Great Britain has with great success introduced sharia councils which give advice to Muslims without getting into conflict with British law. This should also be introduced in Denmark, says Abdul Wahid Pedersen. (Termansen, 2006)
∵
In the early 2000s, Abdul Wahid Pedersen was one of the most recognizable imams in Danish media, and as a co-founder of the umbrella organization Joint Council of Muslims (Muslimernes Fællesråd) in 2006, he immediately put the issue of nikah captivity on the agenda; yet the idea of introducing an Islamic divorce council was not met with unanimous approval. The imam of the Islamic Faith Society Mosque, Ahmad Abu Laban, stated that he already spent more than 50 percent of his time on solving marital conflicts, and added, “I am afraid that such a council would be understood in a very negative way in the contemporary climate1 in Denmark” (Termansen, 2006). The Islamic Faith Society Mosque is one of Denmark’s most popular and influential mosques, and Abu Laban was the leading imam until his death in 2007.
In 2011, the Ministry of Refugees, Migration, and Integration ordered a report on Islamic divorce practices in Denmark from the Danish National Centre for Social Research (SFI), which became the first study of Islamic divorce practices in the country; the results were published in November 2011 in the SFI report Parallel Legal Orders (Liversage & Jensen, 2011). In the months leading up to its publication, a debate on nikah captivity arose. Mostafa Chendid, who was at the time imam in The Imam Malik Institute, explained:
I sometimes get three calls a day from women, and I also hear about this problem from other imams. We see many examples of women who want a religious divorce because of violence in the marriage. However, they cannot get religiously divorced because their husband says no. This puts the women in a very difficult social situation. (Søndergaard, 2011b)
Chendid suggested the founding of some form of institution that could solve the problem without creating a parallel legal system. Another imam and co-founder of the Joint Council of Muslims, Fatih Alev, pointed out a similar need for some form of institution (Søndergaard, 2011b). This idea was met with approval by Manu Sareen (the Social Liberal Party), who became the Minister of Gender Equality and Ecclesiastical Affairs two weeks later: “It could also be a solution that sensible imams help the women. For example by founding a council where the women go to have their divorce problems resolved” (Søndergaard, 2011b). However, Sareen was met with opposition from other politicians including Peter Skaarup from the Danish People’s Party (nationalist right-wing),2 who stated that “the imams must recognize the Danish divorce, and if not, we must take away their marriage license. Meanwhile society must support the affected women” (Søndergaard, 2011b), and Social Democratic Minister of Social Affairs and Integration,3 Karen Hækkerup when she stated, “My opinion is clear. We will not introduce any form of sharia system which can issue religious divorces. In Denmark it is the Danish law that applies” (Søndergaard, 2011c). Martin Henriksen from the Danish People’s Party later suggested a ban on sharia councils (Søndergaard, 2011c), but this was never taken any further, nor were any of the other suggestions.
The opinion that the founding of an Islamic divorce council is an unacceptable solution to nikah captivity prevailed in Danish politics to the extent that the government that took office in October 2011 wrote this into its Basis for the Government:4
The Government will not accept that religious legal institutions take the place of legislation and courts in Denmark. Decisions about marriage, custody of children and punishment are resolved by the authorities – not by religious leaders. After the conclusion of the ongoing investigation into parallel legal orders among religious minorities in Denmark [the SFI report], the government will take initiatives to abolish religious legal institutions. (Regeringen, 2011, p. 56)
In November 2012, the Danish government published The Government’s Strategy against Parallel Legal Orders – An End to Coercion and Suppression in Relation to Religious Marriages (from here abbreviated as the Government’s Strategy) (Regeringen, 2012); however, this only addressed the problem of nikah captivity indirectly (see below). Without any significant action being taken, it is no surprise that the problem persisted, as documented in the VIVE report, Ethnic Minority Women and Divorce, which was published in 2020. Again, the same situation prevailed: no significant action was taken other than indirectly (see below). As I write this chapter in spring 2024, no political strategy that adequately addresses nikah captivity has yet been formulated, so the demand for Islamic divorce persists, which, as demonstrated in previous chapters, plays an important role in Muslim leaders’ being cast as qadis and in the emergence and institutionalization of Islamic divorce councils. Indeed, this demand is amplified by social workers’ attempts to help women obtain an Islamic divorce by putting pressure on Muslim leaders.
