By Daan Beekers . How should we understand, analyze and compare the cultural worlds that Muslims make and live by? And how should we approach the role of religion in these worlds? These are the central questions of the Muslim World-Making research seminar, a platform for researchers with an interest in studying the everyday lives of Muslims, which will start this Thursday and will be hosted by the VU department of anthropology.
With the increasing social and political interest in Islam, social science research on Muslims has grown exponentially in recent decades. Yet, the very subject matter of this field is characterized by a degree of ambiguity: we study Muslims, but what does it actually mean to say that someone is a ‘Muslim’? Is there a coherent, universal ‘Muslim identity’ that we may find when we compare, say, Indonesian villagers to Moroccan-Dutch people in the suburbs of Amsterdam? To what extent should we see religion as a defining feature of the everyday lives of Muslims? These are difficult questions, which have become only more pertinent in the light of the heated public and political debates about Islam. Lees verder
