Muslim Women and Pious Learning in Denmark

Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this book investigates how and why Danish Muslim women engage as teachers and students in Islamic educational activities. It does so by focusing on the learning trajectories, knowledge disseminating activities, and class interactions of the women, showing that they involve themselves in a variety of activities to stay continuously engaged, and that this is a way of becoming pious. The book makes evident that this becoming is dependent on the embeddedness of the individual in a web of relations to both this- and otherworldly others. As such, the book promotes a relational understanding of piety formation and religious engagement that are informative to studies of religious life beyond Islam.

Maria Lindebæk Schmidt Lyngsøe, PhD in the Study of Religions, is a researcher at the Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies, University of Copenhagen. Her main research field is Muslim life in contemporary Scandinavia.