The twin processes of inter-cultural communication and the demand for minority rights are problematised by Linda Hyökki using the case study of Finland. Are Muslims losing the religious meaning to their public performance of faith?
As we are approach the Holy Month of Ramadan in 2023 CE, (1444 AH), those observing the fast in non-Muslim European societies will have to again deal with debates regarding the facilitation and recognition given to this religious practice. For instance, in Germany, the wellbeing of fasting teenager pupils while attending daily school activities is questioned by authorities looking for justifications to prohibit their pupils from fasting. In Finland, public debates last year circulated around the extra free days given to Muslim students to attend the Eid-al-Fitr festivities. In 2017, a demonstration by a nationalist civil society movement was held in front of a school which had included a small informative section in their morning program relating to Ramadan, including playing the Qur’an from the schools’ loudspeakers. The demonstrators claimed that this was a sign of an alleged Islamization of Finland.
As Muslims, we are now faced with the question of as how “palatably” to our non-Muslim fellow citizens we want to present the Holy Month and its contents. Do we frame it in “cultural” terms, focusing on the fun part of community Eid-festivals, or the idea of coming together with family and friends for good food; something many non-Muslims might be able to relate to based on their own experiences of the Christmas holidays? Do we commercialize it with imitations of Christmas calendars hiding sweets behind every little door for every day of Ramadan, with excessive gift shopping, or by investing hundreds in interior lights and decorations? Do we explain Ramadan to our friends and family as the “Muslim Christmas”? Or should we merely stick to human rights-based argumentation, focusing on the fact that we are talking about a religious obligation that in its most basic form needs to be acknowledged as nothing less or more by both Muslims and non-Muslims. Is the culturalization of our religion when it comes to Ramadan and other practices more of a pitfall than a diplomatic way of receiving not just our negative but also positive rights of our religious freedom?
“Culture” is a loaded term we use to describe who we are and who we are not. In everyday language it denotes daily practices by the masses we perceive as shared and traditional to a geographical area. We can for instance socially construct with it an image of “Finnish culture”. Sometimes, we can use “culture” to differentiate “Muslim culture” from “Christian culture”. However, in all these examples, as well as in general, we would be homogenizing not only ourselves but also the “Other” against whom we mirror “our culture”. As European societies strive more and more to become religiously neutral and seemingly secular, the phenomenon of culturalized religion has blurred the lines of rightful belonging even more and complicated the question of how religion finds its place in the public sphere.
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“Why do you have to leave your own culture?” is a question that many converts face from their social environment upon their conversion to Islam. When in my early adulthood years I made the decision to “leave the Church” I was searching for something else that would fit my understanding of this life and the Hereafter. I never felt that my spirituality would collide with my cultural identity. While many converts face rejection from their immediate families (Brice 2016), I was lucky. When I “came out” as a Muslim, my immediate family was rather surprised because they had not thought of me as a religious person at all. Friends and family members who were less close to me scorned my decision. However, whilst I had never been a practising Christian before my conversion to Islam, nobody had then questioned my cultural belonging as a Finn.
While Finland has no official state religion, most Finns have followed Protestantism since the Reformation in the 16th century. The Orthodox Church holds the position of the second official national church. How much then does Christianity define “Finnishness”? If we are to look at the developments within the Evangelic Lutheran Church of Finland, Christian identity seems to be going through a crisis. In 2022, a little more than 60 000 individuals “unsubscribed” from their church membership. In comparison to the previous year, this was approximately 10% more, as per official statistics. In a country of a little bit more than 5.5 million inhabitants, such numbers are significant. The motivations of the masses “leaving” the Church are unclear, however, but it would be easy to claim that Finns are becoming more and more non-Christian.
However, as the Christian faith seems to be losing its content value for Finnish people’s self-identification, the right-wing is increasingly instrumentalizing Christianity in their arguments to racially and culturally otherize Muslims. Highlighting Christian identity as part of “Finnishness” affects the way in which Islam as a worldview and religion practiced on an everyday basis is seen as incompatible with the “Finnish way of life”. Public debates around the “Muslim Question” (O’Brien 2015), on the belonging of Muslims in Finland as part and parcel of the “Us” and the fostering of Islam as a source of cultural life and religiosity tend to focus on the role of the immigrant Muslims, and their “foreign practices”. At the same time, anti-immigration discourse draws heavily on typical discursive frames of the “Clash of civilizations”, “Islamization” of society and gender equality. For instance, Laura Huhtasaari, a member of the True Finns Party and 2018 presidential election candidate, stated during a campaign visit to one of the largest churches in Finland, Mikaelinkirkko, a church located in the city of Turku, that if the Church does not defend Christian values, Christians and Christian traditions, Islam would otherwise wipe Christianity from the country.
Islam and the national cultural identity – or the belonging to the social category of Finns – are juxtaposed within such anti-Muslim racist discourse. For Muslim converts again, this means their framing as culturally and consequently racially divergent from the rest of the (ethnic) Finns. In the extreme form of this racial othering, converts are considered as “traitors” and outcasts. These were also the words of the Christchurch massacre shooter in New Zealand who in his manifesto described Muslim converts as those whom he “truly hates” because they “turn their backs on their heritage, turn their backs on their cultures, turn their back on their traditions and became blood traitors to their own race”.