This chapter demonstrates that policies against parallel legal orders are ineffective because they address problems as they are conceptualized above the epistemic ceiling (see Chapter 2). This means that the actual problems below the epistemic ceiling are not addressed and, therefore, policies have little impact on nikah captivity, if any. Furthermore, the chapter demonstrates how civil servants may be caught in a situation similar to the social workers’ dilemma (see Chapter 2) when ordered to formulate policies that are both meaningful above the ceiling and have impact below the ceiling. I pursue this argument by demonstrating how the ministerial work group that wrote the Government’s Strategy worked on two separate tracks: one above and one below the ceiling.
Before embarking on this analysis, it is important to underline once again that I do not favor a particular solution to the issue of nikah captivity. Indeed, my research indicates various possible solutions, each with its own consequences and side effects. As I see it, choosing between solutions to the problem of nikah captivity is a political issue, and the founding of Islamic divorce councils is one possible solution among several. I have, for example, developed a strategy for Odense Municipality that addresses nikah captivity caused by Islamized coercive control but avoids collaboration with Muslim leaders (a demand by local politicians),5 although in other contexts, I have given advice on solving the problem by working together with them (a full discussion of solutions to the problem is beyond the scope of this book).
1 The Episteme above and below the Ceiling
In Chapter 2, I introduced the concept of the epistemic ceiling to distinguish the episteme that is dominant among politicians and to some extent also in the Danish media: a simulacrum that is more or less detached from what can be observed empirically (Baudrillard, 1994/2020). I described this as being above the ceiling, because it differs from the understandings that exist among many social workers, such as the police, case officers, and security advisors. Furthermore, it differs significantly from empirically grounded research, which describes Muslim practices in a way that is alien to the episteme above the ceiling.
Over the years there has been an overwhelming number of news stories that demonstrate the problem of nikah captivity, to which politicians have responded in a variety of ways, the most common being to condemn the phenomenon strongly, followed by action in the form of inquiries. However, as demonstrated in Chapter 2 with the case of weaponized talaq and the Agency of Family Law, the answers to such inquiries are often misleading, or as I have previously formulated it: the episteme from below the ceiling is suppressed, ignored, or misunderstood above the ceiling. Therefore, the inquiries are typically not followed up with any meaningful action.
Politicians typically produce meaning above the epistemic ceiling that is irrelevant or meaningless below it, as I briefly illustrate with a case in which a Danish imam was accused of having facilitated a weaponized talaq in September 2020.6 Reacting to this story, the Danish Prime Minister, Mette Frederiksen, posted the following on Facebook:
Sharia does not belong in Denmark. Yesterday and today, we can read about divorce contracts based on sharia. On Fyn [island]. In Denmark. It is wrong. It is oppressive to women. It is not Danish. And it must never ever become Danish. In the government we will do everything in our power to get this stopped. An imam should not get involved in divorces. …7 This confirms our fearful hunches about the undemocratic tendencies that exist in parts of Denmark. We will do everything we can to get this stopped.8
This was followed up by the Danish Minister of the Interior and Housing and substitute Minister of Immigration and Integration,9 Kaare Dybvad Bek, who posted,
Religious councils should in no way control whole neighborhoods nor act as judges in people’s private lives. All – both men and women – should of their own volition be able to get divorced if that is what they want, without losing their right to see their children, and without being threatened or met with other reprisals.10
Politicians from the opposition also engaged with this news story. The later Chairman of the Judicial Committee from Venstre (centrist-right liberal party), Morten Dahlin, posted a video together with his fellow party member, Marlene Ambo-Rasmussen, in which they stood in front of the troubled neighborhood where the weaponized talaq was signed by the imam and the two parties. The video presents the episteme above the ceiling, ending with:
Ambo-Rasmussen: That is why we have summoned the Minister of Immigration and Integration for a consultation. Because we must do something about this.
Dahlin: We must not accept that the suppression of these women, and we must not accept that these extreme imams set the agenda. This is a problem that we must solve.11
These political reactions reflect the episteme above the ceiling in which imams are presented as powerful agents who have jurisdiction over, and control whole neighborhoods. That is, above the epistemic ceiling politicians fight against the largely imagined problem of imams with jurisdiction, but below the ceiling, Muslims must navigate the Islamic juridical vacuum which is generated by the absence of such powerful agents.
