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 Being Muslim, Becoming Swedish:
Swedish Muslim Identity and the Challenge to Secular Nationalism
A Thesis Presented
By
Benjamin D. Grimm
To
The Committee on the Study of Religion
in partial fulfillment of
the requirements for the degree of
Bachelor of Arts with Honors
Harvard University
March 2018
 Table of Contents

Acknowledgments……………………………………………………………………… ii
Prelude: the walk from Södervärn to Värnhem………………………………………………iii
Introduction: What Lies Ahead………………………………………………………… 1
Interlude: graduation at Pauliskolan, Föreningsgatan……………………………………… 14
Chapter 1: Swedish, Muslim, Swedish Muslim……………………………………… 17
Interlude: the bus ride through Rosengård from mosque to home…………………………… 30
Chapter 2: The Public/Private Divide in Swedish Society…………………………33
Interlude: Per Kristiansson’s apartment, Barkgatan………………………………………… 48
Chapter 3: Confronting the Legacy of Lutheranism………………………………… 52
Interlude: the mosque on Danska vägen…………………………………………………… 67
Conclusion: What Lies Ahead………………………………………………………… 71
Appendix………………………………………………………………………………… 83
Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………… 84

i
 Acknowledgments

I would like to thank:

My family and friends: Jeanie, Dave, Alexandra, Bridget, Shawn, and Jacob.
All my interview subjects who shared with me their lives and stories, and many of whom
became selfless advocates for my research.
Michael Jackson and Lulie El-Ashry, thesis advisors without equal, whose encouragement
continually inspired me and renewed my passion for this material.
My many mentors at Harvard: Diana Eck, Agnes Broomé, Deirdre DeBruyn-Rubio, Kera
Street, Ali Asani, Courtney Lamberth and countless others.
Timothy Engström, Magnus Johansson, Brian Palmer, Eva Christina Nilsson, Agneta
Hansson, Robin Garefelt, Kristina Strand Larsson, Per Kristiansson, Tilda Malmros,
Theresa Hansen, Jonas Otterbeck, Åke Göransson, Simon Sorgenfrei, and the many
others who, out of pure generosity of spirit, helped an American stranger get to Sweden
and thrive there.
Joni Mitchell, whose breakthrough album Blue was played in its entirety over 200 times
during the process of composition. If this thesis reflects any of its poetic beauty or
existential lucidity, it is only through fortuitous osmosis.

🙧
Finally, I reject any gratitude toward the realty company MKB Fastighets AB, which
scammed me out of a one-hundred-dollar housing deposit.
Particularly you, Hanna. That sink was spotless and you know it.

ii
Prelude: the walk from Södervärn to Värnhem

Agneta looked at me wide-eyed—blue-eyed—her short hair ribboning in the wind

as I explained the jejune details of my first trip to Malmö, the statistics and studies and

news stories. She halted and shook her head. “But why do you care about us and our little

country?” she asked with genuine amazement, awaiting my reply.

Why, indeed. Swedes never ceased to marvel at my interest in their lives. More

than once, discussion of my project stopped a dinner conversation dead in its tracks. I was

shepherded around offices and homes to describe it to flattered and fascinated strangers.

It even got me featured on a magazine cover. For Swedes, the religious habits of their

“little country” in the North were the last thing on an American’s mind (thrust aside by

sugar-plum visions of buxom blonde women, Svedka, and the Swedish Chef), such that I

became the topic of discussion instead of them.

“Choice of subject, like choice of lover, is an intimate decision,” writes Jeanette

Winterson.1 This project is one with which I have lain for two-and-a-half years. Through

four semesters of study, twelve weeks of fieldwork, and innumerable hours of writing, an

unebbing fascination with the subject matter has driven me: the struggle to establish

identity, to feel at home, to belong and convince others of your belonging, is universal. It

occurs all over the globe, all the time, and I suspect it will resonate personally with anyone

who reads this work. In short, it matters far beyond Sweden’s borders.

So while this thesis is intended for many, I offer it particularly to Agneta, my first

friend in Sweden, who asked me why I care: I hope to have offered you an answer.

1 Jeanette Winterson, Weight, (Toronto: A.A. Knopf, 2005), xiii.

iii
Introduction: What Lies Ahead

In 1930, the last religious census was taken in Sweden. At that time, 15 people

identified themselves as Muslims, or rather, “Mohammedans” in the survey’s terms.2

They made up a miniscule portion of the tiny group of “Dissenters and Alien Confessors”

which encompassed 4.2% of the population, the other 95.8% of which were Lutherans in

the Church of Sweden.3 After 1930, the collection of religious demography was outlawed

on the basis of violating freedom of religion. There are now an estimated 450,000 Muslims

in Sweden.4 Sizeable groups of Muslims began immigrating to Sweden as migrant

workers in the 1960s and 1970s and waves of refugees since the 1990s have rapidly

increased their numbers. Within the last two decades, Muslims have truly begun to

establish themselves as a prominent community in Sweden. Islam is now the second-

largest and fastest-growing religion in the country.

While the half-a-million or so Swedish Muslims go largely unnoticed outside of

Scandinavia, Sweden is the site of some of the most interesting contemporary encounters

between national identity and religious plurality. As Talal Asad writes, “Muslims are

clearly present in a secular Europe and yet in an important sense absent from it” because

“‘Europe’ is conceptualized by Europeans…in such a way that Muslim immigrants cannot

be satisfactorily represented in it.”5 Sweden exemplifies the “secular paradox, that in the

name of freedom, individual autonomy, tolerance and cultural pluralism, religious

2 Statistiska Centralbyrån, Folkräkningen den 31 december 1930, Part V, 14.

3 Statistiska Centralbyrån, Folkräkningen, 3. Going by official membership, 99.7% of the population
belonged to the Church of Sweden.
4 Rickard Lagervall and Leif Stenberg, “Muslimska församlingar och föreningar i Malmö och Lund—en

ögonblicksbild,” (Lunds Universitet Centrum för Mellanösternstudier, 2016), 4.

5 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity, (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003), 159.

1
people…are being asked to keep their religious beliefs, identities, and norms ‘private’ so

that they do not disturb the project of a modern, secular, enlightened Europe.” 6 This

mixed-methods ethnography presents a novel study of Swedish secular national identity

through the experiences of the Swedish Muslims who challenge and broaden its bounds.

Sweden is a complicated country adept at appearing simple. Until perhaps five

years ago, its international image as a cheery, prosperous, modern (yet charmingly

folksy), white, secular paradise was unmarred. Swedish Muslims have met Sweden at an

inflection point in its history when these certainties are eroding as the “little Swedish

community [and] the existing social contract in Sweden” bend under the stress of

becoming “far more heterogenous and pluralistic.”7 One otherwise inconsequential

anthology puts an exact title this experience: “Sweden Unparadised.” The authors

describe a nation whose international status and self-esteem are in flux: “The image of

Sweden has undergone a transformation from that of a well-functioning but existentially

bland economic wonder into a more pluralistic, fragmented, and—perhaps—gloomy

society.”8 There is a particularly fraught meeting of Sweden’s intensely secular identity

with a growing religious minority.

The title of this work plays off of Esra Özyürek’s Being German, Becoming Muslim,

an ethnography which investigates how German converts “accommodate Islam to

German identity and carve out a legitimate space for Germans in the Ummah.” Özyürek

argues that the “border crossings” that converts undertake “challenge how we define

6 José Casanova, “Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration,” Religion in an Expanding
Europe, eds. Timothy A. Byrnes and Peter J. Katzenstein, (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006), 67-8.
7 Henrik Berggren and Lars Trägårdh, Är svensken människa?: Gemenskap och oberoende i det moderna

Sverige, (Stockholm: Norstedts, 2006), 367.

8 Demker et al., Culture, Health, and Religion at the Millennium: Sweden Unparadised, (Basingstoke: Palgrave

MacMillan), 2014.

2
Germans and Muslims” as essential categories.9 This work turns the focus in the other

direction, considering how Muslims become Swedish nationals and the concomitant

effects on national and religious identity. I choose to broach the topic through born-

Muslims rather than converts. The Swedish convert population is small; in one of the

only studies of converts in Scandinavia, Anne Sofie Roald, a convert herself, estimates the

total number of Swedish converts to be 5,000, only 1.5% of the Muslim population. 10 The

convert population is also not very politically influential, unlike in Germany or Italy, for

instance. The experiences of born-Muslims, especially second-generation immigrants,

speak to a much broader population which will be the most influential in the future.