Where seeking recognition for Christian practices as religious practices per se does not advance their cause as the audience is meant to be the wider Finnish public amongst whom religion does not cause an emotional response, the right-wing and nationalist actors are making use of culturalized Christianity. In Finland, this has been observed to manifest when customs that traditionally have been associated with the adherence to Christianity as a religion are now framed as “part of Finnish culture”. For instance, the practice of singing the religious hymn “Suvivirsi” during the end-of-school year festivities has been argued to belong to civic education (reference). Hence, even though debates have been held about its omittance from the program to accommodate the non-participation of children from religious minorities in rituals of a religious nature, proponents argue that whoever wants to integrate into Finnish society must accept such practices as “part of the culture”.
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The culturalization of religion, in the case of Finland, that of Evangelic Lutheran Christianity, serves a domophilic (Ahmad 2013) agenda that constructs the Finnish nation as a unity, into which Muslims – perceived as immigrants and foreigners, strangers – are invited to integrate. The idea of this unified nation, static in the facets of its identity is then enacted in situations when public debate concerns customs and rituals that due to multiculturalist policies are about to undergo a change. Facing a “threat” to the domos, the defence is to argue that such practices cannot be changed, not because of their religious meaning – the hymn sung in the school hall at the end of the year is hardly an act of worship for the children waiting to leave for their holidays – but because they are culturally significant. Changing them would thus endanger the cultural identity of the nation at large.
As such, the culturalization of Christianity constructs also part of the anti-Muslim racist discourse per se. As cultural racism, anti-Muslim racism is motivated by nativist thinking and the aim to categorize people to create boundaries of in and out groups. By favoring the majority religion, culturalization dissolves the religious content of a practice and makes it more palatable in the context of neutral and secular state policies. The singing of the hymn is regarded as a cultural practice without religious meaning. It is a tradition, a ritual that has been part of the Finnish school system for decades and has a significant symbolic meaning as this particular hymn is only ever sung in this particular context.
However, where do we draw the line between a cultural practice and a religiously significant practice, if even the appraisal of God, as is the case in the hymn, is not supposed to be considered a spiritually relevant act? How should Muslims disassociate their religious beliefs from the practice of standing up – in respect as it is done for religious hymns – and voicing verses about God with references that contradict the principles of tawhid? When those who do not want to participate in such rituals should be able to draw on their constitutional right of non-participation in religious practices, this becomes more difficult when the hymn has been discursively constructed as culturally symbolic and significant for civic education. Thus, those who sit silently are seen as unwilling to “integrate”.
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As Muslims, we recognize Islam as a religion that can accommodate all socio-cultural contexts of different geographic areas, i.e. the ‘urf, as long as our actions within this accommodation do not conflict with the Islamic principles of revealed knowledge and God’s command (Murad 2020, 208–9) However, while we are adapting our own religious practices to the social environment, such as using different kinds of locally customed dressing styles to follow the principles of hijab, cook local dishes for our iftar meals respecting the fiqh of halal and haram, building our mosques using local and traditional building materials such as wood in the northern part of Europe, we should not forget that fundamentally, we are acting upon what God has ordained for us as a part of our deen.
While we are constantly marginalized and demonized, we might find ourselves in a defensive position, and make use of the culturalization of religion for taking part in civic life but also when it comes to forming our Muslim identities in our respective local contexts. Thus, we might want to strive towards our right to belong in our communities. These strivings can be claims to either highlight the distance of our Islamic lifestyle from those in Muslim majority societies, so as to prove that our cultural loyalties are in the European societies we live in or claims to practising an Islam “free of cultural baggage” or an “authentic” Islam that is not imported goods. However, making our religious practices such as Ramadan about “British”, “German”, or “Finnish Islam”, will neither help us in seeking of recognition for our rights. Relativizing our acts of ibada as “cultural manifestations” will only weaken their footing under the protection of religious freedom.
As the phenomenon of culturalized religion favors the majority religion and thus feeds into the domophilic discourse, anti-Muslim racism manifests itself in this regard in a culture war against the manifestations of Islam in the shared public space. For instance, bans on minarets are in anti-Muslim racist discourse considered as visual representations of Islam that aim to dominate over local cultural symbols, i.e., church towers (Cheng 2015; Ayoub and Lohmeier 2016), and used as an argumentation against the construction of mosques. Thus, while minarets are strictly speaking not necessary in a mosque building for the believers to offer their prayers, we do need buildings that are built to fill the purpose of a mosque respecting several different requirements for suitable sanitary facilities and the prayer room itself. Thus, discussions related to construction of mosque buildings should focus on the necessity of facilitating the basic human right to practice religion and not delve in arguments about whether the building will resemble the mosques in Marrakech, Medina, or Kuala Lumpur.
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In our fight against anti-Muslim racism and discrimination, we have to be able to call things by their name. We must stop being apologetic about our religious beliefs and practices and try to disguise them as “culturally relevant” in a multiculturalist framework. The pressure we will put by following such strategies on individuals to conform to a certain kind of an identity does more harm than good. We have to protect our status as a religious community and not associate the manifestations of our religious practices with any specific locality, whether it is the “Finnish”, the “British”, the so-called indigenous “Balkan” way, the “Arab”, the “Turkish”, or the “Pakistani” way, such favorizing of a specific “Muslim culture”. While culturalization of religion might seem like a harmless strategy to recognize the diversity of our societies, Muslims should acknowledge the dangers that such divorcing of religious meaning from religious practices brings with it, regardless of whether it is applied to the majority religion or that of our own.
Linda Hyökki is a researcher and a freelance consultant on anti-Muslim racism and Muslim minorities in Europe. She is in the final stages of her Ph.D., with a thesis on Muslim converts’ experiences with anti-Muslim racism in her native country, Finland.