The quotations reflect a general pattern in which politicians react with strong condemnation, stating that something must be done, followed by action that is meaningful above the epistemic ceiling, but not below. Below the ceiling, it is meaningless to solve the problem of nikah captivity by punishing imams. Even if all Muslim leaders rejected women who come to them for help with nikah captivity, this would not solve the problem; it would merely mean that these women had fewer options, thus reducing their field of possible actions. However, to punish imams makes a lot of sense above the epistemic ceiling, because of the assumption that one thereby reduces their power and removes their jurisdiction, which is seen as the root of the problem. The logic seems to be that by removing the jurisdiction, which above the epistemic ceiling is presumed to cause nikah captivity, the women are set free. In other words, taking the episteme above the ceiling as their point of departure means that politicians are unable to formulate policies that are meaningful and effective below the ceiling.
As noted, civil servants must deliver policies that are meaningful above the ceiling and effective below – a task that is close to impossible as these two epistemes are incommensurable. In the next two sections, I demonstrate this by moving beyond politicians’ discussions to analyze how a ministerial work group of civil servants in 2011–2012 simultaneously navigated above and below the epistemic ceiling.
When the SFI report was published in November 2011, the former Minister of Social Affairs and Integration, Karen Hækkerup, tasked a ministerial work group with drafting a proposal on how to address the problems it uncovered. This led to the Government’s Strategy which took the episteme above the ceiling as its point of departure. I analyze the results of this work in the first section below. However, an employee – maybe acting independently or on behalf of the ministerial work group – simultaneously collaborated with imams to produce a meaningful and effective solution to nikah captivity below the ceiling, which I analyze in the section that follows the one below.
2 Taking Meaningful Political Action above the Epistemic Ceiling
The Government’s Strategy is based on the SFI report, which reflected an episteme from below the ceiling, but it takes the episteme above the ceiling as its point of departure. This is evident in its continuous switches between descriptions based on an assumed presence of Islamic judicial institutions, reflecting an episteme above the ceiling, and descriptions of absence, reflecting that below the ceiling no such institutions exist (for absence and presence, see Chapter 2). It is, for example, stated in the Government’s Strategy that if one of five conditions are fulfilled then “the woman must submit evidence for one of these reasons to an imam, who thereby directly can dissolve the relation [nikah] without the consent of the husband” (Regeringen, 2012, p. 10). In other words, it describes a presence in the form of imams acting as qadis with jurisdiction, yet it also states that no such jurisdiction exists: “even though they [imams] function as religious authorities, they do not have a formal power to put behind their decisions”. It then continues to describe the security issues related to issuing Islamic divorce documents (Regeringen, 2012, p. 11): that is, page 10 describes a presence, but page 11 describes an absence. These switches between absence and presence can be found repeatedly in the Government’s Strategy, meaning that it constitutes meaningful action above the epistemic ceiling that is incongruent with the episteme below the ceiling and, therefore, has little to no effect on the ground. In other words, it addresses a simulacrum rather than the problems that can be observed empirically. In what follows, I briefly elaborate on this by examining the Government’s Strategy’s four focus areas (Regeringen, 2012, p. 5).
The first consists of informing religious leaders about Danish family law12 and a strategy to increase the number of religious leaders licensed to conduct Danish civil marriages (presumably to decrease the number of nikah-only marriages). Interestingly, this contradicts the typical logic applied above the ceiling as is evident by the very common political suggestion of amendments to make it easier to retract marriage licenses from Muslim authorities in order to combat parallel legal practices. For example, in the debate following the airing of Mosques behind the Veil in March 2016, parties across the political spectrum, including the Social Democratic Party, which presented the Government’s Strategy in 2012, made such a suggestion (Jørgenssen, 2016). The Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs at the time, Bertel Haarder (Venstre, centrist-right liberal party), stated:
I want to be sure that preachers who are approved to marry people in Denmark do not have the opinion that women are not allowed to work if there is another man present [at the workplace]. And that you are allowed to hit children, and that stoning of women is justified – it cannot be reconciled with the authority responsibility of being licensed to marry people with civil validity in Denmark. (DR, 2016)
While it is easy to be sympathetic with the intention of helping the women – and introducing a code of decorum for people issued with a license to perform civil marriage seems sensible – it is unclear how it improves women’s rights. A more likely outcome is that more women will enter nikah without civil registration because the local imam has had his license revoked – which is exactly what the Government’s Strategy is designed to avoid by increasing the number of religious leaders with such licenses. Such inconsistencies, partially generated by discrepancies between the epistemes above and below the ceiling, are widespread in Danish politics.