As the title suggests, this thesis pays close attention to inversions and paradox. It

fixates on how Swedes express an ardent sense of chosenness through cynical anti-

nationalist critique; how they tolerate an unparalleled lack of privacy while elbowing

religious life into the private sphere; how they are saturated in Lutheran ethics and yet

feel themselves to be free. Even the topic is a sort of inversion: my fieldwork initially

placed a premium on Muslim community organizing and the development of Muslim civil

society. Over the course of my research, my purpose evolved from seeing Muslims

through the lens of Swedishness to seeing Sweden through Muslim eyes. This is a

national portrait framed by religion: an ethnography of Sweden.

The existing literature on Muslims in Sweden is scant and stale. The Swedish

fetish inclines toward quantifiable data and surveys. For instance, I know of no book-

length ethnographies of Swedish Muslims. The literature also reflects a fixation on static

9 Esra Özyürek, Being German, Becoming Muslim: Race, Religion, and Conversion in the New Europe,
(Princeton: Princeton UP, 2015), 2; 3.
10 Anne Sofie Roald, New Muslims in the European Context: The Experience of Scandinavian Converts (Boston:

Brill, 2004), 29.

3
and sensationalized issues like headscarves, halal slaughter, mosque buildings, and honor

culture. An extranational perspective is also desperately lacking. I can enumerate without

difficulty all significant English-language studies on the topic and every major scholar is

of Swedish heritage. Importantly, I find it rare that Swedish literature ever treats

Muslims as basically Swedish. The inclination is toward cataloguing the differences, the

trials of integration, the failures of multiculturalism, rather than considering the ways in

which Muslims try to become full members of Swedish society. While concerns like

headscarves and circumcisions are important constituents of Swedish Muslim experience,

they are most often remediable through pragmatic means and do not strike at the

universal lessons available to us. No one I interviewed mentioned any of these topics, nor

did any recall “a time when you faced problems or discrimination because of your faith”

when asked (though they may have felt uncomfortable discussing them with a stranger).

I set these concerns aside in pursuit of more poignant aspects of Muslim experience.

I find a deficiency in ethnography of religion more broadly. I have rarely seen an

integration of theory and narrative that feels organic and that animates the landscape of

daily life with the abstract; this should always be the ultimate goal of ethnography. Too

often, theory becomes a soulless frontispiece to ethnographic account, locked, as it so

often is, in the introduction and only dimly resurrected in concluding. 11 Alternatively, a

text swings to the other extreme and becomes a theoretical reverie devoid of the human

register. By hook or by crook, the real purpose of studying religion is jettisoned; religion

captivates us so grippingly because it speaks to the ceaseless connection between the

human and the divine, the individual and the universal, the abstract and the lived.

11Özyürek, though a good ethnographer, is especially guilty of this, heralding a flawed and frankly
unnecessary theory of “queering ethnicity” in her introduction and then never engaging it in the actual text.

4
 In employing a mixed method of ethnography and cultural studies, I want to

nourish this tributary between the concrete and the abstract. The body chapters to follow

vivisect the diffuse topics of national identity, public and private spheres, and Lutheran

history through tangible examples, letting theory emerge organically from the soil of

everyday life. The chapters are connected by first-person ethnographic interludes that

introduce theoretical topics through everyday activities like riding the bus. These

interstices map my thematic concerns onto the geography of Malmö and make the sources

of my observations more transparent; this sense of emplacement is supported by photo

interleafs from my time in Malmö. These departures from strict academicism viscerally

remind us of the human valence of abstract subjects like nationalism and secularism and

allow the people and places I encountered to speak for themselves.

My major intervention into the literature on Sweden is the introduction of two

vital elements that have been insufficiently considered in previous studies. First, I

emphasize how secularism is yoked to a stark ideological divide between the public and

private spheres that places religion outside of the public arena. In Sweden, no one really

considers the public sphere—so much so that there is not even one single word to

describe: det offentliga rummet, offentligheten, and allmänheten all mean “the public.” The

gamut of public life is so self-evident that it barely warrants reflection. Second, I explicate

the ways in which the Lutheran history of Sweden continues to inhere in its society and

culture. This phenomenon is uncritically accepted in native literature, assumed as a

natural and inconsequential reality, when it is actually a critical force in public life.

The experiences of Swedish Muslims in reconciling religious identity with secular

national identity offer plentiful ingresses into considering how overarching structures

like nationalism and religious identity are experienced by real people. By what means has

5
secularity become so central to Swedish identity? How is religion still active even in

purportedly secular institutions? What social and historical factors permit the vestiges of

Lutheranism to remain in the public sphere while Islam is made foreign to secular values?

How do we make room in the res publica for those who challenge its premises? Must we?

All of these questions plague modernity and cry out only more urgently as global society

becomes ever more diverse.

This thesis argues that by asserting their belonging in Sweden not merely

irrespective of, but as a result of their faith, Muslims disrupt the secular narrative of

Swedishness, revealing in the process that Swedish secularity remains colored by post-

Lutheran influences and rests on a fragile division of public and private life. The

burgeoning of a generation of Muslims born in Sweden challenges the assumption that

religion is an imported good and forces Sweden to reconcile religion as a domestic

product. Muslims’ gravity lies not in a threat to Swedish culture or values, but rather in

their revelatory power—their ability to show the structural instabilities in Swedishness

that have for so long gone unseen. But before taking up this study in earnest, some

context on my approach is warranted.

Sweden in the World

In high school biology, I remember reading about the Urey-Miller experiment, in

which biochemists simulated the conditions of primordial earth in a lab to watch the

spontaneous formation of amino acids in real-time. I think of Sweden in much the same

way. The lack of a colonial history means that Sweden has only had a significant domestic

exposure to foreign cultures in the last fifty years. The novelty of Sweden’s encounter

with diversity offers an opportunity for study that few other European countries do. Its

6
grappling to accommodate plurality while maintaining its own identity comes decades

later than most places in the Western world, like France, Germany, the UK or the US.;

and the aura of chosenness that surrounds Sweden in the international eye makes it an

especially prominent exemplar on the global stage, as I address in the conclusion.

The allure of studying Sweden, however, is not that it offers a vignette of a

charming obscurity to be locked up in a curio cabinet; on the contrary, the challenges and

successes faced by Muslims in Sweden illuminate the experiences of Muslims across the

West. Europe’s northern neighbor has a great deal to say to the study of European Islam,

though the sub-field is dominated by scholarship on France, Germany and the UK, and

so often ignores Scandinavia. The illumination Sweden brings to unspoken assumptions

about public and private space is relevant across the continent. Sweden is quite similar to

Norway and Denmark because Scandinavian culture is greatly shaped by internal trends.

The negotiation of religious identity with secular norms is especially relevant to France,

though its articulated policy of laïcité makes it quite distinct from Sweden’s assumed

secularity. Sweden speaks to the fundamental nature of religious identity in the modern

West: what do religion and national identity have to do with one another in the age of

secularity? What does it mean to be European in an increasingly diverse Europe?

Methodology and Context

The fieldwork on which this thesis is based took place in the city of Malmö over

twelve weeks during the summers of 2016 and 2017. I spoke formally with two dozen

people, including Muslim community leaders, imams, Church of Sweden members and

both Muslim and non-Muslim laypeople. Muslims I interviewed had backgrounds in

Turkey, Macedonia, Tunisia, Iran, Albania, Palestine, and Sweden, and ranged from their

7
mid-20s to their late-70s. Many were contacted via institutional ties. I worked with two

of the major mosques in Malmö (Wakf and the Islamic Center) and had connections with

prominent organizations like “study association” Ibn Rushd and intercultural group Open

Skåne. The major bias in the population I interacted with was its level of public

engagement. Everyone I interviewed was associated with a public entity in some way, as

a teacher at a Muslim primary school, a director at a Muslim educational group, or a

Muslim politician. This reflects in part the huge levels of public engagement in Sweden,

but is also a product of trying to procure subjects through organizational membership.

Most of the non-Muslim Swedes I met were educated, middle-class and urban.

One cautionary note: though many of the Muslims I interviewed expressed some

aspect of immigrant identity, I do not mean to unintentionally conflate Muslims and

immigrants. The majority of Muslims are first- or second-generation immigrants because

the community is relatively young. More critically, the image of a Muslim for most

Swedes remains that of an immigrant. When I told an ice-cream shop owner that I was

interviewing Swedish Muslims, he proceeded to lament how they were coming from the

Middle East and clogging up the dental care queues with their terrible teeth (the irony

that he sells sugary ice cream was not lost on me). His immediate assumption was that by

Muslim, I meant not just immigrant, but refugee. In 2015, Sweden accepted 163,000

refugees fleeing the Middle East, more per capita than any other EU country. 12 Most

Swedes assume that because the refugees came from the Middle East, they were all

Muslim; the imagined connection forged between Muslim and foreign and Muslim and

disruption is powerful. Though the experiences with Swedishness that I discuss may be

relevant to immigrant experience broadly, my research is on Muslims as a religious group,

12 “Europe’s migrant acceptance rates,” The Economist, Sep. 1, 2015.

