Daniel Nilsson DeHanas

Governing through Prevent? Regulation and contested practice in state-Muslim engagement

In this article, we consider the implications of the ‘Prevent’ strand of the government’s counter-terrorism strategy for the UK state’s engagement with Muslims. We argue that the logics of Prevent have been highly problematic for state–Muslim engagement. Nevertheless, we suggest that the characterisation of state approaches to engaging Muslims as a form of discipline is incomplete without an analysis of: first, differences in practices, habits and perspectives across governance domains; second, variations in approach and implementation between levels of governance; and third, the agency of Muslims who engage with the state. Through this approach we show how attention to the situated practices of governance reveals the contested nature of governing through Prevent.

Olympic proportions: the expanding scalar politics of the London 'Olympics mega-mosque' controversy.

When cities host mega-events, such as the Olympic Games, these events change the context in which conventionally local political decisions are considered and made. This article follows Islamic movement Tablighi Jamaat’s proposed plans to build the large Abbey Mills Mosque in Newham, East London, and the controversy that followed. The analysis builds from media accounts, interviews with a leading mosque opponent, and ethnographic observation from religious gatherings at the Abbey Mills site. Taking a scalar politics approach, we investigate how the ‘mega’ scale of the mosque was framed and debated in media and opposition campaign accounts, and how Tablighi Jamaat belatedly responded with counterframes of its own. The ‘Olympics mega-mosque’ controversy would grow to encompass an increasingly broad public sphere and larger anxieties about national identity, government competence, and the integration of Muslims in Britain. We conclude with implications of the case for studying contentious politics, Islamophobia, and contemporary governance.

Of Hajj and home: Roots visits to Mecca and Bangladesh in everyday belonging

Muslim religiosity and South Asian ethnicities are at times experienced as rival forms of affiliation, especially for the second generation born and brought up in the West. In this article, I investigate the role of ‘roots visits’ to Bangladesh and pilgrimages to Mecca in shaping ethnic/religious affiliations of young second generation Bengalis in Londons East End. Building on Glick Schiller (2004), I argue that Bengali translocal ways of being (travel to Bangladesh) have become untethered from Bengali translocal ways of belonging (self-identifications), due in part to the more critical stance on Bengali culture propagated by deculturated Islamic institutions in the East End and to young peoples perceptions of their social class difference from Bangladeshi locals. While second generation youth who travel to Bangladesh tend to express a distancing from their ‘roots,’ those who travel on hajj or umra find that this bolsters their sense of rootedness in translocal Muslim belonging.

A 'system of self-appointed leaders'? Examining modes of muslim representation in governance in Britain

Research Highlights and Abstract This article Contributes to theoretical debates about the significance of group identity and political representation; Contributes to academic research into the shift from formal and hierarchical to more informal and network-based styles of governance; Contributes to research on the integration of Muslims in Britain by elucidating the emergence and diversification of Muslim representative organisations in Britain since 1970; Demonstrates the multifaceted and dynamic nature of Muslim representative claims-making in contemporary UK governance by identifying and analysing a range of modes of Muslim representation. Since the turn of the century Britain has seen a proliferation of Muslim civil society organisations and an increase in the number of points of contact between Muslim spokespersons and government. Yet, this increased participation in UK governance has been a source of fierce controversies centring on the role of conservative male leaderships and the influence of radical Islamic groups. Drawing on interviews with 42 national elites who have engaged in UK Muslim–government relations in the past decade, this article charts the emergence of national-level Muslim representation and assesses its relationship to democratic participation and accountability. Building on the work of Michael Saward, we argue that unelected civil society representatives can act as an important supplement to elected representatives. We show how four modes of Muslim representation have emerged in the last decade—‘delegation’, ‘authority’, ‘expertise’ and ‘standing’—creating dynamic competition among representative claims.