The second and third focus areas address the further education of welfare professionals and the dissemination of information about rights under Danish law among minority citizens. The problem with these focus areas are that they misunderstand the dynamics of the parallel legal practices described in the SFI report. It is naïve to assume that merely informing people about Danish law will result in their abandoning religious and cultural practices. It may make sense to reduce the number of nikah-only marriages – and this may even have an effect in the long run – but the fact that many women who obtain a civil divorce end up in nikah captivity anyway demonstrates that this strategy is not a solution to the issue. Many women in nikah captivity are well aware of their rights under Danish law; their problem is that these rights are irrelevant to their situation, which is why information campaigns are ineffective on their own. Additionally, it makes little sense to further educate welfare professionals if they are not provided with instructions on how to act, because without such instruction they just end up in the social workers’ dilemma (see Chapter 2).
The last focus of the strategy consists of amendments to the penal law (Regeringen, 2012, p. 5). The juridical term “marriage-like relationship” was inserted into penal code § 260 subsection 2 in an attempt to make forced nikah and nikah between minors illegal. However, neither of these legal changes address nikah captivity, and as Niels Valdemar Vinding and I have demonstrated, these and subsequent laws were in various ways incongruent with Muslim practices (Vinding & Petersen, 2023); they regulate phenomena that are imagined above the epistemic ceiling, but which are largely incongruent with the phenomena below the epistemic ceiling that they are supposed to regulate.
When the VIVE report was published in 2020, the situation had remained more or less unchanged since 2011 except for indications of an emerging institutionalization of parallel legal practices. The report contains information on three ad hoc and two permanent but collapsed Islamic divorce councils. In other words, the Government’s Strategy had been ineffective but, as argued above, this is because the strategy only addressed the problem above the ceiling, in which case no effect can be expected below the ceiling. In the following, I demonstrate that the same work group also pursued a strategy below the ceiling, but was unsuccessful.
3 Navigating below the Epistemic Ceiling
During my fieldwork, Muslim leaders repeatedly made references to a meeting that took place in the Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration in 2012 between 14 Muslim leaders and the former minister, Hækkerup, who instructed the ministerial work group to develop the Government’s Strategy. I have spoken with six of the Muslim leaders present at the meeting, and they explain that there was a willingness either from the minister or from the ministerial work group to work towards the founding of an Islamic divorce council.
This section is partially based on information retrieved from the Ministry of Social Affairs through the right of access to documents; however, many documents have been lost, others partially damaged, and a great deal of information was never archived. Therefore, I have requested four of the Muslim leaders present at the meeting to forward all the emails they have exchanged with the ministerial work group that developed the Government’s Strategy. This means that I can provide a reasonably detailed description that, while it does not document exactly what happened, does document that the ministerial work group pursued a strategy below the epistemic ceiling. I should note that all the communication I present below is between Muslim leaders and a single member of the ministerial work group, either acting independently or on behalf of the group. My linguistic framing suggests the latter, but this does not constitute a qualified guess, merely that I had to make a choice between the two. The civil servant in question has rejected my offer to let him/her read and comment on the text.
The abovementioned meeting between Hækkerup and 14 Muslim leaders took place on 7 June 2012 between 2 and 4 PM, but it is necessary to go back further to get a full understanding of the meeting. Shortly after the publication of the SFI report in November 2011, Pedersen (the imam quoted in the opening lines of the chapter), argued that Islamic divorce councils were the solution to nikah captivity, and he found some support for this. The following is an excerpt from a local newspaper that describes a debate in Gellerup, a neighborhood in Aarhus with a high concentration of Muslim inhabitants:
The panel consisted of Jens Espensen, leader of the local police in Aarhus V, Imam Abdul Wahid Pedersen, Sten Schaumbürg-Møller, Professor at Aarhus University, and vice mayor of Aarhus, Rabild Azad-Ahmad (R).13 When a woman asked what a Muslim woman should do if she wants to divorce, this illustrated the problem that became the evening’s dominant topic. Imam Abdul Wahid Peders proposed an Islamic council that can validate the courts’ decisions so that they also become valid under Islamic law, and the other panel members were open to the idea …. [Pedersen explained], “This institution must not be able to go against a decision by the authorities, but it should be able to support it. This is what many people seek, and I know that it exists in England”. (Rønn, 2011)
The story was noticed by the ministerial work group,14 which in January and March 2012 sent out meeting invitations to Muslim leaders. One such invitation email, with the topic, “Meeting with religious authorities about the debate on Muslim ‘divorce councils’”, stated, “Some Muslim authorities have argued publicly for the founding of a Muslim council which can formally dissolve religious marriages without the consent of the husband. … But it is my impression that far from all Muslims think that this is the solution.”