8
and includes no refugees. It is important to note, however, how the categories of Muslim

and immigrant are imbricated in the Swedish imagination of who and what a Muslim is.

Finally, as an ethnographer, I look upon Sweden with a foreign but educated

perspective. A foreign eye catches all manner of idiosyncrasy that might pass by an

accustomed one. It was well known to my subjects that I was American and non-Muslim,

though I was mistaken once for a Norwegian, once for a Syrian, and even once for an

Oxonian (for shame!). Still, I am fluent enough in Swedish and Swedish culture to have

never truly been treated like a foreigner; I was able to manipulate the line between

blending in and sticking out to my benefit. It is a delicate balance, but one that I think

imbues my work with a beneficial mix of naïve attentiveness and nuanced familiarity. The

account I give is impressionistic, incomplete, and subjective—everything ethnography

must be. I try to faithfully convey the Sweden I saw, one limited in geographic scope,

time, diversity of experience, and intimacy, but not of passion.

Malmö: The City in the South

This study of a nation is bounded by a small geographic area, and a rather

unrepresentative one at that: Malmö’s geography and demography distinguish it from the

rest of the country. The abundance of Muslim culture and its level of social engagement

are what drew me there to study over a more obvious choice like Stockholm. Malmö is

the southernmost port city in Sweden, located directly across the border from

Copenhagen, Denmark. It is the country’s most diverse city, with 32% foreign-born

residents,13 178 countries represented,14 and anywhere from 105 to 150 languages

13 Malmö Stad, “Statistikunderlag för Malmö,” May 19, 2017.

14 Malmö Stad, “Malmö i korta drag,” April 11, 2017.

9
spoken.15 In the Swedish imagination, Malmö is not just an immigrant city (though the

largest immigrant group is in fact Danes), but also overwhelmingly Muslim. 16 The most

feasible estimate of the Muslim population is 50,000 individuals, 15% of the city’s

population.17 Malmö has three purpose-built mosques and at least ten, likely more, of

what might be called “basement mosques,” though their physical layouts vary. 18 Most

groups are Sunni, though some Shi’a groups exist, and there are no Ismaili groups.

The physical anatomy of Malmö also makes it distinct from Sweden’s other two

cities with significant Muslim populations, Stockholm and Gothenburg. In Stockholm,

the major Muslim suburbs are literal islands and sit as much as a half-hour subway ride

outside the city. As someone I met said, “The ‘suburb’ doesn’t exist in Malmö in the same

way.” Rosengård, the immigrant suburb of Malmö, is a fifteen-minute bike ride from the

city center; Möllevångstorget, another area with many immigrants, is a restaurant hub

in the middle of town. While still rather segregated from the rest of the city, this

proximity means that diverse cultural and religious life are constantly present, never

more than a few minutes’ walk away. The other omnipresence is nature: the city is

incredibly green, filled with parks, bisected by a canal, and sitting a stone’s throw from

the beautiful Ribersborg beach looking out at Copenhagen over the Öresund Sound.

On all accounts, the spirit in Malmö is different than anywhere else, or so I was

told constantly. My friends from the North articulated Malmö’s peculiarity with slight

disdain, suggesting that it does not represent what Sweden really is: I often heard the

joke, “Where are you living in Sweden? Oh, Malmö? So not in Sweden, then.” Those local

15 Karina Vamling, “Malmös språkliga landskap,” Institution för språkstudier (Malmö högskola), Oct. 16,
2015; “Språken som talas i Malmö,” Sydsvenskan, Dec. 30, 2004.
16 Statistiska centralbyrån, “Befolkning efter bakgrund,” 2010, 5.
17 Lagervall and Stenberg, “Muslimska församlingar och föreningar i Malmö och Lund, 6.
18 Lagervall and Stenberg, “Muslimska församlingar och föreningar i Malmö och Lund.”

10
to Malmö, though, framed its singularity in the opposite way. Over and over again, I

heard the refrain: “Malmö is first; things happen here and then spread up the rest of the

country”; “Malmö is Sweden’s most important political city”; “Malmö is on the cutting

edge.” Ther is a strong north/south divide in Sweden; People south of Stockholm are “a

little more outgoing and talkative, the flow increasing mile by mile” down to Malmö at

the southern tip.19 Malmö is also a city with many students and the thrust of youth shot

through it. All of this “gives rise to a new sort of Swedishness that feels more global.”20

My experience with Swedishness is colored as much by the humanizing of rigid and

bloodless stereotypes as by my location in a city so exemplary and yet so exceptional

(much like Sweden itself).

Studying Nationalism and Secularism

The two diffuse topics in this work’s subtitle require some pinning down. I am

interested in secularism less as political ideology than as a mode of national and personal

self-imagination. National self-conceptions have always been fundamental for setting

boundaries of belonging; the way we understand ourselves dictates who we consider like

us. I am most concerned, then, with the civic resonances of nationalism: the affirmation

of, promotion of, and allegiance to a specific vision of the nation encompassing certain

cultures, values, and norms at the exclusion of others. My most central theoretical tool

comes from Eric Hobsbawm’s conception of nationalism as a set of “invented traditions,”

which he argues react to “the constant change and innovation of the modern world” by

attempting to “structure at least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and

19 Susan Sontag, “A Letter from Sweden,” Ramparts, July 1969, 26.

20 Last quotation from Qaisar Mahmood, Jakten på svenskheten, (Stockholm: Natur och kultur, 2012), 177.

11
invariant.”21 While Hobsbawm considers religion a prime example of invented traditions,

I see secularism working in a very similar way.

My conception of secularism is intentionally broad, though José Casanova’s

definition states it succinctly. Secularism is a “process of societal modernization as a

process of functional differentiation and emancipation of the secular spheres—primarily

the state, the economy, and science—from the religious sphere.”22 Talal Asad also colors

my thinking about how secularism has become a facet of national identity. My concern

with secularism overwhelmingly has to do with how secularism is ferried by the public

sphere—in this sense, the thinking of Habermas and his successors is influential for me.

Studying secularism as a scholar of religion is a peculiar endeavor: why would an

ichthyologist study a lake with no fish? At its core, secularism has always been about

religion—managing it, banishing it, rehabilitating it. And of course, secularism is

essential to the experiences of religious people as well as non-religious ones. As Casanova

later admitted, the secularization hypothesis, that societies everywhere would eventually

and inexorably become secular, was resoundingly disproved by the religious resurgence

at the end of the twentieth century.23 Yet the concept of ‘the secular’ has persisted as a

supposedly self-evident category. If universal secularization never materialized, the

persisting power of the secular myth means something, particularly to the great number

of religious people remaining in the world. Secularism is a paramount concern when

studying the intersection of religion, culture, and society.

21 E.J. Hobsbawm, introduction to The Invention of Tradition, eds. Hobsbawm and Ranger, (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 2012), 2.
22 José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 19.
23 See Casanova 2006 among other of his works.

12
What Lies Ahead

Chapter 1 describes the prevailing secular values that characterize Swedish

national identity and considers how Muslims’ own feelings of Swedishness challenge

these norms. It notes how trying to use Islam to bolster Swedish humanitarian values is

ultimately crippled by the inefficacy of religious language in a secular environment.

Chapter 2 describes the peculiar and unchallenged conceptions of the public and

private spheres in Sweden. It establishes how the bounding of a strictly secular public

quarantines Muslims’ religious lives while making their private activities suspect. In a

novel move, it implicates the privatization of the public welfare system in recent decades

to the feeling of instability in the secular model, and notes the common influence of

increased ethnic, cultural, and religious diversity in accelerating these processes.

Chapter 3 reveals the degree to which the debut of Muslims in the public sphere

has triggered an awareness of the vestiges of former state Lutheranism in Sweden. It

contends that the realization that secularism is not a stable edifice throws the entire

public/private system into jeopardy, and with it, a central pillar of Swedish identity.

