revolt, the continuation of a state of uprising that began in 1919, or perhaps already in the Orabi Rebellion of 1881, and that is bound to continue.

SCHIELKE 2015: 190

Schielke’s description is reminiscent of the process I will describe in this book. Khankan did not want to become an imam, but she did; neither did the co-founder of the Mariam Mosque, Hicham Mouna, want to open a mosque, but he did. Both were surprised and overwhelmed by the events in 2015-2017, but they continuously adapted to an evolving situation, which ultimately led to the founding of the Mariam Mosque with Khankan as its female imam.

I argue that while we do not know what is going to happen, some events are more likely than others, and the potential of any moment may be assessed if one has sufficient data. That is, we may theorize the unpredictable. A starting point is to focus on contemporary Islams as discourses and “uncover the rules of their formation, the conditions of existence for discursive events, albeit in present, living narrative” (Renders 2021: 13). Next, one may identify and asses the demand for discursive products (Islams) and analyze the structures within which Muslims produce Islams. Such a theory does not predict what is going to happen, but it will produce a more accurate assessment of normality and what to expect.

In Chapter 3-5 I analyze the formation of the discursivity that conditioned the emergence of the Mariam Mosque and the well-known variables of agency and structure (Giddens 2013). In short, these chapters demonstrate that in addition to being formed by their parents’ culture, Muslim children of migrants, born in Denmark, are socialized into Danish culture and values, disciplined g Such theorization is already taking place within economics where Nobel laurate, Robert J. Shiller (2015) has demonstrated how irrational exuberance can to some extent predict bubble-formation and volatility in economic markets. Similarly, bubble phenomena in other parts of society have been demonstrated by Vincent F. Hendricks and Pelle G. Hansen (2016).

by dominant discourses, educated in the Danish schools and universities, and they internalize contemporary emotional regimes that influence their sense of justice, what they strive for in life (the definition of success), and what emotions they are able and likely to produce in specific contexts (Barrett 2017; Lazarus 1994; Riis and Woodhead 2010). This is also true of the Mariam Mosque’s founders, Sherin Khankan (b. 1974) and Hicham Mouna (b. 1987), who were both born and raised in Denmark. Chapter 3 gives a short introduction to Muslims in Denmark, Chapter 4 analyzes the genealogy of Khankan’s discourse on female imams, and Chapter 5 investigates the emergence of a demand for female imams, thus establishing that the conditions for a mosque with female imams were present, but also that all attempts to establish such an institution had failed.

The remaining chapters of the book are concerned with serendipities as a third variable in addition to agency and structure. Serendipities constitute the catalyst that produces events and changes the course of history on a microscale, sometimes leading to much larger quivers on a macroscale. To highlight the significance of serendipities is to emphasize the events that changes the course of history, or to merge Taleb’s and Schielke’s perspectives: highlighting serendipities gives a richer description of the normal condition, which expects the emergence of serendipities that changes the course of history.

Before I introduce my argument on non-Muslim Islam as a research object, it is necessary to present a definition of Islams (in the plural). I take the definition of Islam to its most basic definition as discourse emerging in human communication and interaction. Muslims may claim that Islam has an ontological existence beyond this, but as a researcher I cannot make observations of such a phenomenon, and thus, I must rely on manifestations of discourse.

Given the significant influence of Talal Asad’s (1986) famous working paper The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam and its concept of discursive traditions it may seem strange that I do not discuss it in my defining Islams section below. I have often been surprised at how seriously Asad’s papers is taken by some of his readers, especially as Asad does not himself seem to have understood this paper as central to his authorship in the years following its publication. Jonas Otterbeck has pointed out that Asad has not tried to defend or further develop the concept of discursive tradition, neither does he use it much in his later writing. For example, it “only features twice in Genealogies of Religion (1993), the first major book after the 1986-working paper” (Otterbeck 2022: 109). To me this suggests that other scholars have developed the concept for Asad in much the same way as Olivier Roy’s readers developed churchification in his name (Vinding 2018: 53) and Kimberlé W. Crenshaw’s (1989) readers have developed the concept intersectionality far beyond what she originally defined in her famous article (K. Davis 2016: 44). Murray S. Davis suggests that ambiguous and incomplete theories are more malleable and therefore tend to become classics because “an ambiguous theory can appeal to different— even hostile—divisions of its audience, allowing each subgroup to interpret the theory in congenial, if mutually incompatible ways” (M.S. Davis 1986: 296). This seems to be what happened to Asad’s working paper; like other successful theories, it is ambiguous and extraordinarily open to interpretation as the paper’s main function was to introduce discourse theory to the anthropology of Islam, and Asad deserves great credit for that. In the years following its publication, Asad and some of his PhD students used the word discursive in combination with a broad range of words to highlight the discursiveness of phenomena. Charles Hirschkind (2009: 131, 218, 36) for example discus discursive forms, discursive conditions, discursive coherence, discursive conventions, and discursively defined emotional content, while Asad in his abovementioned Genealogies of Religion discus discursive definitions, discursive processes, discursive practices, discursive interventions, discursive events, discursive games, discursive dominance, discursive models, discursive power, and discursive formations (Asad 1993: 8, 29, 144, 153, 180, 193, 210, 219, 229, 247, 264). However, today—after the wide dissemination of discourse theory—I see no reason to highlight that traditions are discursive.

4 Defining Islams

As briefly mentioned in the above, Islam is always produced within a discursivity that limits what Islams can be produced. I define discursivity as the discursive constraints within which humans can produce discourse (cf. Butler 2010; Certeau 20u;; Derrida 1977; Foucault 1994b). Discursivity is dependent on the context within which a given person can produce meaningful discourse, which lives and dies with people and the world in which they live. Discourse and discursivity have close links because the most common way of expanding one’s discursivity is by learning new discourse, making one capable of decoding and producing discourses within the new discursivity thus provided. Although discursivity is partially inherited through language and culture, the process is always imperfect; some discursivity is lost while new discursivity is produced through serendipities, creativity, experience, and people learning other discourses.

It is important not to reduce discursivity to merely what can be expressed through language, as discursivity also determines the sexualities one is able to embody (Butler 2010) and the emotions individuals are able to produce (Barrett 2017; Lazarus 1994; Riis and Woodhead 2010). To take an example, the idea of being in love in contemporary Copenhagen may seem like something natural, but it is a feeling produced within a discursivity oriented towards contemporary practices of dating, making couples, marriage, the nuclear family, and contemporary ideas about happiness, with all that it entails (Foucault 1988; Giddens 1992). In short, discursivity enables people to produce utterances, actions, and emotions in relation to discourses. A lack of discursivity highlights the absence of the knowledge and socialization needed to be able to express oneself in relation to a given discourse. Thus, discursivity simultaneously signals competences and restrictions, and what constitutes a meaningful articulation in the 7th century Arabia may be unintelligible in 21st century Copenhagen (and vice versa).

The formation of contemporary individuals’ discursivities is significantly influenced by recent structural transformations on the macrolevel. Realizing this has far-reaching consequences for the conceptualization of Islam because it decenters texts, religious authority, and institutions in the production of Islam. The discursivity, which conditions not just the Mariam Mosque’s formation but European Islam as such, is caused by the labor migration of the 20th century from Muslim majority countries to Europe. That is, the primary variable accounting for Islamic theological developments currently occurring in Europe is not texts, religious authorities, or institutions—it is a series of highly improbable events, which led to mass migration and thus the emergence of the European Muslim discursivities that produces Islam in contemporary Europe. In other words, mass migration—once again—led to the emergence of new Islams at the edge (Bulliet 1994).