In March 2016, a national Danish television station (TV2) aired a documentary titled The Mosques behind the Veil. Presented in three episodes, viewers follow two undercover moles, Mohammad and Fatma, who live in a nikah (Islamic marriage). In episode two, Fatma explores the option of getting Islamically divorced without her husband’s consent – something with which the Danish legal system cannot assist her – and she is referred to an Islamic divorce council in Aarhus. However, Fatma struggles to achieve her goal:1
TV speaker: The three panel members are all affiliated with the Mosque of Peace. On the left sits Radwan Mansour, in the middle sits Nasir Qasimi. According to our sources he is one of the most respected imams in Aarhus. The last is Khaled Mansour … The three of them will now determine whether Fatma and Mohammad can obtain [an Islamic] divorce. Fatma is permitted to present her case.
Fatma: He takes a standpoint and then discussions become so intense that he hits me.
Qasimi: No! Anything other than that. That is way out of line. No matter who does the hitting. It would be way out of line, even if it were my own father who had done it.
Fatma: After that we started to disagree even more. I became fed up with him and no longer desired him.
Qasimi: So, you do not do it?
Fatma: We began sleeping apart. Then he became more irritated and started to say that sex is his right according to sharia law, even if there is a conflict between us. Then the conflict became worse, and now he wants an additional wife. His family says that there is a wife for him in Germany.
Qasimi: You love each other, and you are sympathetic. I see it as a secondary thing.
Fatma: He wants an additional wife. I will not accept that.
R. Mansour: It is our duty to tell you that this is permitted. It is a man’s right to take a second, a third, and a fourth wife. It is completely natural.
Fatma: Then I want a divorce. If he marries an additional wife, I want a divorce.
Qasimi: You cannot demand a divorce on that basis. It is not allowed in relation to sharia.
TV speaker: The sharia council panel members advise Mohammad against marrying an additional wife in the current situation.
Segments of the Muslim population in Denmark understand civil marriage and nikah as being of different orders – two parallel phenomena. While civil marriage is regulated by Danish law and enforced by the Danish legal system, nikah is neither regulated nor enforced by a centralized Islamic institution in Denmark. Therefore, when women want to divorce according to Islamic law, they must turn to whoever poses as an Islamic divorce institution, such as the Islamic divorce council in Aarhus, which we are told consists of five members who meet once a week, indicating that this is a somewhat stable institution. This stability is further evidenced by Fatma’s case being the third heard by the council on the day of her visit.
Although this was not the first report of an Islamic divorce council in Danish media, The Mosques behind the Veil provided viewers with a glimpse into the operations of a conservative Islamic divorce council. It illustrated how some Muslim women experience what Anika Liversage and I call nikah captivity (Liversage & Petersen, 2020). We use this term to be as specific as possible, but this does not imply that captivity in unregistered religious marriage is exclusively a Muslim phenomenon. Nor is the situation described in the scene above an exclusively Muslim phenomenon, as pointed out by Natasha Mulvihill et al., who have investigated marital captivity in unregistered religious marriages among Muslims, Christians, Buddhists, and Jews:
The ‘sanctity of marriage’ across faith groups can be used to exhort victims of religious coercive control and spiritual abuse to forgive and reconcile with their abusers. Participants talked of being told by elders and faith leaders that divorce was sinful and that it was the victim’s duty to stay and make the relationship work. (Mulvihill, Aghtaie, Matolcsi, & Hester, 2022, p. 10)
The enforcement of the “sanctity of marriage” discourse is also evident in Fatma’s dialogue with the members of the Islamic divorce council in Aarhus:
Fatma: But I do not want to continue. I am suffocating. With my own family I felt more dignified. I do not want to. I do not want it. Whether he marries again or not, I do not want to continue.
Qasimi: Maybe you should give him a chance.
R. Mansour: After all, we do not want to make Satan happy. Will you give him a chance?
Fatma: No. I want to divorce.
Fatma is very clear in her request for an Islamic divorce, but the members of the Islamic divorce council refuse to issue it without an attempt at reconciliation. The scene is familiar to me because it is not uncommon for a controlling Muslim husband to threaten his wife with entering nikah with an additional woman as a way of disciplining her – and some do follow through – nor is it uncommon for women to request Islamic divorce from Muslim leaders who refuse to issue such documents without attempts at reconciliation. However, the scene is also truncated, because it does not adequately reflect the power dynamics of a typical situation in which a woman turns to an Islamic divorce council. A richer description of the situation would fundamentally alter the impression one gets as a viewer (Suhr, 2021). For example, if Fatma – a fictional character played by a mole – were like most Muslim women, she would not accept an answer from the Islamic divorce council that was counterproductive to her aims; rather, she would turn to other Muslim leaders for a different answer. Further, if Muhammad was like most abusive husbands, he would ignore the Islamic divorce council’s decision if it issued an Islamic divorce, possibly even threatening the council members with violence. In other words, although the Islamic divorce council is significant – otherwise the people Fatma and Mohammad are supposed to represent would not attend – it is seldom able to rule in any meaningful judicial sense.
The Mosques behind the Veil described an interesting phenomenon that had been missed by researchers at the time: namely, that Islamic divorce councils operate outside Britain. To take an example, the first large study of Islamic parallel legal practices in Denmark, published on 1 November 2011, had not found any Islamic divorce councils (Liversage & Jensen, 2011); however, approximately a month prior to its publication, on 5 October 2011, three Danish imams spoke about their Islamic divorce council on the front page of the newspaper Kristeligt Dagblad under the heading “Danish imams establish their own divorce court” (Søndergaard, 2011a). In the article, one of the Muslim leaders involved presented the Islamic divorce council as already operational, having issued a total of ten divorces.