In total, this thesis argues that Muslims act as a mirror in which Sweden sees itself

more clearly: the growth of a group of people who identify as both Swedish and Muslim

challenges traditional norms of Swedishness rooted in secular uniformity and reveals that

the Swedish secular system was never stable or impermeable. It exposes dire fault lines

in the prevailing conception of what it means to be Swedish. Swedish Muslims represent

not an empirical threat—an assault on Sweden’s secularity—but rather an ideological

one—a challenge to the entire project of secularism. The gravity of Swedish Muslims lies

in this revelatory power.

13
Interlude: graduation at Pauliskolan, Föreningsgatan

The only place you regularly see Swedish flags in Sweden is on immigrant-owned

restaurants. This observation was my own, gleaned from days treading the rows of Arab

pizzerias and falafel joints on Bergsgatan, and offered up to the company gathered around

a dinner table. To this musing, my companions added a stronger conclusion: if someone

flies a Swedish flag outside their house, they are probably crazy. The Swedish flag has

become a symbol for the anti-immigrant far-right party and “hoisting the flag in Sweden,

therefore, [has] acquired a racist undertone.”24 A bit embarrassed, I thought of my own

home in western New York and the colloquial instruction we give to visitors: “It's the

grey one with the American flag.” As if reading my mind, someone chimed in that, by

contrast, the American flag is innocuous in Sweden, a cultural kitsch beloved by rural

rubes who drive imported Chevys and listen to American rock and roll.

On Sweden’s National Day, June 6, the flag makes a rare public appearance. More

than one Swede admitted to me that Sweden’s National Day is a half-hearted attempt to

compete with Norway's famous celebration, May Seventeenth. Despite dogged efforts, a

convivial aura has never really taken root. Still, in Malmö, novelty flags are secured to

the fronts of the city buses, flapping anxiously in their travel, and large banner flags are

flown at a public ceremony in the Main Square, replete with a military band and folk

dancers. With all the festivity, the crowd for the 2016 celebration was so quiet that from

one street away I could not hear them and thought I had the time wrong. The soporific

assembly drew around three hundred people who perched on wooden benches in silent

observation as awkward speakers offered sporadic holiday well-wishes. Despite Malmö’s

24 Roald, New Muslims in the European Context, 32.

14
sizeable immigrant population, almost everyone was white-skinned (and white-haired)—

the only non-white person I saw was a beggar, wearing a blue shawl and holding a paper

Swedish flag next to her change cup.

June also brings graduation season, when blue and yellow flood the endcaps of

grocery stores in the form of ribbons, plush teddy bears, and sickeningly precious flag

toothpicks. Unlike in the US, where school colors dictate the color scheme, all Swedish

graduates are regaled with blue and yellow. Early in June 2016, I stumbled upon a

graduation ceremony (“utspark,” lit. kicking out) at the St. Paul's School (Pauliskolan) in

Malmö as I was leaving a coffee shop. Drawn by the squawks of air horns, I found my

way to a faintly yellow brick building whose front façade rose stepwise with reflective

windows across its face. Its rear side had a more distinctive mien, sectioned horizontally

by lines of black brick, with window arches that gave it an almost exotic quality.

On that day, every window on the back side of the building was thrown open to

the mild summer air and students in formal clothing and graduation hats (studentmössar)

hung out of them with noisemakers in mouth and hand. The school draws from a diverse

urban area, and out of the windows flew flags from every country conceivable: Bosnia,

Pakistan, Algeria, Japan, Italy, Kurdistan, and the local soccer team Malmö FF—

identified with the help of Google. In a throng at street level, parents assembled with

large placket signs (studentskyltar) decorated with baby pictures. The mix of names caught

my eye: Viktor, Mohammed, Erik, Ashraf, Miguel, Ali, Linnea. The image was powerful.

Watching Muslim girls, with white hijabs to match their graduation caps, proudly waving

Palestinian and Turkish flags while surrounding by blue and yellow, I couldn’t help but

think to myself, This is what Sweden looks like now.

15
 🙧

On August 29, 2017 sculptor Mattias Norström relocated his work “Du Gamla,

Du Fria” (the title and opening line of the Swedish national anthem) from Gothenburg to

Sergels torg, the central square in Stockholm. The work consists of a tall metal flagpole,

bent at the top, with the Swedish flag drooping upside down. Immediately, the piece was

criticized by politicians who found it “indecent and inappropriate to erect this sort of flag

in Stockholm’s most central locale [where] very many people pass.”25 Two days later, a

man was arrested while attempting to scale the pole at 4 AM, armed with a boat hook and

tree saw. Though he denied it, he was suspected by police to have conspired to saw down

the installation.26 No political affiliation was known.

Though once subdued, the flag, like so much else in Sweden, has become a

contentious subject of national debate. That the Swedish flag is traditionally a shyer

banner than its foreign siblings makes it only a more potent patriotic symbol—it seems

strangely natural, then, that immigrants and xenophobes are both its standard flyers. The

colors of the Swedish flag have become a metaphoric metric for the incorporation of Islam

into the fabric of the country; the term “blue-and-yellow Islam” (blågul islam), coined by

two Islamologists, is commonly used to characterize the development of Swedish Muslim

identity.27 It is hardly coincidental that the placards at the Islamic Center of Malmö

identifying men’s and women’s entrances are bright yellow text on blue plastic. But in a

country where anyone flying the flag is “probably crazy,” is a patriotic Islam dyed in

Sweden’s colors too blue-and-yellow for its own good?

25 Erik Slottner, group leader for the Christian Democratic Party. Quoted in Lovisa Åkesson, “Ilska mot
den krökta flaggstången,” Expressen, Aug. 30, 2017.
26 Marja Andersson, “Man försökte såga ner flaggstången på Sergels torg,” SVT Nyheter, Aug. 31, 2017.
27 See Svanberg and Westerlund’s Blågul Islam, 1999.

16
Chapter 1: Swedish, Muslim, Swedish Muslim

Sweden, Sweden beloved friend, Welcome, welcome here.

A tiger who is ashamed,
I know how it feels
When the seriousness becomes a joke,
When the silence is scared.
What is it that’s happened?
Welcome, welcome here.
Whoever you are, wherever you are.
Deck your veranda for a party,
For a friend from far away.
In this country, moderation’s best.
We toast to another Midsummer,
Fresh potatoes and herring,
As if time has stood still.
Whoever you are, wherever you are.
The rain pounds the windows now,
But the night is bright in a country with no sound.
And the glass glitters quietly on our table,
As empty as words.
Of course the love is strong.
Welcome, welcome here.
Whoever you are, wherever you are.
—Kent, “Sverige” (Sweden)

Swedish rock band Kent breaks with its usual style with their acoustic ballad,

“Sverige.” The song has a beautiful sentimentality to it that makes even a foreigner feel a

twinge of longing. But its lyrics also have an ambiguous, sarcastic quality that feels at

odds with the melody: do they express nostalgia for lost traditions? Or do they mock a

country trapped in time “stood still”? Is its “welcome here” a mockery of an immigration

policy that has allowed the obliteration of Swedish culture? Or is the sarcasm directed

instead at the vapid illusion that anyone is welcome, “whoever you are”?

Fan-made lyric videos on YouTube have hundreds of comments—quite talkative

for the reticent Swedes, as we will see.28 Most praise the song: “Better song about Sweden

than [the national anthem]”, “Should become the official Midsummer song!!!.” Many,

though, debate the song’s meaning. “Do people not get that the lyrics are sarcastic?”

‘MudgateBronn’ asks. “It’s critical of all the immigrants who come here and destroy.”

Someone evokes Kent’s left-leaning politics to dispute this interpretation. Another user

28 Comments from Matilda E.’s video “Kent – Sverige lyrics” and LipiXx483’s “Kent – Sverige (Lyrics).”

17
understands it as “a criticism against a Sweden that doesn’t welcome anything unknown

or unexpected… a society that doesn’t care about each other [sic].”

Then there are the nationalist provocateurs. ‘Sweden lover 4 ever’ sneers, “if

someone is an ISIS soldier do you mean they get to come here? That’s totally absurd.” A

user drops an old nationalist slogan, “Keep Sweden Swedish!” (Bevara Sverige svenskt!).

‘Elina Eriksson’ proclaims, “Out with the vermin I say! Protect the whites in Sweden that

are still left cause soon we’ll disappear.” An immigrant slur (blatte) is invoked more than

once. Someone tells an Eritrean user to “go back to your ape country.” Someone comments

that he is Iranian-Swedish. “So you’re not Swedish then,” a commenter replies.

Zehra T muses, “I don’t understand a word, but this makes me feel so chill.”

