Mikkel Rytter

‘The Family of Denmark’ and ‘the Aliens’: Kinship Images in Danish Integration Politics

Applying insights from newer anthropological kinship studies, this article suggests that the current Danish immigration regime is based on and legitimized by a certain kind of ‘kinship images’ that are used and reproduced in Danish public and political discourses. Since 2002, every Danish citizen applying for family reunification with foreign spouses has been met with a ‘requirement of national attachment’, which basically distinguishes within the pool of citizens between the ‘real’ and the ‘not-quite-real’ Danes. The article discusses the possibilities of ‘integration’ in the current situation where Danish legislation and public discourses tend to distinguish between Danish citizens on the basis of their family history and national attachment. The article furthermore discusses different strategies of ‘kinning’ through which the ‘not-quite-real’ can aspire to become ‘real’ Danes.

A decade of suspicion: Islam and Muslims in Denmark after 9/11

In 2011, al-Qaeda leader, Osama Bin Laden, was killed in Pakistan and the US president, Barack Obama, concluded a decade of global ‘war against terror’. In light of this, it seems only sensible to explore what implications the post-9/11 international developments have had on a local basis in specific national contexts. With this in mind, this article focuses on Denmark and discusses how the critical event of 9/11 motivated a security/integration response, including various pre-emptive measures that have cast the Muslim population as the usual suspects. It will discuss how these changes have affected the everyday lives of ordinary Danish Muslims over the last ten years and changed the relationship between majorities and minorities. Finally, it will also examine how and why recent national and international events have created the potential for another shift in majority–minority relations.

Money or Education? Improvement Strategies Among Pakistani Families in Denmark

Tracing life stories and family histories back to rural Punjab, I explore the development and processes of upward social mobility of the Pakistani community in Denmark from the 1960s onwards. I suggest that social mobility among Pakistani immigrants and their descendants must be seen as the outcome of a village-like immigrant communitys fierce competition for symbolic capital and recognition within the context of changing social and economic conditions in Denmark. While the Pakistani immigrants primarily found unskilled factory work during the 1960s and 1970s, the economic recession and restructuring of the Danish labour market during the late 1970s and 1980s pushed them into two different long-term strategies of money or education respectively. This created a split in the Pakistani community between educated and non-educated families and shaped the second generations way of life in terms of, for example, marriage arrangements or notions of identity and belonging.

Rituals of migration: an introduction

ABSTRACT This introduction presents a framework for the articles in the special issue Rituals of Migration. First, it provides an overview of studies of ritual and migration, highlighting the fruitfulness of exploring the two fields together and arguing for the use of ritual as a cultural prism on processes of continuity and change in migration. In light of these analytical approaches, the introduction continues by outlining and discussing the three major themes that crosscut the articles (the interrelations between change and continuity, processes of placemaking and lines of social differentiation), demonstrating how the articles can shed light on these issues.

By the beard of the Prophet: Imitation, reflection and world transformation among Sufis in Denmark:

This article discusses the significance of growing large beards among the young Danish Pakistani members of a newly established Naqshbandi Sufi order in Copenhagen, where the beard is not simply an imitation but a reflection of the Prophet Muhammad. Exploring emic understandings of emulation and embodiment, the article suggests that a conceptual displacement from imitation to reflection enables our analytical framework to move beyond the ‘self-cultivation paradigm’ that has dominated recent writings in the anthropology of Islam, so that it can accommodate the numerous ways in which devoted Sufis are being acted upon; a change from ‘technology of self’ to ‘technology of Other’ enables connections between this world and Elsewhere to be included in the analytical framework. The article further discusses how the beard is significant in the brotherhood’s attempts at sacralization and world transformation based on nur (light) and love.

Burger Jihad: Fatal Attractions at a Sufi Lodge in Pakistan

Abstract Based on a number of “burger episodes” during 10 days of itikaf at a Sufi lodge in Pakistan, this article discusses the difficulties of religious self-cultivation among young Muslim pilgrims from Denmark. The focus on food and eating is not only used to discuss how religious brotherhoods and spiritual kinship are created and maintained, but also becomes a prism to discuss emic conceptualizations of the nafs, the lower self, as well as how the jihad of dedicated Sufi Muslims is tested by fatal attractions of various kinds—in this case, in the guise of tasty burgers.

