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AbstractOver 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.

In recent years, young pious Muslims in France have become increasingly active as arts practitioners, notably in the domain of music and performing arts. This engagement is often explained with the desire to offer the French Muslim community an alternative to the ubiquitous secular mass culture deemed detrimental to a pious subjectivity. Because the official structures of the Islamic revival movement have for a long time adopted quite a restrictive stance with regard to cultural production, but also due to Muslims' largely working class backgrounds in France, the young artists perceive their work in terms of educating the umma. In other words, they seek to develop a cultural or artistic sensibility that is nonetheless conducive to Islamic sensitivities. By examining three small performance art pieces produced by a young generation of pious Muslim artists from the Paris region, I hope to extend our understanding of Islamic sensory politics, as well as aesthetic and ethical practices, in a world where entertainment, leisure, and the culture industry are considered increasingly decisive for the sustainability of pious self-cultivation.

This article addresses the complex reflections regarding gender relations expressed by women active in the contemporary Islamic revival movements in Europe (especially France and Germany). Much recent research conducted among these groups aims to counter the rather negative accounts prevailing in public discourses on gender and Islam. This literature notably argues that women's conscious turn to Islam is not necessarily a reaffirmation of male domination, but that it constitutes a possibility for agency and empowerment. However, when faced with certain 'traditionalist' positions defended by these women, even this well-meaning literature seems precarious, left in a state of uncertainty. Taking this puzzlement as a point of departure, this contribution aims to think about the dilemmas involved in articulating a language for women's dignity and self-realization, which competes with dominant languages of equality, individual rights and autonomy. This project is rendered even more intricate by the fact that these pious Muslim women socialized in Europe have also been partly fashioned by the liberal discourses against which they want to position themselves.

Islam und Freiheit werden häufig als sich widersprechende Begriffe verstanden. Allerdings verhindert die produzierte Dichotomie zwischen christlichem, progressivem Okzident und islamischem, stagnierendem Orient, dass das Verhältnis beider Begriffe in ihrer Komplexität und Dynamik erfasst wird. In diesem Sinne beleuchtet der Beitrag in einem ersten Schritt das islamische Menschenbild. Vorgestellt werden die Vorstellungen zeitgenössischer Denker und ihre islamisch-theologische Herleitung von Freiheitsrechten. Als besonders konfliktreiche Frage wird die Religionsfreiheit am Beispiel der Debatte über Apostasie thematisiert. Da Islam und Freiheitsrechte nicht nur in einem theologischen Zusammenhang gesehen werden, sondern auch in politische und gesellschaftliche Zusammenhänge übersetzt werden, wird anhand konkreter Länderbeispiele (Ägypten, Iran und Deutschland) die Vielfältigkeit aufgezeigt, mit der Islam und Freiheit miteinander in ein Verhältnis treten können. Die Beispiele und Bandbreite der Situationen belegt, dass der Islam ein religiöses System darstellt, das Pluralismus zulässt bzw. zu einer vielgestaltigen Auslegung einlädt. (ICH)

Practicing Islam in inhospitable environments -- "I want to instruct myself to strengthen my faith" : learning in Islamic institutions -- "Your nafs pulls you down, your spirit up" : struggling for virtue -- "My label is not a feminist, it is simply Muslim" : beyond emancipation versus submission -- "A housewife with a diploma" : educated women in the family and the workplace -- Visibly Muslim : negotiating appearances in public spaces -- Pious citizens

Foreword / Jacob Olupona, Harvard University, Divinity School -- Introduction: Embodiment and relationality in religions of Africa and its diaspora / Yolanda Covington-Ward and Jeanette S. Jouili -- Spirited choreographies : embodied memories and domestic enslavement in Togolese mama tchamba rituals / Elyan Hill -- Alchemy of the fuqara : spiritual care, memory, and the Black Muslim body / Youssef Carter -- Spiritual ethnicity : our collective ancestors in Ifá devotion across the Americas / N. Fadeke Castor -- Faith full : sensuous habitus, everyday affect, and divergent diaspora in the UCKG / Rachel Cantave -- Covered bodies, moral education, and the embodiment of Islamic reform in northern Nigeria / Elisha P. Renne -- Embodied worship in a Haitian protestant church in the Bahamas : religious habitus among Bahamians of Haitian descent / Bertin M. Louis Jr. -- The quest for spiritual purpose in a secular dance community : Bèlè's rebirth in contemporary Martinique / Camee Maddox-Wingfield -- Embodying Black religion : the ethics and aesthetics of Afro-diasporic Muslim hip-hop in Britain / Jeanette S. Jouili -- Secular affective politics in a national dance about AIDS in Mozambique / Aaron Montoya -- Wrestling with homosexuality : kinesthesia as resistance in Ghanaian pentecostalism / Nathanael Homewood -- "Exceptional healing" : gender, materiality, embodiment, and prophetism in the Lower Congo / Yolanda Covington-Ward -- Dark matter : formations of death pollution in southeastern African funerals / Casey Golomski.

The contributors to Embodying Black Religions in Africa and Its Diasporas investigate the complex intersections between the body, religious expression, and the construction and transformation of social relationships and political and economic power. Among other topics, the essays examine the dynamics of religious and racial identity among Brazilian Neo-Pentecostals; the significance of cloth coverings in Islamic practice in northern Nigeria; the ethics of socially engaged hip-hop lyrics by Black Muslim artists in Britain; ritual dance performances among Mama Tchamba devotees in Togo; and how Ifá practitioners from Mexico, Colombia, Venezuela, Trinidad, and the United States join together in a shared spiritual ethnicity. From possession and spirit-induced trembling to dance, the contributors outline how embodied religious practices are central to expressing and shaping interiority and spiritual lives, national and ethnic belonging, ways of knowing and techniques of healing, and sexual and gender politics. In this way, the body is a crucial site of religiously motivated social action for people of African descent.
Contributors. Rachel Cantave, Youssef Carter, N. Fadeke Castor, Yolanda Covington-Ward, Casey Golomski, Elyan Jeanine Hill, Nathanael J. Homewood, Jeanette S. Jouili, Bertin M. Louis Jr., Camee Maddox-Wingfield, Aaron Montoya, Jacob K. Olupona, Elisha P. Renne