Paradigms of Purification in European Mosques: How Islamic Ethics Informs Social Action

• In Event: 2253 - Religion

Abstract

Abstract: This paper examines the marginalization of Muslims in Europe and their ethics-driven centered collective responses of Muslim communities in Europe. Drawing from over two years of ethnographic research in two of Europe’s largest representative capital city mosques, I argue that the Islam ethics undergirding individual religious practice becomes operationalized as a social process in collective paradigms of purification, which respond to the deep social pollution of Muslim identity. These two cases highlight centrifugal versus centripetal paradigms of purification in the Sehitlik Mosque, Berlin and the East London Mosque. In both, mosque communities perceive pollution as outside of “true” Islam, instead located in mainstream society and/or disfiguring interpretations of Islam. And in both, the practice of Islamic ethics forges a means to contend with “uncivil” associations.

Author

• Elisabeth Becker