So far, researchers in mainland Europe have only identified Islamic divorce councils in Germany and Finland, although they call them committees rather than councils. In his study of Islamic divorce in Germany, Mahmoud Jaraba, for example, identified “family dispute committees, comprised of an imam and two to four eminent members of the mosque community” (Jaraba, 2019, pp. 92–93). He points out the emerging institutionalization of this proto-council phenomenon when he describes how Muslim leaders based in Berlin considered founding “a family counseling and arbitration service … along the lines of the sharīʿa council in Britain” (Jaraba, 2019, p. 102). However, it is not clear what the differences between these institutions are, nor what kind of institution the first is. Similarly, in their study of Islamic divorce in Finland, Mulki Al-Sharmani, Sanna Mustasaari, and Abdirashid A. Ismail (2017, pp. 276–280) describe two five-male-member committees situated in mosques that issue Islamic divorce as rulings without the husbands’ consent (faskh).
The situation in Germany and Finland differs from that in other countries in which researchers have documented parallel Islamic legal practices, such as Sweden (Roald, 2009), Norway (Brekke, Hadi, & Kozaric, 2022), the Netherlands (Muradin, 2022), and Italy (Alqawasami, 2021). In these countries researchers have not identified institutions that issue Islamic divorce documents without a husband’s consent, but they have demonstrated that Islamic legal documents are in circulation. Even recent studies often stress the lack of empirically grounded knowledge on parallel Islamic legal practices. To take two examples from the four abovementioned studies: Torkel Brekke, Fazal Hadi, and Edin Kazaric (2022, p. 181), in their study of Norway, state that “next to nothing is known about the actual practice of imams in family counselling”, while Arshad Muradin (2022, p. 53), studying the Netherlands, states that “sound empirical knowledge and understanding about the ideas and normative practices of Muslims within immigrant communities are still remarkably scant, particularly concerning informal processes of family dispute resolution”. In countries where no empirical research has yet been done, researchers often merely say, as in Susan Leahy and Kathryn O’Sullivan’s legal study of the situation in Ireland, “no empirical research on this topic has been conducted to date” (Leahy & O’Sullivan, 2019, p. 534).
The shortage of empirical studies means that it is too early to rush to conclusions such as “there are no sharīʿa councils in the Netherlands” (Eijk, 2019, p. 37). Rather, as I suggest in this book, Islamic divorce councils most likely exist across mainland Europe in some form – just as they do in other Muslim minority countries such as Britain (Bowen, 2016), India (Jones, 2020), Australia (F. Ahmed & Krayem, 2021), the United States of America (Macfarlane, 2012), and Canada (ibid.) – but they have not yet been identified due to the lack of empirical studies and for methodological reasons to which I return in Chapters 1 and 2.
In this book, I argue that the situation in mainland Europe is similar to that in Britain in the second half of the twentieth century, which Justin Jones describes as a development from ad hoc practices that over time became institutionalized:
While informal arbitration and mediation services have been provided by individual imams or community leaders since the early waves of Muslim immigration to the UK in the 1950s–60s, these quasi-legal practices have, in later generations, increasingly been embodied in the institutional forms of dedicated community organisations. (Jones, 2020, p. 50)2
The first official British Islamic divorce council – indeed, the first official Islamic divorce council in Europe – emerged in 1982, and since then, they have appeared all over Britain (S. Bano, 2012; Bowen, 2016). As this process has only been studied in retrospect, approximately twenty years after it happened, in research based mainly on interviews with the Muslim leader, we know little about the actual dynamics of how they emerged (Bowen, 2016, p. 54ff.; Shah-Kazemi, 2001).
Since the establishment of the first official sharia council, the growth rate in both the number of cases and the number of councils has been steep. The Islamic Divorce Council, established in 1982 and still Britain’s largest council, “adjudicated over 400 cases on matrimonial dispute” between 1982–1991 (Surty, 1991, p. 60), which equates to approximately 44 cases a year on average. Between 1991 and 1995, the council dealt with another 1,100 cases (Pearl & Menski, 1998, p. 79), which equates to 275 cases a year. Further, in a national survery in 2012, Samia Bano (2012, p. 7) identified 30 sharia councils in Britain, 22 of which responded to her inquiries and reported that they saw between 80 and 200 cases a year.
As the subtitle of this book indicates, this is an ethnographic study of how Islamic parallel legal institutions emerged in Denmark. In my fieldwork I have observed how Denmark’s first two Islamic divorce councils stabilized as institutions, one issuing 206 Islamic divorces in 2023 and the other 60. However, the main focus of the book is on the situation that precedes such institutions, a situation I call the Islamic juridical vacuum.
1 The Aim of This Book
With inspiration from grounded theory methodology (Glaser & Strauss, 2017) this ethnographic study, undertaken in Denmark between 2017–2024, presents the theory of the Islamic juridical vacuum, which explains the Islamic legal situation in mainland Europe.
The fundamental dynamic in the Islamic juridical vacuum is a demand for Islamic juridical services that is not catered for, because when there is no Islamic legal institution in a field, plaintiffs project their need for Islamic legal verdicts onto Muslim leaders and Islamic institutions. Women may, for example, request an Islamic divorce from a Muslim leader or a mosque, and if an individual or an institution successfully delivers on this – issuing an Islamic divorce without the consent of the husband – they are transformed into a qadi (Islamic judge) or an Islamic divorce council. Once their Islamic legal performance becomes known, the demand of the field is projected onto them, thereby sucking them into the vacuum. This puts the qadi or Islamic divorce council on a trajectory towards institutionalization, but such trajectories are typically interrupted by depletion of resources or security risks, meaning that divorce institutions such as qadis and Islamic divorce councils continuously emerge and collapse. This also happened to the Islamic divorce council in Aarhus mentioned in The Mosques behind the Veil, which has emerged and collapsed in various forms since then.