This email demonstrates that the ministerial work group explored alternatives to Islamic divorce councils; however, proponents of the councils were also invited to meetings. Pedersen and Alev, for example, who publicly argued the case for them as the solution to nikah captivity, were invited to a meeting. The invitation they received did not contain the abovementioned exploration of other options than Islamic divorce councils. It merely said, “I would like to meet with you to discuss specific experiences and [your] evaluation of the question, and [we] would of course also like to hear your suggestions for a possible recommendation.”
On 29 March 2012 three imams from the Danish Islamic Center (Pedersen, Alev, and Waseem Hussain) met with the ministerial work group. Unfortunately, almost a whole page of the minutes of that meeting has been lost,15 but in what has been preserved it is stated that the Danish Islamic Center received 30–40 Islamic divorce requests a year from women who experience nikah captivity. The minutes go on to say that the imams proposed at least three strategies to solve the problem of nikah captivity: 1) the introduction of a standardized nikah contract in which it is stated that a civil divorce has Islamic validity; 2) a precedent be established among imams not to facilitate nikah without prior civil marriage; 3) avoidance of the facilitation of nikah between minors unless their parents consent to it and a civil marriage with dispensation has been solemnized. There may have been more suggestions from the imams but, as stated above, a significant part of the minutes to the meeting has been lost.
It is, furthermore, stated in the minutes to the meeting that Pedersen and Alev, who are two of the three founders of the Joint Council of Muslims, agree to contact the other umbrella organization, the Danish Muslim Union, with the aim of collaborating on finding a solution to the issue of nikah captivity. It is unclear what this solution comprised, but irrespective of exactly what the solution was, it is clear from later events that the ministerial work group went forward with the proposals from the Danish Islamic Center.
Pedersen had already introduced a standard nikah contract in 2004 in which it is explicitly stated that the wife has the right to divorce (see Figure 5); however, this did not solve the problem of nikah captivity in every case, and over the years he has therefore altered the formulation. By 2024, it had become quite elaborate, and included a reference to Islamic divorce councils in Britain in cases of dispute (see Figure 6). These two documents demonstrate an awareness of the problem of nikah captivity, an attempt to solve it via the available means, and the inadequacy of the solution, which is why Pedersen ends up referring disputes to British Islamic divorce councils.
In April 2012, the ministerial work group delivered its recommendations to Hækkerup, who accepted them all and ordered that they should be developed into the Government’s Strategy. During this work, the ministerial work group invited a broader group of Muslim leaders to meet with Hækkerup on 7 June 2012. I previously mentioned that I have spoken with six of the 14 Muslim leaders who attended the meeting, and they all state that they got the impression that Hækkerup listened, and that she understood the problem of nikah captivity, and that Muslim leaders could not solve it alone because of the security issues related to nikah captivity and Islamic divorce. One imam even talked about his own recent experience with an Islamic divorce in which the threats from a family had been so serious that he had pulled out because he feared that the family would kill him. According to the Muslim leaders, Hækkerup was shocked to hear this, but there is some ambiguity in the reports as to whether she agreed to Islamic divorce councils as the solution. However, on the basis of Hækkerup’s very clear public statements, it seems unlikely that she would have agreed to such a proposal.
Hækkerup only took part in the first 30 minutes of the two-hour long meeting. The subsequent 90 minutes were, as the agenda states, reserved for “Internal debate among the participants [in the meeting] about the problem and future practice – including a presentation and discussion of a suggested solution by the Danish Islamic Center”. That is, the three imams who had met with the ministerial work group on 29 March presented their suggestion for a solution; unfortunately, the agenda does not specify its content, and the meeting minutes have been lost, if they were ever written. However, a representative from the Muslim Cultural Institute, Imran bin Munier Husayn, wrote an email to one of the civil servants in the ministerial work group two days after the meeting, on 9 June, which contains a short resume:
As I understood it, there are two primary solutions we should work with in relation to the divorce problem, because we should not count on or expect any legal changes in relation to Danish Family Law:
Preparation of a standard [nikah] contract which connects civil divorce with the religious so that a civil divorce automatically triggers a religious divorce.
