Localized Islam(s): interpreting agents, competing narratives, and experiences of faith

Abstract

This special issue investigates contemporary transformations of Islam in the post-Communist Balkans. We put forward the concept of localized Islam as an analytical lens that aptly captures the input of various interpreting agents, competing narratives, and choices of faith. By adopting an agent-based approach that is sensitive to relevant actors’ choices and the contexts where they operate, we explore how various groups negotiate and ultimately localize the grand Islamic tradition, depending on where they are situated along the hierarchy of power. Specifically, we outline three sets of actors and narratives related to revival of Islamic faith: (1) political elites, mainstream intellectuals, and religious hierarchies often unite in safeguarding a nation-centric understanding of religion, (2) foreign networks and missionaries make use of open channels of communication to propagate their specific interpretations and agendas, and (3) lay believers tend to choose among different offers and rally around the living dimension of religious practice. Contributions in this issue bring ample evidence of multiple actors’ strategies, related perspectives, and contingent choices of being a Muslim. Case studies include political debates on mosque construction in Athens; political narratives that underpin the construction of the museum of the father of Ataturk in Western Macedonia; politicians’ and imams’ competing interpretations of the Syrian war in Kosovo, Macedonia, and Albania; the emergence of practice communities that perform Muslim identity in Bulgaria; the particular codes of sharia dating in post-war Sarajevo; and veneration of saints among Muslim Roma in different urban areas in the Balkans.

Muslim Orders in Russia: Trade Networks andHijamaHealing

“…The late 1990s saw a transnational turn in the research on migrant communities and networks when scholars began looking beyond national borders and the formation of diasporas abroad to analyses of mutual influence of migrant sending and receiving countries (Taylor 1999;Faist 2000;Meyer 2001;Vertovec 2006;Wimmer and Schiller 2003;Levitt and Schiller 2004). Studies examining the role of religion in transnational migrant networks and diasporic engagement focused initially on Christian migrants in the West (Hagan and Ebaugh 2003;Levitt 2003;Levitt and Schiller 2004), but the literature has grown to include analyses of Muslim migrant communities in Western and Eastern Europe (Ahmed 1992;Vertovec and Peach 1997;Abu Lughod 2002;Salih 2013;Elbasani and Tošić 2017).…”

Milletic Secularism in the Balkans: Christianity, Islam, and Identity in Bulgaria

“…Such Muslim voices, no matter if they are Ḥanafī-Māturīdīs or Salafī-minded, pursue a re-Islamization “correcting” their local coreligionists who until recently followed supposedly superstitious and syncretic practices. Even though Islam is sociologically “localized” (Elbasani and Tošić, 2017), if we judge from certain fragments of reality, contextual diversity among stricter and more mainstream Muslims today is transformed and increasingly superseded by the “great” Islamic tradition. In social practice, Islam has never been monolithic and in this sense it is “not immune to the processes of religious individualisation and pluralisation” (Clayer and Bougarel 2017, 225).…”

Fear of Islam in Greece: migration, terrorism, and “ghosts” from the past

“…5. After the fall of Communism, most Balkan states witnessed a wholesale revival of Islam (Elbasani and Roy 2015a), at the intersection of grand narratives of national belonging, external agendas, and believers' own evaluation of their religious identity (Elbasani and Tosic 2017). 6.…”