I use the word “theory” advisedly, because the theory of an Islamic juridical vacuum not only explains the Islamic legal situation of Muslims in mainland Europe, but it can also be utilized to make accurate (and testable) predictions. As explained above, it predicts, for example, that in a field with a significant demand that is not catered for, Islamic legal institutions will continuously emerge and collapse due to a cascade effect and security issues. The theory also predicts that there are qadis and Islamic divorce councils in other European countries, and it predicts where they can be found, how they operate, and what kind of Islamic legal processes they are likely to be involved in. However, it is important to underline that it does not predict that Islamic divorce councils will necessarily emerge and stabilize as institutions, although this is a possible outcome (and the theory explains the process).
The book is structured so that Part 1 explains the theory of the vacuum, first by addressing epistemological and methodological issues in the anthropological study of sharia in Chapter 1, and then in Chapters 2 and 3 by presenting the theory, grounded empirically. Part 2 of the book presents an ethnographic study of the Islamic juridical vacuum from three perspectives: male Muslim leaders (Chapter 4), female Muslim leaders (Chapter 5), and the central administration of the welfare state (Chapter 6). The voices of women experiencing nikah captivity are present throughout the book and, therefore, do not have a standalone chapter. Part 3 investigates the institutionalization of Islamic divorce councils in Denmark. This part of the book documents the transition from the vacuum situation to one similar to that of Britain, although at a much earlier stage of institutionalization.
Both in my methodological approach and in the presentation of research results, I emphasize sensitization to data. This means that at times I diverge slightly from the main argument of the book to describe phenomena such as forced marriage and Islamic polygamy. I believe that this – if not done to excess – provides a richer description of my data, but I also recognize that I must save the detailed descriptions for research articles. However, now readers expecting a straightforward presentation of the Islamic juridical vacuum and nothing else have been warned.
Although this book is about the emergence and institutionalization of Islamic legal institutions, it is not aimed exclusively at Islamic studies researchers. It investigates how parallel legal institutions emerge and become institutionalized, and the conclusions may be applicable to similar types of institutions such as Beth Din, Krisi-Romani, and Jehovah’s Witnesses committees (cf. Jacobsen et al., 2024; Pearl & Menski, 1998, p. 78; Rohe & Jaraba, 2015, pp. 10 and 18). It may also be contrasted with other types of parallel justice in which agents have the resources to enforce their decisions, such as in organized crime (e.g. Cosa Nostra or Hells Angels).
Finally, I would like to clarify what this book does not aim to achieve. I do not attempt to solve any problems, nor do I venture into discussions of the ideal relationship between religion and state. The book comprises basic research that may inform such discussions and problem solving, but it does not take part in it. This means that I do not suggest the founding of Islamic divorce councils as a solution, nor do I suggest mobilizing the power of the welfare state to end parallel legal practices, although both could be solutions (with different pros and cons), as could a middle road between the two.
2 Denmark as a Single Case Study of a European Phenomenon
This is a single case study of a European phenomenon (Flyvbjerg, 2006). To demonstrate this, throughout the book I continuously make comparisons with empirically grounded research in other European countries, North America, and Australia, thus highlighting that what I have observed in Denmark is a shared pattern. This means that to the extent that it is possible, given that empirically grounded studies are still scarce, this study constitutes a single case comparative study (Glaser & Strauss, 2017, pp. 25–26).
Although there is variation in migration patterns and in how European states have accommodated Muslim migrants, western European populations have undergone similar demographic changes during the 20th century as Muslim minority populations have settled (Fetzer & Soper, 2006; Nielsen & Otterbeck, 2016). Likewise, although individual countries have distinct histories, the emergence of Muslims as a hot political topic and the securitization of Islam is also a shared feature of western European countries (Cesari, 2013, 2015). Even in some eastern European countries to which Muslim migration has been minor, the effect within politics has been significant (Górak-Sosnowska, 2016).
Denmark follows the abovementioned pattern. The first Muslim migrants arrived when “Denmark joined the Europe-wide search for migrant labour in the late 1960s with an initially almost unrestricted labour immigration policy” (Nielsen & Otterbeck, 2016, p. 84). Approximately 2,000 Muslim migrants had arrived by 1968 (Nielsen & Otterbeck, 2016, p. 84), a number that rose to approximately 29,500 by 1980 (Jacobsen, 2011, p. 47), and approximately 256,000 in 2020, thus making up 4.4 percent of the population (Jacobsen & Vinding, 2020). The demographic composition of the Muslim population in Denmark is very diverse with no national minority making up more than 15 percent with the exception of Turks, who make up 20.9 percent. It should be noted that because the early migration of Muslims to Denmark primarily consisted of unskilled male workers, the vacuum-generating activity of women wanting divorce is a later development that could not have emerged prior to the demographic changes in the 1970s when family reunifications changed the demography of the Danish Muslim population.
I pursue the argument of Denmark as a case study of a European phenomenon further in subsequent chapters, but for now, it is sufficient for my argument to note the demographic changes of the Danish population in the second half of the 20th century.
3 An Initially Unplanned Study
The study that I present here was not initially planned. In fact, parts of the fieldwork could not have been planned, because I could not have predicted that two Islamic divorce councils would emerge during my fieldwork, one of them in the institution in which I was doing ethnographic fieldwork at the time. However, it was also unplanned in the sense that I did not plan to study sharia practices; rather, serendipitous events led me down a path of carrying out a series of studies of sharia practices in Denmark.
In 2014, when I began to build the trust relations with Muslim leaders that would later enable me to do research on Islamic marriage and divorce practices, I had no idea that this study was going to be the product. As I had a very text-oriented education within Islamic studies, I was merely driven by curiosity as to what Islam looked like in Muslim everyday practices, and, therefore, taking every opportunity to learn more. I took notes on my observations, but these were not aimed at anything in particular, although they did include some observations relating to sharia practices.