Transnational Sufism from below: charismatic counselling and the quest for well-being

Pakistani migrants in Denmark have achieved a level of prosperity and social mobility that first-generation migrants could only dream of before they emigrated in the 1960s. However, their success has come at a price. Currently, migrant families are experiencing a period of radical social change, which challenges and alters their perception of well-being. In such a critical situation, they may turn towards Sufi shaykhs, located in Pakistan, for help and guidance. This article puts forward the concept of ‘transnational Sufism from below’ in order to explore how migrants pragmatically use religious counselling in dealing with the contingencies of everyday life. The quest for well-being is not only related to the pain and suffering of ‘the individual body’, but it is also related, to a large extent, to ‘the social body’ of family and kinship relations, and seems to outline a new kind of diffuse transnational engagement with the potential for reshaping diasporic identities and connections between Pakistan and Denmark.

Back to the future: religious mobility among Danish Pakistani Sufi Muslims

ABSTRACT Pakistani migrant families in Denmark are embedded in a transnational social field, one that stretches between the rural villages in Punjab that they left behind in the 1960s and 1970s, and their new home in greater Copenhagen. However, the upcoming generation, born and raised in Denmark, often has an ambivalent relationship with the homeland of their parents. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in the Sufi tariqa(order, path) called Naqshbandi Mujaddidi Saifi, this article explores how the ritual of ‘zikr Allah’ (the commemoration of God) provides an opportunity for the Copenhagen Saifis to cultivate new connections with Pakistan, beyond the kinship networks and the family village of origin. The ritual is significant for their aspiration to become pious Muslims. In this process, Pakistan comes to be ascribed with new meanings. Whereas the parents’ generation associated Pakistan with family and kin, property, houses, and power connected to the village of origin, these pious Saifis begin to associate Pakistan with spirituality, purity, and love for their shaykh in particular and the Sufi tariqa in general.

Writing Against Integration: Danish Imaginaries of Culture, Race and Belonging

ABSTRACT The article addresses some of the problems related to the concept of integration, which has been used (and abused) in Denmark since the 1990s to discuss socio-economic, cultural and religious challenges related to the everyday life of ethnic minorities. The concept of integration is not innocent but promotes both a specific conceptualisation of Danish society and a problematisation of immigrant minorities and their relationship to the indigenous majority. Based on the ethnographic studies conducted in Denmark in recent decades, the article attempts to disentangle the dominant social imaginary by outlining three scenarios: ‘welfare reciprocity’, ‘host and guests’ and ‘the Danes as an indigenous people’. These scenarios consolidate an asymmetrical relationship between majorities and minorities because they simultaneously cast integration as desirable and impossible. Finally, inspired by Lila Abu-Lughod’s seminal article ‘writing against culture’, the article suggests strategies of ‘writing against integration’ in order to regain the critical potential of academic analysis.

The Scent of a Rose: Imitating Imitators as They Learn to Love the Prophet

This chapter discusses the study of experience and affect in an ecstatic religious ritual.1 More precisely it focuses on the gatherings of zikr Allah, performed three times a week among Danish Pakistani Sufi brothers who follow the transnational tariqa (path, order) called Naqshbandi Mujadiddi Saifi, named after the late shaykh Saif ur-Rahman, who passed away in 2010 and has his shrine at the outskirts of Lahore in Pakistan. At the zikr gatherings, young murids (followers) receive nur (light) reflected onto them by their shaykh. Nur Muhammadi is the preeternai light that God used to create Adam. The purpose of the zikr is to cleanse the heart of evil influences and transform the murids into pious Muslims. Furthermore, nur awakens the lata’if, the seven centers of the ‘subtle body’ of the murid. When this happens, the murid will often experience wajd (ecstasy), a state in which he will have bodily tics, cry laugh, shake, scream, or fall to the ground and lose all physical control.