Social Compass

This article provides a historically informed analysis of the contemporary incorporation of Islam and Muslims into an idea of common – national – membership in the United States and Britain. It shows that there is a current movement towards synthesis between religious and national identities by Muslims themselves, and explores the ways in which this synthesis is occurring within rich and dynamic public spheres in societies that have historically included and incorporated other religious groups. The authors argue that both countries are wrestling with the extent to which they accommodate Muslims in ways that allow them to reconcile their faith and citizenship commitments, and that the British ‘establishment’ is no less successful at achieving this than secular republicanism in the US.

This article utilizes an analytical framework that examines the differences in the organizational forms and strategies of Islamic organizations with reference to both internal and external factors affecting the organization, such as internal organizational characteristics and national and transnational political opportunity structures. This perspective is applied to review the empirical results of recent secondary studies from a cross-national and transatlantic perspective. In particular, this paper centres around a meta-analysis of research findings collected in the volume Islamic organizations in Europe and the USA: A multidisciplinary perspective, edited by Kortmann and Rosenow-Williams (2013), which presents new empirical research on Islamic organizations in the USA, Germany, France, the Netherlands, the UK, the Baltic States, Poland, Spain, Belgium and Switzerland.

Debates over faith-based schools have resurfaced in recent years, due largely to an increase in Islamic schools in the West and concerns regarding their role vis-a-vis social cohesion. Such debates typically occur in the public and political realms, with less academic attention to the issue. This study addresses this gap by focusing on Islamic schools in the US and England. The article draws on extensive qualitative data collected over 20 months at three Islamic schools to understand the experiences of Muslim students and their families. Contrary to popular perceptions, the findings suggest that Islamic schools can facilitate the participation of Muslims in mainstream institutions by equipping them with the cultural capital needed to navigate in non-Muslim arenas. Paradoxically, the findings also indicate that attending Islamic schools does not necessarily translate into greater levels of religiosity among Muslim youth; in some cases it even turned them away from the religion.

This article uses conversion to Islam as a lens through which to explore the intricacies of race and religion in France and the United States. Using in-depth interviewing and ethnography, the author explores how white converts relate to their allegedly dissonant racial and religious identities in national contexts where Islam has been racialized as ‘Brown’ and foreign. Focusing on two countries that have historically had highly contrasted understandings of race and religion, she offers a comparative analysis of how race operates in the lives of Muslim converts on both sides of the Atlantic. The article shows that, even though processes of racial assignation work in a similar manner in both cases, French and American converts report different experiences with race, thereby suggesting that the racialization of Islam is endowed with different textures and meanings across national contexts.

This article is a case study of the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen shrine in Pennsylvania, United States. The authors illustrate how various ‘Sufisms’ coexist and engage in contestation over the way that Bawa’s remaining disciples, new members, and otherwise interested devotees utilize Bawa’s burial shrine. The Fellowship in Philadelphia has established links with spaces affiliated with Bawa Muhaiyaddeen in Sri Lanka as well as with branches of the Fellowship in Toronto, Canada, and Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Hence, although this project is in many ways a case study of localized Sufism in the United States, it further highlights the dynamics of what might be called globalized Sufism in the 21st century.

This article deals with the recently revealed paradox that contemporary Muslims score higher on Protestant work ethic than contemporary Protestants. The author tests whether this phenomenon is supported by World Values Survey (WVS) data. According to Inglehart’s theory of post-materialist shift, work ethic should be stronger in the developing societies where there is a lack of existential security. The author also tests whether the effects of the Protestant work ethic extend beyond the religious population of Protestant countries. The multilevel models built on 25,437 respondents in 55 countries show no significant difference in work ethic between Muslims and Protestants. Living in a historically Protestant society does not increase work ethic, but being religious in a Protestant society does. As countries develop, work ethic is likely to decrease. This poses further questions about the universal features of religious ethics and the non-religious factors explaining the economic progress associated with the Protestant work ethic.

The borders between sacred and secular music are often believed to be fixed and impenetrable. However, when a secular musical genre is reworked for consumption by religious audiences, a space is created where the sacred meets the secular, and this can be used to examine the variety of ways in which cultural norms, values, and ideologies fluctuate and converge between the religious and temporal spheres. In this article, the author looks at the overlapping of Christian and secular heavy metal music, focusing on the ways gender is described, celebrated, and normalized in the lyrics of Christian metal. After analyzing the lyrics of 351 Christian heavy metal songs, she conducts an in-depth analysis of three sets of lyrics. Despite the obvious antithesis between the worlds of heavy metal music and evangelical Christianity, her analysis highlights one avenue where the sacred and secular merge. The display, production, and management of gender can be viewed as a common trope that links Christian metal to secular metal and can function as a means of creating a space for the alignment of religious beliefs within the larger cultural expectations of gender.

Religion has received a large amount of scholarly attention for its role in promoting pro-social outcomes for a community. One of the areas in which religion may demonstrate a positive effect is suicide. The role that religion plays in reducing suicide within a community has long roots in sociology. Émile Durkheim suggested that religion would have a pro-social effect in decreasing suicide. Religion should reduce suicide by establishing values and norms that integrate individuals into society and regulate the behavior of the members of a society. However, the presence of many different religions could erode the social integration and regulation effects of religion. This would cause suicide to increase as individuals become confused as to what values and norms are to be followed. The current analysis uses the religious fractionalization index to examine the effect of religious heterogeneity on suicide. The findings demonstrate that increased religious heterogeneity increased suicide for a sample of countries.

Erratum to Chinese evangelists on the move: space, authority, and ethnicisation among overseas Chinese Protestant Christians by Yuqin Huang and I-hsin Hsiao published in Social Compass 62(3): 379–395. DOI: 10.1177/0037768615587823.

On page 379, the corresponding author of the article should read:

Corresponding author:

I-hsin Hsiao, East China University of Science and Technology, Xuhui District, Meilong Road 130, Shanghai, 200237, China

Email: ecust1213@gmail.com