When I embarked on the fieldwork for my PhD dissertation in August 2016, I got first-hand experience with nikah captivity and Islamic divorce through the Copenhagen-based Mariam Mosque, operating with female imams. Women contacted the mosque to get an Islamic divorce and, in the process, they provided a great deal of valuable information on male Muslim leaders’ Islamic divorce practices. Women would complain about how an imam had issued an Islamic divorce to one of their friends but refused to help them, or they would explain how they had gone through reconciliation or mediation which led nowhere, or at least not to divorce. At the time, the state of the art in Denmark consisted of a report titled Parallel Legal Orders (Liversage & Jensen, 2011) and studies by Rubya Mehdi of mainly Pakistani nikah and Islamic divorce practices. Both constituted empirically grounded pilot research that could be built on and expanded (e.g. Mehdi 2005, 2008, 2012). However, I did not discover this literature until 2019.
In spring 2017, I discussed my initial observations of Islamic divorce practices with Niels Valdemar Vinding, and we agreed to collaborate part-time on sharia research. This meant that, parallel to my PhD studies, I began part-time fieldwork, started a field diary, began strategically expanding my network beyond Copenhagen, and set up semi-structured interviews in spring 2018. Based on our pilot work, Vinding and I won the Danish textbook award in 2018 for our book proposal Sharia and Society: Islamic Law, Ethics, and Practice in Denmark (Petersen & Vinding, 2020). At the time, Anika Liversage had recently been commissioned to update the abovementioned report on parallel legal orders, and at the award ceremony she approached us and asked whether we would like to discuss sharia practices in Denmark over a cup of coffee. Long story short, I dedicated 11 months full time work in 2019 to producing ethnographic data3 and writing my part of Sharia and Society, and simultaneously I conducted semi-structured interviews with 21 Muslim leaders and co-authored the report Ethnic Minority Women and Divorce – With a Focus on Muslim Practices, which I reference in subsequent chapters as the VIVE report (Liversage & Petersen, 2020). It was based on this research that I first formulated the theory of the Islamic juridical vacuum (Petersen, 2020), so a brief detour to provide some methodological details of this study is called for.
The VIVE report did not comprise ethnographic fieldwork, nor was it planned as a grounded theory study; rather, it was a carefully planned interview study. While Liversage and a team of assistants interviewed 37 ethnic minority women (32 Muslims, 3 Catholics, and 2 Hindus) and 27 social workers, I interviewed 21 Muslim leaders (19 male and 2 female). All samples were high diversity samples, designed to produce a rich qualitative description of religious legal practices in Denmark (Gerring, 2007). I strategically chose the two female Muslim leaders based on my knowledge of their involvement in Islamic divorce cases (Bernard, 2011, p. 145). Both are anonymized, but neither is the female imam in Copenhagen, Sherin Khankan, nor affiliated with the Islamic divorce practice of the Mariam Mosque, which I describe in Chapter 7. Both informants provided me with names of additional women I could interview, but time constraints hindered me from adding additional interviews.
Based on my knowledge of their Islamic divorce practice, I strategically chose nine of the 19 male informants and the rest were selected based on snowballing – the first nine informants recommended another seven, who recommended another three (Bernard, 2011, pp. 147–155). Six informants lived in minor cities in Denmark and 13 in major cities such as Copenhagen, Aarhus, and Odense. Seven were born and raised in Denmark and 12 had migrated to the country. Their ethnic/national backgrounds were Levantine Arabic, Moroccan, Somali, Turkish, Bosnian, and Danish and they were oriented towards the following schools of thought (madhab) or similar: 9 Hanafi, 3 Shafiʿi, 2 Salafi, 2 indifferent to schools of thought but not Salafi, 1 Maliki, 1 Jafari, and a former Islamist who had not yet decided on a school of thought. The youngest informant was in his late twenties and the oldest around seventy years of age. Merely 10 of the 19 informants were imams, and of these, three were reluctant to use the title as they seldom delivered the Friday sermon. The majority of the informants were teachers, titled ustadh by their peers. Seven of the interviews were audio recorded and 14 were recorded by extensive note taking during the interview, which I developed into longer texts in my field diary immediately after the interviews concluded (for additional information on sampling and methodology see Liversage & Petersen, 2020, pp. 41–48).
This was a sample well-suited for grounded theory, even if that was not what I had originally planned. In practice I realized early on that my textbook ideas about Danish sharia practices were dubious at best. This meant that I had to alter my interview guide significantly between early interviews to produce meaningful data, and ultimately I had to go back and re-interview six informants because the interview guide had changed so much that it became a problem in relation to the research design. In other words, even in the process of generating data I was implementing grounded theory – a methodology that I had discussed extensively with other PhD students but had not planned to employ for this study. However, the grounded theory approach was forced upon me by the incongruence between my theoretical ideas and my empirical observations, and as I became aware of this early on, I adapted to the situation and decided to embrace it.
Before embarking on analysis of my interview data, I refreshed my knowledge of grounded theory by reading a short handbook text (Engler, 2014), and I subsequently isolated in Ørslev Monastery to harness my memory in the analytical process – something that is generally advised in grounded theory methodology (Glaser & Strauss, 2017, p. 6). I analyzed the data in open coding cycles (Saldana, 2016), strategically avoiding coding similar interviews consecutively (Bazeley & Jackson, 2013, pp. 69–70), writing memos on theoretical ideas that emerged, and starting over when necessary (Glaser & Strauss, 2017, pp. 101–115). The result was an empirically grounded description of Islamic legal practices. Meanwhile Liversage had finished her study of women in nikah captivity and social workers who face this issue.4 Until this point, we had abstained from discussing our observations and conclusions, but when I submitted my results to Liversage they matched her observations and conclusions. This gave me confidence in my observation, when entering the field, that theories are incongruous with empirical observation.
At the time, I did not write on the Islamic juridical vacuum as a theory – not even in my article where I coined the vacuum as a concept (Petersen, 2020). Rather, I employed a strategy of providing a rich description of the vacuum as a pattern that I had observed. I later realized that this was too simplistic. The Islamic juridical vacuum is not just a concept, it is a theory that contains a number of concepts such as the epistemic ceiling, the social workers dilemma, Islamized coercive control, and deferral of verdicts, among other elements (see later chapters).