Keepin’ it Real: London Youth Hip Hop as an Authentic Performance of Belief

Abstract Hip hop is a global cultural phenomenon that encompasses rap music, dance, graffiti art, and fashion as well as particular ways of being. One sub-genre of hip hop is Gospel rap, in which Christian rappers attempt to ‘represent’ the truth of God as a tangible reality, thereby ‘keepin’ it real’. This study investigates how young British Jamaican male adults in the Brixton area of London appropriate hip hop for their own ends. Based on original raps authored and performed by these young people, the research finds that their representations of spiritual reality are influenced by the conventions and boundaries of professional Gospel rap. The study describes how youth incorporate religious hip hop into their everyday lives and argues that in some cases hip hop performance becomes a method for pedagogically reshaping the body, giving religious beliefs an ‘embodied authenticity’.

London Youth, Religion, and Politics: Engagement and Activism from Brixton to Brick Lane

In London Youth, Religion and Politics: Engagement and Activism from Brixton to Brick Lane, Daniel Nilsson DeHanas offers an illuminating comparison of the lives of Christian and Muslim young people in Brixton, South London, and in the East London borough of Tower Hamlets. With the book focusing particularly on questions of civic engagement and political participation, Sadek Hamid finds this a valuable, empirically rich and theoretically informed text that will increase understanding of how different forms of Christianity and Islam influence the daily lives of young people in London and challenge lazy media stereotypes that often frame perspectives on the social integration of ethnic minority youth.

Religion and the rise of populism

The seemingly unstoppable rise of populism has caught observers by surprise. Donald Trump’s US election victory, the Brexit referendum in Britain, and President Erdoğan’s emboldened power in Turkey are just three of the many cases in which populism has radically altered the tenor of contemporary politics. In these three examples, religion seems to have played a significant role, yet is often overlooked. In this special issue, we aim to provide a corrective to the general neglect of religion in academic work on populism. The contributors to this special issue shed light on roles of religion in the three populist cases already mentioned as well as in an array of other examples of populist discourse and action, stretching from Germany to Kyrgyzstan. In this brief introductory piece, we draw on key existing works and the case studies included in this issue to suggest useful ways of approaching the intersections of religion and populism.

Editorial 46.1

As Editors of Religion, State & Society we never fail to be fascinated and inspired by our contributors’ abilities to discern and illuminate multifaceted and unexpected configurations in the human relationships highlighted by the journal’s title. This already stems from the numerous possibilities of interpreting the very concepts – ‘religion’, ‘state’ and ‘society’ – that constitute our title, and particular that of ‘religion’. Our multiregional focus provides further opportunities for seeing these complexities and for attempting to identify regularities and patterns in the relationships between specific aspects of ‘religion’, ‘state’ and ‘society’. Finally, RSS’s interdisciplinarity brings together different perspectives and methods of illuminating these relationships. This issue opens with an article fromMariya Omelicheva and Ranya Ahmed in which the authors analyse the roles of religion in political participation. While the bulk of the literature on this topic focuses on the United States, with a few studies offering other single-country analyses, Omelicheva and Ahmed’s work stands out as an ambitious cross-national and cross-religious quantitative comparison. The authors use hierarchical multilevel modelling to pull apart different influences at the country, institutional and individual level, from the 1980s until 2014. Across a global range of cases, they ascertain how different facets of religion work in divergent ways. They find that religiosity by itself tends to impede political engagement, while membership in a religious organisation increases the likelihood of political action. Beyond this central finding, there are interesting results from the comparative breakdown between religious traditions. Buddhists and Jews are found to be exceptions, with higher religiosity resulting in a greater likelihood of engaging in a few specific political activities such as boycotting products. In contrast, self-identifying Muslims are shown to be less likely than other groups to engage in all forms of political activity. This latter finding is perhaps surprising given the unrelenting media and academic interest in Islamist politics. The second article in this issuemoves our attention from how religion influences political engagement with the state to how states attempt to influence religion. Serawit Bekele Debele’s in-depth qualitative approach enables investigating nuances that may not be visible in the comprehensive picture based on a large-scale study. Her case study focuses on the Oromo ethnic minority group and Waqqeffana, an African traditional religion which some of thempractice. Each year Waqqeffana followers hold a lively festival of thanksgiving, known as Ireecha, which has recently taken on an increasing political dimension as an expression of self-determination, leading state authorities to worry that it is ‘dangerous’. Debele builds from Bryan Turner’s well-known two-part framework on managing religion with ‘upgrading’ (modernising and secularising religions into state logics) and ‘enclavement’ (policies of exclusion and segregation). She adds to Turner’s categories two other management strategies exemplified by the case of Waqqeffana in Ethiopia. These are ‘repression’ RELIGION, STATE & SOCIETY, 2018 VOL. 46, NO. 1, 1–3 https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2018.1432197