To pontificate on the essential character of an entire nation is risky business too

often undertaken. Yet, to begin to apprehend the experiences of Swedish Muslims, we

must understand something about the nature of Swedishness. With a rapidly increasing

number of established immigrants of all faiths, the question of reconciling Swedish

identity with other cultures and religions is increasingly actual. Swedish Muslims

particularly juxtapose two things that do not obviously fit together: religious identity and

normatively secular national identity. The union of Swedish and Muslim identity requires

reconciliation on a personal level and disrupts secular nationalism at a societal level.

My ethnographic experience with Swedishness is circumscribed by a small

geographic area and a particular population therein. This chapter is strongly colored by

the experiences of second-generation Muslims. Through the self-selection of the

interview process, the people I spoke to are all publicly-engaged, all Swedish citizens,

18
mostly young, and all quite learned in issues of religion and identity. Their perspectives

on Swedishness do not necessarily reflect those of Swedish Muslims with different

experiences; all the same, they represent a large and influential portion of the Muslim

population. Everyone I interviewed identified enthusiastically as Swedish; even their

expressions of frustrations with Swedish culture emerged from a feeling of entitlement to

a place within Swedishness. Questions like, “Do Muslims identify as Swedish?” or “Is

Islam commensurable with Swedishness?” are therefore nugatory: they do, and it is. Or,

as someone I interviewed more poignantly put it:

It’s not worth commenting what is Swedish, what is un-Swedish. We must’ve moved on from this
a long time ago! I think there isn’t anything that’s Swedish or un-Swedish. There is something that
is reasonable, logical: that which is beneficial to people and that which is harmful to people. Islam
does not contribute any harm to people. If it’s Swedish, un-Swedish—give that up.

Rather, there are two more important concerns: first, how do Muslims make sense of the

conflicting elements of Swedish and Muslim identity—how do they “become” Swedish?

And second, why must they become Swedish in the first place? 29

This chapter establishes some of the sweeping characterizations of Sweden

proliferated by other authors and supported by my experience and then considers how

certain Muslims make sense of their place within this national ethos. The main voice that

speaks in this chapter is that of Fatma, a 27-year-old master’s student in Malmö.

Multilingual and worldly, she has worked for most major Muslim organizations in

Sweden. Her incisive comments strike at the heart of many Muslims’ experiences with

Swedish culture and reflect the perspectives of numerous national organizations. Two

vital aspects of Swedishness, its privacy and its secularity, are treated separately in the

following chapters. When discussing the personal valence of national identity, I try to

29It also begs semantic questions that cannot be taken up here: does “Swedish” mean something different
here than in other contexts? Is one a “Swedish Muslim,” a “Muslim Swede,” or something else entirely?

19
speak as much as possible about “Swedishness” (svenskhet) rather than nationalism. The

latter term is too formal, too imprecise, and too impersonal—besides, no one really feels

like “a national.” They feel Swedish. By asserting the national aspect of their identity,

Muslims challenge and broaden the restrictive norms of Swedishness. Yet, in defending

their common values with patriotic expressions, Muslims encounter a paradox of Swedish

national identity, that it is essentially anti-nationalist.

On Swedishness
“Swedish people have nothing to do: they yawn their whole life away, they are always
bored, so they like to bore other people and try to find some fun in them. I was mad with
anger the whole evening, though Stockholm was so fine in the night with the bright water
and glittering lights.”
—Simone de Beauvoir, letter to Nelson Algren, August 13, 1947 30

Subjective accounts of Sweden are among literature’s most animated prose. The

sedateness of the snow-blanketed North seems to inspire unceasingly colorful description

and psychoanalysis. For instance, American essayist Susan Sontag’s “A Letter from

Sweden” has become something of a legendary diatribe among scholars of Sweden for its

acrimonious, if astute, observations. Brian Palmer paints a more positive though equally

vivid picture. Though histrionic, the conclusions that authors like Sontag, Palmer, and de

Beauvoir draw largely align with my experience with Swedishness.

Swedes are a bundle of contradictions. They are “not given to puzzling over

things,”31 and yet they never cease debating public matters (politely, of course). They

welcomed record numbers of refugees in 2015 but a guest is “viewed as someone who

30 Simone De Beauvoir, Beloved Chicago Man: Letters to Nelson Algren, 1947-64, ed. Sylvie Le Bon de
Beauvoir, (London: Gollancz, 1998), 62. Many thanks to Elisabeth Åsbrink for helping to locate this text.
31 Sontag, “A Letter from Sweden,” 24.

20
disrupts household order and compromises cleanliness.”32 They are overwhelmingly

educated, and still retain a certain naïveté—the word “blue-eyed” (blåögd), as many

Swedes are, can also mean “unsuspecting” or “naïve.”33 They are exemplars of modernity,

light-years progressed in gender equality and social welfare, but still “the myth of a little

family in a little red cottage” in the woods remains a nonpareil national fantasy. 34 And

they are deeply humanitarian, and yet unable to connect emotionally with other humans

or begin a conversation without awkwardly mentioning the weather. 35

None of this is to imply that the many generalizations about Swedishness are true:

but stereotypes, like rumors, are consequential whether accurate or not. The norms of

order and emotional reticence in Swedishness are often held against immigrants.

Immigrants are frequently depicted as disrupting societal order and “framed as an

encroachment upon the home,” the womb of Swedish order.36 They are also stereotyped

as overly emotive and loud. “Silence is the Swedish national vice,” 37 writes Susan Sontag.

“Human ‘contact’ is always, at least initially, a problem…Being with people feels like work

for [Swedes] far more than it does like nourishment.” 38 An immigrant from Spain

affirmed that “Swedes hate small talk. It feels like something you’re forced to do.”

Immigrants, he said, are easier to talk to and much more welcoming. Yet to Swedes, this

gregariousness is uncomfortable and improper in a public setting.

32 Sontag, “A Letter from Sweden,” 28.

33 Brian C.W. Palmer, The Struggle for Sweden’s Soul: Moral Engagement and Identity in a Post-Christian
Society, (Uppsala: Department of Theology, 1996), 48.
34 David Gaunt and Orvar Löfgren, Myter om svensken, (Stockholm: LiberFörlag, 1985), 42.
35 A Twitter user jokes, “How do you know @FirstAidKitBand are Swedish? They use the weather as an

opening topic.” Their song “Emmylou” starts, “The bitter winds are coming in and I’m already missing
the summer. Stockholm’s cold, but I’ve been told I was born to endure this kind of weather.”
36 Palmer, The Struggle for Sweden’s Soul, 21.
37 Sontag, ”A Letter from Sweden,” 26.
38 Sontag, ”A Letter from Sweden,” 30.

21
 Swedes’ secularity, however, is uncontested. Antje Jackelén, archbishop of the

Church of Sweden, describes the prevailing attitude toward religion well: “Religion is

perceived as something that others have. Faith is something people did in the old days; as

they do it today, it’s always others, and they believe in strange things, dress strangely, eat

strangely, and do strange things at strange moments.” 39 A man I met at a barbecue

summed it up more pithily, “Swedes have no God, but we have soccer, which is almost the

same thing.” At a private think tank in Malmö on women in religion that I attended, the

discussion turned to the perception of religious individuals in society. A seminary student

at Lund University confessed that telling people she wants to be a priest “is like coming

out to people as being homosexual,” so surprising and radical the act is. Another

participant—again, an attendant at a discussion on women in religion—said that the word

“religious” did not feel appropriate to her. “It just has such a negative ring,” she explained.

Others bemoaned how acceptable it is in Sweden to have no religious literacy. Such is not

permissible in other countries, one remarked, looking to me for endorsement. The tone

of the room felt almost like that of a support group.

The most fascinating contradiction embedded in Swedishness is that at the same

time as Swedes express deep pride in their national achievements, Swedish culture is

staunchly anti-nationalist. As a Muslim born in Sweden said, “Scandinavia is very chill.

There isn’t so much about nationalism. It has to do more with one’s fellow people

(medmänniskor).” The strongest nationalist sentiment I heard was during a National Day

television broadcast when a presenter solemnly proclaimed, “We all live and die on the

earth. I am, however, thankful that I was born in Norden [the Nordic countries].” This

39 Antje Jackelén, “Samhälle och existens,” Conference, Malmö, Sweden, April 26, 2016.

22
comparatively bold declaration did not even mention Sweden by name. Qaisar Mahmood,

a Swedish national with immigrant parents, wrote a book titled The Hunt for Swedishness,

in which maps national identity through a cross-country motorcycle journey. He

expresses his frustration at getting people to “admit” to feelings of nationalism: “The

interesting thing about talking to blonde and white Swedes is that they always excuse

themselves and say that they don’t feel like Swedes either,” he writes. Often, they respond,

“‘Who really feels Swedish?’” to which Mahmood retorts, “The last thing a fish is

conscious of is water.”40

Swedes jump at the chance for self-deprecation, confessing with near Catholic

fervor their deep-seated social anxieties or affinity for routine. Or, as Sontag puts it,

“There’s no complaint I can make about Sweden that a number of Swedish acquaintances

haven’t volunteered to me themselves.”41 Swedes I met solicited my criticism about

Sweden with almost uncomfortable eagerness. Ehn et al. describe this trend as an

“inverted nationalism,” deeming Sweden a sort of “third world nation of patriotism.” 42

Nationalism is typically viewed as antiquated or excessively aggressive, particularly

among the younger generation.