Establishment of a council or a kind of religious “court” (without legal authority, but only religious authority) following the English model, or possibly Catholic and Jewish model, which can take care of … the situations that the standard contract cannot cover or solve.
If you send the contact information to the invited imams, then, in the Joint Council of Muslims we can begin by planning a seminar where we invite most possible faith communities/mosques in order to create a work group that can proceed with the project.
The strategy of making civil divorce Islamically valid through an innovative nikah contract, simultaneously reducing the number of nikah-only marriages as laid out in the Government’s Strategy, may constitute a good long-term strategy. Combined with the founding of an Islamic divorce council to deal with all other cases, this is a strategy that is likely to solve the vast majority of the nikah captivity cases; however, neither of these proposals, which make sense below the ceiling, were mentioned in the Government’s Strategy. In fact, they are in direct contradiction with the government’s policy to “take initiatives to abolish religious legal institutions” (Regeringen, 2011, p. 56). Nevertheless, on 12 June, the ministerial work group responded to Husayn’s email, saying,
It is I who thank you for the great support and the very positive and solution-oriented discussion we had at the meeting. I sensed a great willingness to collaborate, and I hope it will continue going forward. As we spoke about, I think it is best that the next meeting is held outside the ministry, and I am glad that the Joint Council of Muslims has taken it upon themselves to continue this [work]. As I expressed, it will be good if both the Joint Council of Muslims and the Danish Muslim Union are represented. I can recommend that you contact Muhammed Attia – who was unfortunately unable to attend last Thursday – but who plays a central role in the union and who might be interested in being part of the planning phase as well. If the ministry can contribute to the meeting in any way, or if you need legal advice, please let us know.
As demonstrated by the above quotation, the ministerial work group drew a line between what could be done within the ministry and what had to take place outside the ministry. This is evident in the instruction that, “it is best that the next meeting is held outside the ministry”. Furthermore, in an email to Alev, the ministerial work group sent a copy-paste of Husayn’s resume stating, “Maybe you should have a discussion in relation to the perspective on the meeting that the Joint Muslim council sends out invitations to. That with the [Islamic divorce] council is most likely necessary, but you must be cautious in terms of how you frame it.”
The ministerial work group went even further by following the Muslim leaders’ work and by offering input to it. On 14 June, it sent an additional email to Husayn in which it recommended that specific Islamic authorities and institutions with which they had been in contact should be included in the meetings outside the ministry:
I have had a dialogue with the Islamic Faith Society Mosque, which would very much like to be part of the discussion. … Some I have spoken with also recommend that the Danish Muslim Association [Dansk Islamisk Forbund] should take part in the meetings going forward. … Furthermore, it has been pointed out that … Imam Mushib Jaffar from the Islamic Cultural Center on Horsebakken16 [street] also could be interested in being involved.
The ministerial work group also provided Husayn with the names of contact persons, their email addresses, and phone numbers. Furthermore, it followed up on the progress of the meetings outside the ministry in at least one email on 26 August: “Have you had the opportunity to continue with the work on the question, and has there been a meeting in the Joint Council of Muslims yet?” In other words, the ministerial work group coordinated parts of a process below the epistemic ceiling that ran parallel to the process above the epistemic ceiling. Husayn and other people involved in this process describe it as an attempt to establish a national Islamic divorce council as a solution to nikah captivity.
Only two meetings were held outside the ministry, both in the fall of 2012. Both meetings were focused on the founding of an Islamic divorce council and introducing the standardized Islamic divorce contract, but no agreement was reached on either topic. It is difficult to estimate the effect of the work described in this section because the proposal to establish an Islamic divorce council to solve the problem of nikah captivity is not new. It has existed at least since 2006 when Pedersen as a founding member of the Joint Council of Muslims suggested it (Termansen, 2006). However, Pedersen’s suggestion in 2006 was not followed up by any attempt to establish such a council. This only manifested in 2012 when, as demonstrated in this chapter, the ministerial work group co-coordinated national meetings between Muslim leaders in Denmark.
Finally, it should be noted that the employee in the ministerial work group who was in email communication with Husayn denies that the work group pursued a strategy outside the ministry that ran parallel to the work inside the ministry. It is also important to underline that I am merely arguing that such a parallel strategy has been pursued. While the email correspondence suggest that the ministerial work group tried to introduce a standardized Islamic divorce contract and facilitate the establishment of an Islamic divorce council as male Muslim leaders claim, there is no definitive proof of the latter in the material. However, this is largely irrelevant to my aim, which is merely to demonstrate that the ministerial work group pursued a parallel process below the epistemic ceiling.