Approximately a week before my PhD defense in November 2020, Vinding received funding for the “Producing Sharia in Context” project at University of Copenhagen and hired me as a postdoc. Starting in February 2021, I began full time ethnographic fieldwork aimed at generating the theory of an Islamic juridical vacuum. However, I was aware of not becoming too zealous in my application of grounded theory methodology because I believed that this would impede my ethnographic fieldwork. Rather, as previously – working with Vinding and Liversage simultaneously on two separate projects with different approaches – I continued the ethnographic fieldwork, but also planned it in a way that would generate theory. For example, I expanded the scope to include the welfare state and women in (or who had been in) nikah captivity, produced data for comparison, continuously revised my ideas until they eventually became saturated, integrated relevant existing theories, and, as I explain in Chapter 1, took extensive measures to sensitize my data production methodology (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). However, while doing all of this and more, I did not refrain from getting sidetracked by the opportunities that sometimes present themselves during fieldwork.
I have generated most of my data by being present in situations in which Islamic parallel legal activities take place, or by speaking with people involved in ongoing parallel legal processes. These types of ethnographic data are notoriously difficult to quantify, other than by specifying how long one has been in the field and whether part-time or full-time.5 I have conducted formal interviews with a total of 70 informants (some of them more than once), but because I did not always find the formalized interview situation conducive to producing high quality data, I have mainly pursued other strategies. Most of my data have been produced by being present in situations and talking to people – sometimes at length (for hours) – but without an interview guide. This differs from the interview situation in which one can impose a topic, set the stage, and often more or less control the conversation (Brinkman & Kvale, 2015), but it also offers a form of data production that is better sensitized to the phenomena under study.
When embarking on full-time fieldwork in February 2021, I chose to continue my work with the six6 most promising informants from the VIVE study and, based on my knowledge of the field, I recruited an additional six7 Muslim leaders. I met regularly with these informants, sometimes just chatting, sometimes observing Islamic legal procedures, and at other times interviewing them. As I was simultaneously engaged in fieldwork I have regularly spoken to many more Muslim leaders without working systematically with these informants to generate theory. Additionally, I collected 552 Islamic divorce documents and 69 nikah contracts, but I stopped collecting such documents once I realized what little value they contributed compared to the resources required to collect them.8
When embarking on fieldwork it is difficult to determine whether data are significant or insignificant. This means that I generated a considerable body of data that later turned out to be irrelevant to this book; on the other hand, these data led me to a better understanding of the object of study, which meant that I could ask better research questions, thus producing new data that would otherwise not have been possible. This is the way of grounded theory. However, I have also had to make difficult choices as ethnographic research constitutes a major investment of resources. In the spring 2021, for example, I did some exploratory work on how parallel legal institutions make rulings on penal law cases. However, the discrepancy between the resources available and such an endeavor was too great, and therefore, in consultation with Vinding, I chose to not pursue this any further, although I would occasionally make observations on the topic due to overlaps with my research object.
4 On Triangulation
Even the most conservative Muslim leaders in my study have welcomed my interest in what they do, and many seem to have understood it as an opportunity to be understood on their own terms. To supply me with the data I requested, one Muslim leader, who did not archive his Islamic divorce cases because he was afraid that his Islamic legal practice was illegal, even drove to the houses of women whose divorces he had facilitated to photograph their Islamic divorce documents. Furthermore, I have again and again been surprised by how straightforward most Muslim leaders have been when describing weaponized talaq, spousal violence, social security fraud, and so on. Nevertheless, because Muslim leaders may have a vested interest in presenting themselves and their practices in a specific way, I have triangulated parts of my data to check whether informants were being honest with me, and to correct for their inherent biases.
Fortunately, sociologists and anthropologists working with religion have extensively discussed how to evaluate information received by members of sects, cults, and extremist organizations, among others. Relevant to this, Meredith McGuire states that “it is an honorable sociological tradition to point out the facades behind which people mask their activities” (McGuire, 2002, p. 13). For this study, I have on some occasions been able to triangulate because of serendipitous events, whereas in other situations I have purposely triangulated to make sure that I was not being led by informants.
Serendipitous triangulation happened in an interview with Musa, who is a prominent Muslim leader. During a four-hour visit to his home, he delved into a case that haunted him because he was not sure whether he had dealt with it in a proper manner, or whether the female plaintiff had been unreasonable. I listened to Musa’s concerns and within minutes I realized that this was a case in my material on which I had collected the paper trail of documents from authorities and another mosque. This type of triangulation constitutes pure luck, but it happens from time to time in extended ethnographic fieldwork, and Musa’s presentation of the case corresponded to the woman’s account. This case illustrates how a longer period in the field reduces the risk of being led by informants.
Planned triangulation takes a different form. In the case of the Islamic divorce council (IDC), which claims that they will always provide a woman with Islamic divorce if she insists, I used my network among social workers to track the cases of five women from an NGO and a women’s shelter through the IDC without the knowledge of the qadis (Islamic judges). All the women received their divorce, following the procedure that the IDC had laid out in my conversations with them.
However, with all of this being said, some informants may not like the rich description of their practices as this includes the consequences of their actions, of which they might be unaware. For example, some Muslim leaders are convinced that they excel at getting marriages back on track, when what they are actually doing is pressuring women to return to an abusive partner. They may be unaware of this because the only feedback they have is that they never see these women again, yet the real reason is that the women know that there is no help available with these Muslim leaders, so they take their problems elsewhere the next time they have the courage and energy to try to leave their abusive husband.
In addition to triangulation, on a few occasions I had to reject data in order not to create expectations of loyalty among my informants. Yasir, for example, who is a prominent imam, offered to call a meeting of imams, introduce me to them, vouch for me, and then ask the imams to provide me with their Islamic divorce archives. At the time when Yasir made this offer, I was still collecting material on Islamic divorce cases, and these data seemed valuable to my research. However, as it could have compromised my independence as a researcher by generating expectations among informants, I refused this offer.