All the same, I do not think Swedes lack feelings of patriotism; those feelings are

merely expressed in terms that are unfamiliar to our traditional conceptions of

nationalism. A quiet nationalism works unnoticed in Swedish culture. For instance, one

survey found that only 28% of Swedes reported being “proud to be” Swedish, compared

with 80% of Americans. Ehn et al. argue that this statistic shows not that Swedes are less

40 Mahmood, Jakten på svenskheten, 20.

41 Sontag, “A Letter from Sweden,” 24.
42 Billy Ehn, Jonas Frykman and Orvar Löfgren, Försvenskningen av Sverige, (Stockholm: Natur och kultur,

1993), 28.

23
patriotic, but rather that “the word ‘proud’ feels better in American mouths than Swedish

ones.”43 Fatma, who will speak more later, once said similarly that “America has too much

self-loving.” She explained that “Swedes have the same problem, but not admitting it in

that way [sic].” I find that the expressions of national criticism that Swedes so often make

are actually articulations of this quiet, “inverted nationalism”: Swedish national identity

is built upon its own undoing.

The subtle expression of Swedish national pride comes through as a sense of

chosenness, internally and externally validated. Sweden has “a lengthy history of being

seen, and seeing itself, as ‘elect,’” from seventeenth-century scientist Olof Rudbeck’s belief

that Sweden was the location of the biblical Eden to “the moral posture that Sweden has

taken in international affairs during the last fifty years.”44 Chosenness is intimately tied

up with the teleological assumption of the modern (and secular) project, that all cultures

will inevitably follow suit and reach modernity.45 Sontag writes that:

The Swedes take evident pride in Sweden’s uniqueness, its vanguard role on the international
scene…But theirs is a very different kind of pride [than in the US]…Swedes see themselves as
exemplary in a more passive style. They are neither in a position nor disposed by temperament to
export aggressively what they practice…but confidently await the inevitable movements of
history that will lead other nations to imitate them.46

Swedish nationalism shows an insidious quality in concealing itself behind the

purportedly universal project of modernity. It eschews being perceived as aggressive or

negative by universalizing its aspirations: human rights, gender equality, universal

welfare, and child autonomy, among others. In short, nationalism becomes measured in

43 Ehn et al., Försvenskningen av Sverige, 27. They note that the Swedish version of “Proud to Be
American” bumper sticker instead says “Lovely to Be Swedish” (Härligt att va’ svenskt).
44 Stephen A. Mitchell and Alf Tergel, “Chosenness, Nationalism and the Young Church Movement:

Sweden 1880-1920,” Many Are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, eds. William R. Hutchinson
and Hartmut Lehmann, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994): 232.
45 Cf. Asad 2003 and Casanova 2006 on this unrealized assumption of modern secular progressivism.
46 Sontag, “A Letter from Sweden,” 24.

24
terms of social virtue. In this disguise, Swedish values are essentialized and the nation

made a moral paragon—who, then, would challenge the Swedish model to suggest, for

instance, that it offers insufficient space for religious pluralism? Self-criticism actually

works to fuel this cycle; if Sweden is the moral acme of the world, it must constantly strive

to outdo its own impossible standards. So cloaked, it is difficult for immigrants to broaden

the bounds of Swedishness because they must in effect fight against universal positive

aims. Self-criticism by native Swedes is allowed to propel the consummation of Sweden’s

lofty aims. Yet, immigrants are not afforded the same dispensation to judge.

On Muslimness

“I am angry. I’m angry because I’m not Muslim enough. And no matter what I do I’ll
never be Norwegian enough. And I’m not Moroccan enough, and I’m not chill enough, or
pretty enough…”
Sana, Skam Season 4, Episode 847

The first time I met Fatma in 2016, I knew she was a firebrand. Right off the bat,

she told me that she had recently joined a new organization with an all-male board. On

her first day, when asked to introduce herself, she announced, “My name is Fatma, and

one day I am going to replace every one of you with a woman.” A bit personally distant

when we began talking, she quickly opened up and did not close. For nearly two hours,

she monologued on a litany of topics, hardly waiting for a prompt and interrupting herself

frequently to pull up a relevant YouTube video or a manifesto outlining her latest project.

And while she quipped, “Swedes are so good at placing people—they started Linnaean

biology, after all,” she too spoke with acumen. 48

47 Julie Andem, “Det største loserne på skolen,” Skam, Season 4, Episode 8, (NRK, June 9, 2017).
48 Interviews with author May 23, 2016 and June 8, 2017. Pseudonym used.

25
 But one year later when we spoke again, Fatma was markedly more somber. She

explained, “I guess I think I’ve calmed down a lot. It’s not that I’ve changed my

perspective; I still feel the same way.” Fatma had realized that, “The problem with me was

that I wanted to have everything now back then, and I wanted to change the whole

world…The best thing is to work long-term, at a grassroots-level, so it sticks.” The past

year was marked by a terrorist attack in Stockholm, local resonances of global political

tension, and personal trials for Fatma. In the midst of Ramadan, she was ruminating on

her relationship with God and her purpose in life.

It was during our second interview that Fatma recited Sana’s lines above. This

monologue had aired six days prior on the hit Norwegian TV series Skam (Shame), which

has a huge following in Sweden. Sana, a Muslim teenager played by actress Iman Meskini,

is the star of the show’s fourth and final season. As Fatma summarized, Sana is “trying to

be ‘in’ at the same time as she’s trying to have her own identity, at the same time as she’s

searching for God.” During Skam’s fourth season, Sana became famous across Scandinavia

for Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The portrayal of a young Muslim negotiating her

faith with the culture of her peers resonated with many—a friend from the Church of

Sweden even told me that she heard multiple sermons preached about the lessons Sana

has to teach about diversity and tolerance.

Fatma told me she almost cried while watching that episode. “Before that I

thought, I’m… I’m not Swedish enough, I mean I’m not anything enough.” Fatma listed

her identities: female, Muslim, Swedish, Tunisian, a feminist. After hearing Sana’s words,

she resolved to “see it as a positive thing. Instead of thinking the rope I’m holding goes to

two different things, not so sturdy, instead I say, I have so many ropes and that makes me even

stronger.” Fatma contrasted her line of thinking with that of her parents. “My parents

26
think of themselves as Tunisians in Sweden… [Tunisia] is a vacation destination for me.

When I come back to Sweden I just feel (sigh). Oof. Home.” Unlike her parents, “The way

I think is so Swedish. I believe that I have created my own Swedishness, if you can say so,

that isn’t typically Swedish—except, there’s no such thing as typically Swedish anyway.”

Sana’s struggle helped Fatma realize her own triumph in understanding her identity.

“What more could you ask for” from a teen drama? “It gives you new ideas.”

I asked Fatma, as I asked everyone, what she wanted to see in Sweden’s future.

Surprisingly, she seemed flustered for the first time. “That’s a big question… I have no

idea.” She stumbled for a bit, before suddenly leaning forward: “The picture has become

clear,” she declared. She asked me, “Do you know the Gothenburg mosque?” It is her

favorite in Sweden, “because it has Swedish furnishings. It isn’t a sort of cupola-ish—I

mean there are cupolas—but the furnishings themselves inside aren’t so much Arabic

calligraphy.” Nearly shouting, she gushed:

It’s so Swedish! So simple! White walls—it’s open. I just feel, like yes! That is a Swedish mosque.

That’s what I want to see. It feels right now like there are Muslims who—I’m not saying that
they’re not Swedes: they’re Swedes, but they make use of cultural elements from other countries.
But I just want us to find the Swedish cultural element. I want it to be that when you see a Muslim
who is in Sweden you’ll say, “That’s a Swedish Muslim.” And when he [sic] goes abroad, you think
“Ah. There’s a Swedish Muslim.” Do you get it? That’s what I think about. That we create a sort
of… an Islam that is based in Sweden. And then, I think that Muslims can be a self-evident part of
Sweden because we have made our own Swedish Islam.