4 The Problem of Nikah Captivity Unresolved
As described above, the problem of nikah captivity remained unresolved despite the Government’s Strategy. This became abundantly clear in subsequent years as cases kept emerging in the Danish media, most notably in the documentary The Mosques behind the Veil, aired in March 2016, which I quoted extensively in the introduction. On 8 March 2018, Lise-Lotte Duch, the leader of a cultural center for women with refugee and immigrant backgrounds called FAKTI, and social worker Ina Jensen wrote an opinion piece in Denmark’s largest newspaper, Politiken, in which they stated that, “there must be an exit strategy for women who want to divorce their suppressive husband” (Duch & Jensen, 2018), thus pointing out that no strategy that addresses nikah captivity had yet been formulated. Duch and Jensen went on to explain the problem of nikah captivity and the consequences this has for a segment of Muslim women, ending with a call to action:
We do not know the extent of the problem, but we see it massively in FAKTI. [However,] we see it very little in the political debate. … On the occasion of International Women’s Day, we encourage politicians to come up with proposals that support our fellow sisters from other cultures in gaining real equality on the same level as ethnic Danish women. (Duch & Jensen, 2018)
The opinion piece was – as were the many stories about nikah captivity – greeted with silence until a journalist, Mathilde Graversen, wrote a series of articles about the problem of nikah captivity, inspired by Duch and Jensen (Graversen, 2018a, 2018b, 2018c, 2018e, 2018f, 2018g, 2018h). These stories led the then Minister of Immigration and Integration, Inger Støjberg, to visit FAKTI where she listened to Duch, Jensen, and the women who come to the center (Graversen, 2018d). Støjberg responded by ordering an information campaign, further education of welfare professionals, and an update of the SFI report. The two first responses are very similar to those which produced the Government’s Strategy, which had proven ineffective a few years prior, and as I was involved in both, I briefly explain why.
First, I was informally consulted by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration before a tender for the information campaign was published, and I strongly advised the ministry to develop a solution to nikah captivity before setting up the campaign; that is, I advised the ministry that it ought to develop something that could be presented to minority citizens before launching an information campaign. My advice went up through the hierarchy of the ministry but was rejected, so the tender was published. I later sat on the advisory panel for the organizations that won the tender, and from here I could observe the organizations’ slowly realizing that they had no relevant information to disseminate – at least not relevant to women experiencing nikah captivity. However, to their credit, the organizations identified a group of minority citizens who had very little knowledge of their rights under Danish law and informed them about these rights.
Second, I was responsible for running courses teaching welfare professionals about the sharia practices documented in the VIVE report, so I have repeatedly been asked questions by welfare professionals on how they should respond to nikah captivity – a question that I could only answer by stating that they must follow the guidelines issued by their employers, while being well aware that no such guidelines existed. Another teacher on the courses gave instruction in Danish law, but it was clear that it only addressed the issue of nikah captivity indirectly at best. I have received many phone calls since these courses in which welfare professionals have asked me to recommend a Muslim leader with whom they could collaborate. I should note that I have never made such recommendations because my informants should not become burdened with Islamic divorce cases just because they speak with me. Furthermore, I did not want to become an agent in the field in which I was also doing research.
The point in Støjberg’s response was to order an update of the SFI report, which was published as the VIVE report in January 2020. Both reports reach the same conclusions, although the time frame for the VIVE report was more conducive to undertaking good research, and therefore the report is richer. It is clear from the VIVE report that the results of the Government’s Strategy had been ineffective.
In addition to the information campaign and training of welfare professionals, the political response to the VIVE report also included legislative action. The former Minister of Immigration and Integration, Mattias Tesfaye, tried to make nikah captivity illegal, make it illegal to issue nikah contracts that do not include mutual religious divorce rights, and he made amendments to raise the quality of the law on forced nikah and nikah between minors. However, except for the latter, these legal changes attempt to regulate phenomena above the ceiling and, therefore, they are incongruent with phenomena below the ceiling (for an analysis that demonstrates this incongruence, see Vinding & Petersen, 2023). In other words, the vast majority of nikah captivity cases, forced nikah cases, and most nikah contracts that do not allow mutual religious divorce rights, are most likely not covered by these laws, although nikah between minors has probably become illegal.17
In conclusion, to adapt Duch’s and Jensen’s expression: no functional exit strategy for women experiencing nikah captivity has been formulated. That is also the case at the time of writing in the spring of 2024. Therefore, it is no surprise that the problem of nikah captivity persists today. This means that the demand for Islamic divorce, which is projected onto Muslim leaders by women in nikah captivity and welfare professionals, is still high, and this is what causes the emergence and collapse of Islamic divorce institutions. In the next chapter, I demonstrate how an Islamic divorce council emerged and developed into a parallel legal institution with external funding. As soon as the institution was announced publicly in 2021, it produced a cascade, mainly due to representatives of the welfare state, thus demonstrating that the demand is not just a Muslim community phenomenon – it also exists below the epistemic ceiling within the welfare state.