5 Ethical Considerations
This study complies with the Code of Conduct for Responsible Research at University of Copenhagen. However, I find it insufficient to merely follow guidelines because writing a book on social problems among minority citizens who are already experiencing stigmatization in society poses important ethical questions. Therefore, I would like to stress that the women who have participated in this study have done so in the hope that it will make a difference to other women in the future. A core finding in the study is that politicians, journalists, and debaters are discussing a simulacrum that is far removed from the actual situation of these women (Baudrillard, 1994/2020); indeed, most political initiatives are irrelevant to them, and some may even have worsened their situation. Furthermore, making an accurate description of problems among minority citizens is a corrective to pulp nonfiction (Abu-Lughod, 2013) and de-exoticizes IslamLand (Ahmad, 2009).
I see my interaction with informants as entering into a contract. There is no getting away from the fact that the informants contribute to my research career, but that is not unethical. However, it would be unethical if that were the only outcome of their interaction with me. In other words, interacting with informants produces an ethical obligation for me to deliver something in return – something that matters to them. My informants in nikah captivity want their problems to be properly understood, and they want them addressed in a well-informed manner. This goes for all three main groups of informants (women in nikah captivity, Muslim leaders, and representatives of the welfare state), even if the problems they face in relation to nikah captivity are different.
Delivering on the above means that I must describe intimate details of some women’s lives, describe problematic practices among Muslim leaders, and demonstrate how representatives of the welfare state engage in unauthorized activity. The women whose narratives I reproduce at length have all read and commented on the texts. This is also the case with some of the Muslim leaders and representatives of the welfare state. I should note that parts of my descriptions of unauthorized practices may be read as an exposé, but this was not the intention; on the contrary, representatives of the welfare state have reached out to me because they were frustrated with being put in a situation where they cannot help their clients. I am not exposing unauthorized practices among representatives of the welfare state; rather, I provide social workers with an opportunity to talk anonymously about a taboo topic.
Although I do not discuss solutions to problems in the book, the knowledge I produce influences my informants’ lives, which is an important outcome of my research. During the ethnographic study, I worked with the Danish police, the Agency of Family Law, and Odense Municipality to change work routines (Petersen, 2021a, 2022d, 2023), and since 2019 I have trained a broad range of welfare professionals in how to handle problems related to the topic of this book. In other words, I have continuously disseminated research results in the hope that women in the future are met by welfare professionals who understand them and their situation. Furthermore, I have entered into collaboration with relevant ministers, members of parliament, and politicians in Danish municipalities to ensure that the problems I describe will be addressed in a well-informed manner on the political level in the future. On September 20, 2024, Vinding and I presented 14 recommendations to the Danish government regarding regulation of Islamic parallel legal practices. Further, I have disseminated my research results among a select group of civil servants to enable them to assist their ministers with formulating well-informed solutions.
Finally, I have strategically planned the dissemination of my research results by entering into collaboration with the online media company Zetland, thus securing impact on public perceptions of parallel legal practices, especially in terms of providing counter narratives to the kind of Muslim leaders presented in Mosques behind the Veil. This is not to say that Qasimi and Mansour are not representative – I present Muslim leaders who resemble them in this book – but they are merely a type among others. My research also highlights these women’s marked degree of agency, which is absent from common narratives about Muslim women, who are mostly presented as passively accepting their oppression by husbands, families, and imams.
6 Primer on Islamic Legal Terminology
Danish Muslims may enter into one or a combination of three types of marriage, referred to throughout the book as: 1) civil marriage under Danish law; 2) Islamic marriage under the law of a foreign nation; 3) unregistered nikah.9 While the first two types are regulated by state legal systems, the latter is regulated by social dynamics. There is no single agreement about the rules of nikah and Islamic divorce among Danish Muslims. This is also the case internationally where one only has to take a brief glance at Islamic family law codes from different Muslim majority countries to observe the differences.
Until the 19th century Islamic law was uncodified, but with the emergence of nation states Islamic family law was codified with inspiration from European legal traditions (Zubaida, 2003). These are the law codes that today regulate Islamic marriage in many Muslim majority countries. However, prior to the 19th century, there was no such thing as an Islamic law code where one could look up nikah and Islamic divorce; rather, Islamic legal scholars (fuqaha) discussed the rules that ought to regulate nikah and Islamic divorce within a discipline called fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence). Today, one can look up the laws governing Islamic marriage for individual Muslim majority countries that use religious family law, but nikah is not regulated by such legal codes.
The discussions within fiqh are still ongoing, and the closest one can get to a clear answer on the rules of nikah and Islamic divorce within fiqh is to refer to an Islamic legal encyclopedia such as Islamic Fiqh and Its Proofs or Encyclopedia of Islamic Law (Bkhtiar, 1996; Zuhayli, 2001). Here the reader will not be presented with a clear answer, but rather an introduction to Islamic legal scholars’ deliberations on the topic, in addition to the positions taken by influential Islamic legal scholars. Entries will typically discuss the subject by presenting the majority opinion in different schools of thought, but sometimes also significant dissenting views within each school.
Since Danish Muslims do not agree on the rules regulating nikah and Islamic divorce, I do not see the point of providing an Islamic legal primer. Such an endeavor may even be misleading, as I would, thereby, be declaring a single law of nikah, when no such single law exists in practice. Instead, I provide an introduction to important terms and normative practices.