It is interesting to observe that even as Fatma reminds us that “there’s no such

thing as typically Swedish anyway,” her dream is to typify a Swedish Muslim. While she

pushes against a restrictive Swedishness or a monolithic Islam, Fatma envisions a

national and religious identity by whose characteristics an individual can instantly be

recognized as a member. It is perhaps an inevitable replication: in advocating for a group

whose belonging is evident, she re-reifies a singular breed of Swedish Muslim.

27
 Fatma also emphasizes the use of “the Swedish cultural element” in creating a

Swedish-Muslim identity. Duyvendak et al. dub the modern connection between national

identity and culture the “culturalization of citizenship.” They describe a trend in which

“culture (emotions, feelings, norms and values, and symbols and traditions, including

religion) has come to play a central role in the debate on what it means to be a citizen,

either as an alternative or in addition to political, judicial and social citizenship.” Proving

cultural belonging has become a requisite performance to be recognized as a fellow

citizen—“Especially immigrants are expected to demonstrate feelings of attachment,

belonging, connectedness, and loyalty to their country of residence.”49 I noticed during

my interviews that when I asked the question, “Do you feel Swedish?” almost everyone

responded by talking about their citizenship. “I’m a Swedish citizen in any case!” an imam

who immigrated from Albania rejoined. He did not elaborate on personal feelings of

Swedishness. A Muslim woman born in Sweden replied, “I feel very Swedish, as Swedish

as someone who has a grandfather who’s Swedish. My grandfather lived here and paid

taxes here.” Paying taxes is a curiously common rebuttal to questions of nationality, and

in this case also a claim to history. Both individuals interpreted my question about their

personal, cultural attachments as a question about citizenship.

Another common way of justifying Swedish Muslim identity was to emphasize

Islam’s harmony with Swedish humanitarian values and even environmentalism (a blue-

and-yellow Islam mixed to green!).50 Many Muslims, like Fatma, stress how Islam

reinforces their Swedish identity, and Swedish identity their faith. “There is so much that

49 Jan Willem Duyvendak et al., “Introduction,” The Culturalization of Citizenship: Belonging and
Polarization in a Globalizing World, eds. Duyvendak et al., (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006): 3.
50 This seems banal, but consider the US, where justifications of Muslim belonging are grounded in the

principle of religious liberty, the spirit of diversity, or the compatibility of Islam with Judeo-Christianity.

28
is in common with our human rights; you don’t have to choose one or the other” was a

common refrain. A board member of a mosque in Malmö affirmed that:

There are unbelievably many similarities between Muslim and Swedish values. Everything about
honesty, what should be followed, reasonable thought, that you shouldn’t take advantage of
someone, that you shouldn’t deceive someone. There are many precepts that I take with me to
work. Of course, that’s not obvious—not everyone recognizes that it is Muslim. So there isn’t
really anything that I think hinders me from being a good Muslim in Sweden.

No Muslims I interviewed, even imams, invoked the Qur’an or hadith to justify

their views. I do not think they avoided it because they thought I would not grasp the

theology; rather, it is a result of the fact that religious explanations are not valid in a

secular environment. In Talal Asad’s words, secularism is a “representation of citizenship”

that “transcends particular and differentiating practices of the self that are articulated

through class, gender, and religion.”51 Because secularism is so entangled with Swedish

identity, it is impossible for religious language to contribute to national sentiment. To

bolster a sense of Swedishness with reference to particular identity would be a terminal

error in the system. The anodyne vocabulary of culture is most efficacious, and thus the

preponderance of value language over theological language.

But the need for Swedish Muslims to speak to the affective register of national

identity puts them in a peculiar position. Those who do not obviously fit into white,

secular majority culture must display their patriotism to prove their belonging in Sweden

through the “culturalized” view of citizenship. Yet, in eagerly affirming their national

pride, they break with the “inverted nationalism” that characterizes Swedish identity. A

self-evident Swede has no charge to defend their Swedishness, so their expressions of

national pride are made at will, and usually as critiques. And so Muslims, in defending

their allegiance, have already made themselves un-Swedish.

51 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 5.

29
Interlude: the bus ride through Rosengård between mosque and home

The 33-bus line runs from the eastern transportation hub of Värnhem through the

immigrant-heavy suburb of Rosengård, passing through the industrial stretches and

dense housing complexes of the city’s southeast quarter before bowing out along the rural

hamlets on its way back west. Every Friday, I commuted to the Islamic Center of Malmö,

positioned in a grassy clearing carved out from the brush along an expressway. A sloping

cyan cupola rises starkly from the landscape, and between the arcs of the trees, the

building’s bright orange tile roof becomes visible too. When Jumu’ah prayer and my

interviews were done for the day, I would wind my way a quarter-mile up the knolls to a

bus stop by the Västra Skrävlinge Church, which sits atop a hill at the end of the same

street. From the church’s front door, you can see the mosque’s minarets rising through

the trees. The road sign at the turn-off from the highway points directly at the mosque

and announces, “Västra Skrävlinge Church.” I smirked at the obliviousness of this

outdated piece of metal every time I passed it.

The 25-minute bus ride back home from the mosque showed a cross-section of the

cultural and demographical gradient from the center of the city to its margins. Rosengård,

the area where the mosque is located, is an overwhelmingly immigrant suburb (84% as of

2000) comprised of towering, concrete apartment units built during the Million

Program.52 In the common imaginary, Rosengård is the stereotypical roost of Muslims,

an area which is often accused of being a “sharia no-go zone” by right-wing pundits. I

personally found it pleasant, quiet and calm. On the other side of the bus route is

52 Göran Larsson and Åke Sander, Islam and Muslims in Sweden, (Berlin: Lit Press, 2007), 294–5. The
Million Program (Miljonprogrammet) was a national effort from 1965–1975 to construct one million units
of affordable housing. These enclaves, which often house immigrants, are generalized as “million areas.”

30
Värnhem, located just east of Malmö’s center but hardly its cultural nucleus—when I told

a friend my address, she bluntly remarked, “Oh, that used to be a really dangerous area.

People would go to meet their dealers there. It’s much nicer now, though!” A gentrifying

force has certainly been at work in the past two decades and it can be felt tangibly as you

walk by upscale bars and restaurants springing up alongside long-established immigrant

grocers and hole-in-the wall record shops.

The city bus carries a microcosm of the public sphere on its chassis. Riding back

from the mosque in the afternoons, I watched the negotiation of public space transform

in front of me. At Rosengård Center, people who look to be of immigrant origin pile onto

the bus: South Asian boys with tight fades chatting in Hindi, young hijabi women with

cheetah-print scarves and rhinestone iPhone cases, older Arab women with black shawls

and tawdry circles of blush on their cheeks, and occasionally a mother maneuvering an

unruly stroller in close quarters. The crowds load on tightly, squeezing into every seat

and pressing close to reach support bars and straps. The bus quickly grows warm and

heavy with voices, a rich assemblage of foreign tongues that mirrors a vinyl decal on the

driver’s vestibule welcoming passengers in dozens of languages.

As the sparse landscape of concrete and green coalesces into brick buildings and

storefronts, the crowd inside of the bus begins to thin out.53 The demography of

passengers lightens as the cabin volume rapidly sinks to a dull whisper and the spacing

between people becomes greater and greater. Unlike the passengers from Rosengård, who

sit casually in any open space, native Swedes are exceptionally self-conscious about

respecting personal space on public transportation. In four-seat clusters, it is common to

53 Most transportation in the city center takes place on bicycle or foot. Central bus stops are spaced about
a five minutes’ walk apart, while those on its margins can be as much as twenty minutes apart.

31
see only one seat occupied as multiple people voluntarily stand. A man I met at a dinner

party confessed the moral dilemma he wrestles with when he is sitting next to someone

and an empty seat opens up: is it ruder to stay put when there is an open seat or to abandon

his neighbor too eagerly? This so-called “bus phenomenon” is a frequent conversation

topic with foreigners through which Swedes glean their self-deprecating pleasure. Even

outside the bus, these mannerisms persist. People cluster under the bus stops in

Rosengård to escape the June sun, while travelers at Värnhem form a long line down the

street with ample distance between themselves.54

As the bus route cut across the urban geography, I watched the negotiations of

the public arena transform. The hum of voices and the cozy nearness faded to an orderly

calm. I noted the tighter positioning of people’s legs and stiffness of their torsos, and their

habitus affected mine; in the second half of my journey, I was more keenly aware of the

placement of my backpack or the protrusion of my shoe into the aisle. The passengers in

Rosengård played with the architecture of the bus, hopping up on luggage platforms or

leaning against glass dividers; in contrast, I was once scolded by two elderly Swedish

women because I was standing in the empty stroller area, thereby infringing on the space

reserved for a hypothetical mother. The way people in Rosengård comport themselves

would never pass in the central orbit of the bus line: hopping up, leaning against, pressing

close, they violate the unspoken rules of bus behavior. Even my unconscious adaptation

to their physicality earned me a scolding from the old guard. Even on the bus, those

entering Swedish culture from without grapple with unseen frameworks that seem unable

to accommodate their presence.