Editorial 45.2

Relationships between religion, state and society often involve ‘invisible’ qualities that may escape the attention of social scientists and other researchers before, at certain junctures, they reveal themselves in observable societal trends or movements. The four research contributions in this issue of Religion, State and Society, different as they are in their themes, arguments and geographical locations, aim to scrutinise precisely the ‘invisible’ and seemingly inscrutable qualities that can produce unexpected and polarising configurations in religion and politics. This theme is most evident in the first two articles, both focused on Poland. Krzysztof Zuba investigates two parties on opposing fringes of Polish politics, which have had impressive yet short-lived electoral successes: the Catholic-led radical right League of Polish Families (LPR), associated with Radio Maryja, and the radical left anticlericalist Palikot Movement (RP). Zuba describes LPR and RP as ‘political meteorites’. Soon after their founding, each of these parties gained great momentum with around 40 representatives in parliament (in 2001 and 2011, respectively), only to rapidly fizzle out and lose parliamentary status. Why did Polish political fashions shift so radically from fringe to fringe? Zuba puts forward a five-part explanation: secularisation, including anticlericalism of many Polish voters; hidden religious cleavages that temporarily emerged; sociocultural changes driven by populism and postmodernism; political opportunities created by events, such as the quarrel over the Smoleńsk cross; and the shifting electoral strategies taken by the two parties. Zuba’s observations seem to resonate with trends and developments we find elsewhere in the world, particularly the ways populist and other polarising movements use emergent opportunities, sometimes related to religion, to catalyse radical political shifts. Moving beyond Zuba’s analysis of the LPR and RP parties, there are elements of the rise and fall of radical politics that may seem to defy social scientific prediction altogether. In his study of The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran, Charles Kurzman (2004) grasps at this volatility with what he calls an ‘antiexplanation’: many people who join growing movements do so simply because these movements are growing. Victoria Kamasa’s article on the symbolic reach of the Catholic Church in Poland considers a different configuration of polar oppositions. Her article concerns the Catholic Church and its relationship with atheists, its symbolic opposite. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu, Kamasa argues that the power of the historically dominant Catholic Church can be understood by the degree to which it shapes the linguistic habitus of other groups in society. Kamasa’s analysis of Catholic and atheist online discussion forums bears out the importance of the church’s liturgical categories in shaping various discussions on the topics of love, death and sin. Polish social imaginaries, to use Charles Taylor’s (2004) term, are imbued with Catholic metaphorical categories. Even if Polish atheists reside in an opposing philosophical pole to Catholics, if they wish to speak intelligibly on the brokenness of society or on human affection or mortality, they may find themselves having to engage with Catholic-infused language. RELIGION, STATE & SOCIETY, 2017 VOL. 45, NO. 2, 85–86 https://doi.org/10.1080/09637494.2017.1323423

Tributes to Philip Walters (editor from 1988 to 2015) by Edwin Bacon, Jonathan Sutton and Grace Davie

Philip Walters stepped down as this journal’s Editor at the end of 2015, after having served for nearly 25 years. Our own early editorial experiences make us deeply appreciative of the formidable and inimitable role Philip played in transforming an important religious freedom advocacy periodical into a major academic forum on religion, politics and society. The three contributions included in this tribute section are written by people who knew Philip at different periods in his life and work and from different angles. Edwin Bacon, Jonathan Sutton and Grace Davie each shows something of the combination of human and professional qualities – intellectual insight, personal integrity, empathy, patience, rigour and sense of humour – that Philip uniquely brought into his work with RSS. A common thread that emerges from the tributes is Philip’s remarkable intuition for changing times in society, politics and religion. He made the journal a home for those capable and willing to address the intellectual and moral challenges arising from such inescapable change. We are immensely grateful to Philip for this legacy and for his generous assistance in the early months of our editorship. We know that he continues to be engaged in good causes, which have marked his entire professional life. We wish him and his wife Anne every success in these and enjoyment in his retirement.