This article was published six months after the Mohammad Cartoon Crisis, so Abu Laban is most likely referring to the political climate or the climate in the public debate.
The label is based on Karina Kosiara-Pedersen’s (2020) study of the Danish People’s Party.
There was an election on 15 September 2011, and the new government that took office on 3 October 2011 drew new boundaries between ministries. This explains why it was the former Ministry of Refugees, Migration, and Integration that ordered the SFI report, and it was new Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration that received it.
This is a document in which the government, which is typically made up of multiple parties, describes the policies it will pursue.
The strategy titled Handlevejledning for Tvingende Kontrol: Med Særligt Fokus på Muslimske Forhold (Instructions on How to Handle Coercive Control: With Focus on Muslim Relationships), is not publicly available, but access to it can be requested by contacting Odense SSP.
I do not provide the details of this news story because the newspaper Berlingske later lost the case when the imam took it to the Danish Press Association (Birk, 2020c). I should also disclose that I evaluated the documents and gave written testimony in this case that favored the imam. My evaluation was that, while Berlingske had published a series of news articles that were well grounded in terms of research, and for the most part gave accurate descriptions of parallel legal practices, this specific case on weaponized talaq was inaccurate and misleading. The verdict of the Danish Press Association (2021) is available from: https://www.pressenaevnet.dk/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/0622-Anonym-kendelse.pdf (accessed 5 October 2023).
In 2015, in an executive order on ecclesiastical mediation in cases of separation and divorce, which follows from Section 40 of the Marriage Act, it is stated that mediation is an option available to the parties, and that if the couple belong to a faith community outside the Church of Denmark, then the “priest” of that community may attempt mediation (Vinding, 2020, pp. 130–131). In other words, some forms of mediation by imams in relation to divorce are sanctioned by Danish law.
Mette Frederiksen’s Facebook wall, posted on 26 September 2020: https://www.facebook.com/mettefrederiksen.dk (accessed 5 October 2023).
Bek substituted for the Minister of Immigration and Integration, Matias Tesfaye, while he was on parental leave from 17 August 2020 to 27 September 2020. On 2 May 2022, Bek took the position over.
Kaare Dybvad Bek’s Facebook wall, posted on 24 September 2023: https://www.facebook.com/kaaredybvad (accessed 5 October 2023).
The video was posted on the day of the consultation with the Minister of Immigration and Integration. This was the consultation that I partly analyzed in Chapter 2, and as mentioned, no meaningful action was taken – neither at the consultation nor subsequently. Venstre, Danmarks Liberale Parti’s Facebook wall, posted on 27 October 2020: https://www.facebook.com/venstre.dk (accessed 5 October 2023).
Ironically, the slide deck used in the course informed course participants that religious marriage ceremonies without civil validity (nikah-only marriages) “are not illegal in Denmark”. In 2017, this course was made compulsory for religious leaders who wanted a marriage license. I have been provided with the slide deck by the Ministry of Immigration and Integration based on the open access to documents.
Radikale Venstre (centrist party).
The information retrieved by the right to open access includes a collection of the articles quoted above and a few others.
The meeting minutes are three pages long. Page one is intact, page two only contains the first three lines, and the rest of the page is blank, and the third page contains eight lines. I have inquired with the Ministry of Social Affairs about the missing text on page two, but it has not been possible to retrieve it.
This recommendation seems to be based on Jaffar’s already having had experience with the Islamic divorce council activity. On 14 October 2011, the employee from the ministerial work group asked Alev in an email, “Do you have contact with someone from the Muslim Cultural Center? It would be very fruitful to talk to someone who seems to have taken the initiative to establish a [Islamic divorce] council that makes decisions in such cases [Islamic divorce].”
I use non-declarative language here as it is up to Danish courts to decide how the law should be interpreted.