If one looks up nikah in an encyclopedia of fiqh, one is presented with a unilateral consensus among Islamic legal scholars (and schools of thought) that nikah constitutes a civil contract between a bride and a groom, or their respective guardians. I cannot stress this enough, because one of the most persistent misunderstandings in Danish law, politics, and the media is that imams solemnize nikah in the same way as a priest, but this Christian concept is historically foreign to fiqh. Nevertheless, even Muslims may understand an imam’s performance during a nikah ceremony to constitute a solemnization. As I argue in Chapter 1, this is an important point, because it is not at all clear why the view of the imam should supersede that of ordinary Danish Muslims among whom it is normal to say that an imam has wed a couple. Imams, on the other hand, often say, “we have read a nikah” or “we have said a nikah”, indicating that the imam has merely helped the couple to do something. Couples enter a nikah when one party proposes nikah and the other accepts, in front of two witnesses. Some imams have a marriage license issued by the Danish state, which means that they may also solemnize a civil marriage, but this is separate from nikah.
When entering a nikah, the groom typically pays a dower to the woman – often referred to as an advance dower. Among some Muslims, this comprises a romantic gesture in the form of a rose, a ring, or something similar, but in other groups the dower may include large sums of money or gold. Some couples also negotiate a deferred dower, which in theory – and in rare cases also in practice – becomes relevant in the case of divorce (see below). Although in some families husbands are expected to be the breadwinners, it is also common for women to contribute from their income to the household. Even women who are not in the job market will often pay some or the whole of their social security into the household. Nevertheless, the ideal of men as the breadwinners who pay maintenance to their wives is widespread, even among people who do not observe it in practice.
There are three main types of Islamic divorce practiced in Denmark: talaq, khula, and faskh/tafriq. Some researchers may object to my lumping faskh and tafriq together, but these terms are used interchangeably in the fiqh practices that I have observed empirically.
In a talaq divorce the husband utters the phrase “I divorce you” to the woman, thereby triggering a waiting period (idda) of approximately three months. Islamic legal scholars generally agree that the husband is supposed to pay maintenance during the waiting period but, as explained above, this is seldom relevant in the Danish situation. If the husband regrets his divorce enunciation, he can take his wife back before the waiting period is over. Otherwise, the nikah is terminated at the end of the waiting period. If the nikah contract stipulates a deferred dower the husband must then pay it to his ex-wife, but this rarely happens. If the couple at a later point want to live as husband and wife again, they must enter into a new nikah.
If a man takes his wife back during the waiting period, and later utters the talaq divorce again, another waiting period commences, but when he does this the third time, the nikah is immediately terminated, and the couple cannot, in theory, enter another nikah; however, they sometimes do anyway. The same rules of maintenance apply during the waiting period and payment of deferred dower at the second and third talaq enunciation. However, as stated, these rules are seldom observed, and dower agreements made in nikah contracts are not enforced by Danish courts. A husband can also utter three talaq divorce statements at once, but there is some disagreement among Danish (and foreign) Muslim leaders as to whether this counts as one or three divorce enunciations. In practice, a husband will typically decide that his three enunciations count as one if he regrets having uttered all three at once, but if his wife wants to divorce she may insist that they count as three and try to mobilize her family and Muslim leaders to make her view heard. In a Danish context, talaq divorce is sometimes formalized by having an imam write up a document, but it may also be done by the husband’s texting “I divorce you” three times or similar. However, if a husband actually pays a deferred dower and maintenance during the waiting period, he will typically ask for this to be written down and witnessed.
In a classical khula divorce the wife offers compensation to her husband in exchange for his consent to divorce. This compensation typically consists of her paying back the dower and waiving the deferred dower. If a man consents to khula divorce this is often documented by having a Muslim leader write up a khula document. In khula divorces where the power asymmetry is significant, women may agree to what is called weaponized talaq. This is an etic term, not found in fiqh. It describes a khula divorce in which a husband weaponizes his option of keeping his wife in nikah captivity. As she may depend on his consent to divorce Islamically, he may, for example, demand that she pays large sums of money or property that far exceeds the dower or he may demand that she gives him custody of the children (cf. Jaraba, 2019, pp. 83–86; 2020, p. 37; 2022, p. 308). Agreements on child custody and similar are then registered in the Danish Agency of Family Law so that they take effect under Danish law. Such divorces may be written down in khula divorce documents, but most often they merely constitute an oral agreement, and the woman will receive a standard Islamic divorce document without any mention of this. See Figure 1 for an example of such a standard Islamic divorce document.
Standard divorce document. Although these documents come in many different layouts they tend to contain the same basic information.
Recently, a new practice of khula has emerged in which a qadi (Islamic judge) – that is, a Muslim leader posing as a qadi – issues an Islamic divorce without a husband’s consent. This is the norm in British Islamic divorce councils (Bowen, 2016), but it has also been written into some Islamic legal codes abroad (Sonneveld, 2012). In such khula divorces, women pay back their dower and waive any deferred dower, and the qadi thereafter issues a khula divorce without the husband’s consent. Such divorces are typically recorded in a khula document. Whether a khula is classical, weaponized, or new is not evident from the terminology applied in Islamic legal practices – all three types of divorce document merely say khula – but it can easily be inferred from the content or context of the documents.
The final category of divorce, faskh/tafriq, is characterized by Muslim leaders’ posing as qadis who issue the Islamic divorce without the husband’s consent. While there are nuanced differences between faskh, tafriq, and the abovementioned new khula practice, these are of minor relevance in contemporary Danish practices. Some Muslim leaders may insist that men pay the deferred dower when issuing a tafriq divorce, but this rarely happens. Other Muslim leaders will write in tafriq divorce documents that women waive their deferred dower (as in the new khula practice). Similarly, some Muslim leaders may insist that women return the dower as part of a new khula divorce, while others will ask women to waive the deferred dower and keep the already paid dower. I return to this in Chapter 5. At this stage, it is sufficient to say that fiqh terminology is seldom applied rigorously, and Islamic divorce practices are not always firmly grounded in fiqh. The content of Table 1 comprises a mere approximation of the normative meanings these terms take in a Danish context.
Most common fiqh terminology applied in Islamic divorce practices in Denmark
Some practices do not fall into any of these categories. In some Somalian communities, for example, a woman may divorce by having a locksmith change the lock while her husband is out; she will then pack his belongings, put them outside the door, and let him know via a text or a call that he is divorced. Then he can come and pick up his things. Similarly, when Turks and Bosnians divorce, they typically do so in the Agency of Family Law, and this is generally accepted as a full divorce. Such divorce practices fall outside Figure 1, but I describe them in the book to the extent that they are relevant.
7 Remarks on Language
A significant number of the sources for this project are in Danish, and I have consistently translated these into English, with original titles to be found in the bibliography. Likewise, most quotations are translated from Danish and Arabic into English without providing the original. The most significant challenge in terms of language has been to translate Danish administrative terms without ending up in long explanations of how Danish municipalities, regions, and state work. I see no benefit in providing such information to non-Danish readers, who will most likely become irritated with digressions of little relevance to the main topic of the book, and in many places I have therefore lumped municipalities, regions, and state into one entity, the welfare state. Nevertheless, Danes with a specialized interest will easily decipher what is what.
Similarly, I use the concept “social worker” as shorthand for employees in the state, regions, and municipalities who have direct contact with clients, such as police officers, nurses, social workers, security advisors, case officers, and so on. Whenever I discuss civil servants and others who do not have such contact with clients, I use the term “representatives of the welfare state”. Furthermore, I use the term client even if this is slightly misleading as the Danish term borger signals independence whereas client signals dependance.
Sometimes men insist that they are Islamically married to a woman, thus calling for the term “husband”, while their (former) spouse insist that she is divorced, thus calling for the term “ex-husband”. I use the term “(ex)husband” to reflect ambiguous marital status in such disputes (nikah captivity).
Some terms used by Muslims are so integrated into English that they have a vernacular spelling, even if they are still considered loan words. Whenever this is the case, I use the English simplified version of the word such as the Quran rather than al-Qurʾan and sharia rather shariʿa. I use ten Arabic terms that are important throughout the book: fiqh (Islamic jurisprudence), nikah (Islamic marriage), qadi (Islamic judge), haqq (divine justice), ijaza (traditional authorization to transmit Islamic knowledge), fatwa (legal opinion), and the terms for types of divorces (talaq, khula, tafriq, and faskh). Further, I use English plural forms, such as qadis and fatwas. I have translated other Arabic terms into English: for example, mahr is a dower, madhab is a school of thought, faqih is an Islamic legal scholar, ustadh is a teacher, and so on.
For all terms that have a simplified spelling in English, which is commonly used within Islamic studies, I use this (e.g. tajwid, taqia, nushuz, sharaf, izzat, marja al-taqlid, shabab, tafwid, tawkil, sheikh, akhi, namus, etc.), and I always explain the meaning of such specialized terminology. However, I see no reason to use transliteration of these terms because no specialist will be in doubt about the meaning, and non-specialists will appreciate the simplified English spelling.
In a few places in the book where I presume fiqh specialists will want to know, I have provided the exact wording of the original Arabic, using Brill’s simple Arabic transliteration system. I do not explain the potential significance of these bracketed transliterations to non-specialists. It is a compromise that I have arrived at to appeal to as wide a range of readers as possible.
All informants and institutions (including women’s shelters) are anonymized with the exception of Sherin Khankan, imam in the Mariam Mosque, and Mohammad Khani, imam in the Imam Ali Mosque. Informants who only appear once in the book and only briefly are not given pseudonyms, whereas individuals I mention multiple times, or whose stories take up more space are given a pseudonym. Due to anonymization, I do not name the cities in which my clients live – or even assign them fictive names. Instead, I have divided them into major (more than 100,000 inhabitants) and minor cities (less than 100,000 inhabitants). Finally, I should note that because I sometimes quote Danish media and public figures, there are a few overlaps between non-anonymized and anonymized individuals and institutions. A women’s shelter may, for example, be described by name in a story quoted from Danish media and also be given a pseudonym in another part of the book.
The dialogue is in Arabic, but quotations are translated in accordance with the subtitles on which the majority of viewers have most likely relied.
For an example of such an ad hoc institution, see Zaki Badawi’s (1995, pp. 77–79) account of how, along with other imams in the Islamic Centre in Regent’s Park, London, he established an institution to deal with Islamic divorce in 1977.
It is generally accepted within both sociology and anthropology that researchers generate or produce data rather than collect data in a raw form.
Liversage’s sampling of women who were in nikah captivity is interesting because it is atypical within the anthropological study of Islamic divorce practices. Whereas female informants are typically recruited in situations where they are in the process of Islamically divorcing their husband (e.g. S. Bano, 2013; Bowen, 2016; Walker, 2016), Liversage primarily sampled women who were unable to identify institutions that could provide such Islamic juridical services. Therefore, Liversage’s informants are describing women’s situation in the Islamic juridical vacuum.
In November 2022, I went back to part-time research as I transitioned into a position as a senior lecturer at Lund University (2022–2023) and then associate professor at Stavanger University (2023–2024). I ended fieldwork in June 2024, four months after having submitted my book manuscript for peer review at Brill.
Abdallah (M10), Hakeem (M19), Haitham (M1), Musa (M17), Hassan (M8), and Kamal (M3). The numbers in parenthesis are the identification markers these informants had in the VIVE study. Furthermore, in this book I make references to Muhammad (M18), Idris (M16), Yusuf (M6), Tarek (M5), Abdel (M7), Zaynab (K1), and Aisha (K2). The latter seven were also informants in the VIVE study, but I have not conducted additional interviews with them.
Yunus, Yasir, Abdi, Abdi, Nabila, and Amina.
Compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), for example, means that such data must be anonymized on site, a labor-intensive process.
Nikah merely means marriage in Arabic, but I have chosen this terminology because it is conventional within the study of sharia and because it makes it easier to distinguish it from civil marriage.