54It is a popular trope on the Sweden sub-reddit (/sweddit) and Swedish meme pages on Facebook to post
pictures of people at bus stops standing yards away from one another.

32
Chapter 2: The Public/Private Divide in Swedish Society

You cannot even order a hamburger in Sweden without encountering an

archetypal bureaucratic invasion into daily life: number-taking. When frequenting the

fast-food franchise Max, as a penny-pinching young researcher might do, you order at an

electronic kiosk (prompted by helpful suggestions for pricey add-ons). The machine spits

out a slip with which you wait in line until your number is displayed to pick up your meal.

Even this simple act is governed by a sort of public order. Reminders of order are

omnipresent in Sweden, from a sign on the bike stand by my apartment that passively

commanded, “Park nicely!”, to a gentle scolding I received from Fatma while walking

with her on the street. As we came to a narrower stretch of sidewalk, I straddled the bike

and pedestrian lanes. Though no one was around, she observed drily, “One should be

careful not to walk in the bike lane.” The chastisement was classically passively Swedish.

The appropriate habits for the public setting are well established, and an intricate

choreography—a social habitus of sorts—governs public interactions. More than just

corporeal, it dictates the proper performance of all social activity. Sex is discussed quite

openly in the public sphere, though romance is not. Money, interestingly, is fair game as

well (many Swedes’ incomes are publicly available online). However, as Susan Sontag

notes in her famous diatribe, “Though outstandingly honest in the sphere of work and

public order, [Swedes] are often not candid.” Though they have “less privacy…than in

any other advanced industrial country,” Swedes are markedly shy and emotionally neutral

in social interaction.55 This reticence is not reserved only for strangers. “Swedish families

55 Susan Sontag, “A Letter from Sweden,” 25.

33
are all silent when they eat dinner, except maybe to ask, ‘is there dessert?’” a friend once

told me. “There’s a phrase: ‘let the meal quiet the mouth’” (låt maten tysta mun).

Religion is never discussed publicly. While Muslims I interviewed regularly asked

me about my beliefs, I never got this question from non-Muslim Swedes, even priests and

congregation members in the Church of Sweden. The exclusion of religion from the public

sphere is essential to the experience of Swedish Muslims. The public sphere that Muslims

encounter is a pervasive one, in that so many aspects of daily life fall under the auspices

of the welfare state—education, healthcare, public transit, social services, and so on. The

connection between the public and the welfare state is essential because it means that the

private sphere essentially ends at the threshold of one’s front door. The pervasiveness of

the public sphere is key because, if religion is impermissible in the public sphere, there

remain few arenas of life in which it can exist uncontested.

Swedish Muslims challenge secular nationalism by calling into question this strict

delimitation of the public sphere disbarring religion. Muslims like Fatma who want

“create an Islam based in Sweden” defy one of the central precepts of the public sphere,

that religion cannot be anything more than private. It is a challenge to the individual and

the institution to maintain an identity that reconciles national and religious associations

against a rigid system holding the public nation and private faith in opposition. All the

same, I resist the tendency to suggest that something about Islam makes it more

inherently public than other religions; rather, as I explicate in Chapter 3, Muslims are

perceived as exceedingly public and exceedingly religious only because the Lutheran

history of the public sphere makes Protestant Christianity invisible within a system

purpose-built around it.

34
 This chapter explores how Swedish secular norms demand the quarantine of

religious expression to a minimal and circumscribed private area through the mechanism

of the welfare state. The public/private divide is rarely interrogated in the existing

literature on Sweden, despite it playing a more salient role here than perhaps anywhere

else in the world.56 This chapter rectifies this omission. By considering two women’s

reflections on religion and the public sphere, it simultaneously breaks down the narrative,

promoted by detractors but reinforced even by scholars, 57 that Islam is somehow more of

a public issue than other faiths. The important question is not whether the confinement

of Islam to the private sphere is possible, but rather why it is demanded in the first place.

Being Muslim in Public: Nisa and Rabia58

One Friday in July 2017, I visited Ögårdsskolan, the primary school located at the

Islamic Center of Malmö. In a full afternoon of back-to-back interviews, I spoke to two

women in a row whose unexpected commentaries on the public sphere were only

compounded by their proximity to one another.

The first woman to enter the small classroom where I was stationed was Nisa.

With sun-streaked hair, wide green eyes, and dewy skin, she looked more at home in a

perfume ad than in a classroom teaching grades 4–6. Nisa’s family comes from a Turkish

minority in Macedonia and her parents and paternal grandparents immigrated to Malmö

as migrant workers in the 1970s. While telling me about her childhood, Nisa recounted

56 The only works I can think of that explicitly consider the experiences of Muslims in the public sphere
are Carina Listerborn’s “Geographies of the Veil” and Susanne Olsson’s “Religion in the Public Space,”
though the latter’s title belies little concrete discussion of public space.
57 I think for instance of Jeanette Jouili and Nilüfer Göle whose focus on Islam as performance reinforces

the idea that Islam is more a performance of identity through body and dress, than a personal faith.
58 Interviews with author, July 3, 2017. Islamic Center of Malmö. Pseudonyms used for both subjects.

35
how her parents encouraged their children to assimilate into Swedish life. “Islam was

always present at home. The names were named. The holidays were celebrated,” she said,

but “Turkish was only spoken at home and religion was very private.” She recounted how

her parents and grandparents “said ‘Shh!’ [to the children] all the time. They didn’t want

people to see or hear us, honestly… It wasn’t so important to take up space.” She and her

siblings were taught to be polite and deferent in public and to speak Swedish with one

another outside the home. Interestingly, Nisa told me that she grew up in Rosengård.

Public expressions of her Turkishness would hardly have raised an eyebrow in the central

walking area, populated by a bulk spice market, a Middle Eastern grocer, shops with signs

in Arabic, and innumerable women in headscarves. Her family’s insistence on public

inconspicuousness seems like an active effort to assimilate into a broader idea of public

life than the literal public around them. Nisa in turn internalized these norms, pausing at

one point and reflecting with a sense of novelty, “It might be that I’m a little Swede-ified.”

Perhaps as a result of this upbringing, Nisa said her “faith is very private. It’s my

thing. Religion is something that is between God and me.” Discussing her choice not to

wear a headscarf, she admitted, “The veil makes it so that people have so many prejudices.

So I see it as a hindrance for me… My mom [who wears a scarf] is very brave, but I’m

not there yet.” She defended her choice, noting “My mom didn’t get questions when she

was young. There wasn’t so much curiosity. But now if you have visible religion like my

mom you get questions more often, and that kind of ‘look.’ It’s become tougher.” Even if

her faith remains personal, she sees her Muslim values as reinforcing her Swedishness:

“You don’t need to sacrifice one for the other…There is so much that we have in common

with our human rights,” she said. Nisa sees her private beliefs as direct influences on her

36
public Swedish identity. Yet, the prejudice one is met with in public, “that kind of ‘look,’”

seems to preclude those personal beliefs from fully inhabiting the public sphere.

As Nisa left, a middle-aged woman named Rabia entered hurriedly, informing me

that she only had fifteen minutes before lunch but would answer any questions I could

pose quickly. Rabia was a bit tense but spoke with candor. Like Nisa, she felt that things

were easier in her parents’ time, but while Nisa attributed it to a transformation in society,

Rabia chalked it up it to the fact that her parents’ generation was “more neutral” than

today’s Muslims. “Of course, the more Muslims there are in Malmö, the more they come

under the microscope,” she explained. She explained that Malmö now has more Arabs and

Somalis—she is herself Turkish. Her use of the word “they” contributes to the insinuation

that these ethnic groups are somehow less “neutral” than Turks and distances her

experiences as a Muslim from theirs.

When I asked Rabia if religion should have a public role, she curtly replied, “No.

I don’t think so.” Rabia declared, “This is not a Muslim society and I don’t need to demand

that others make special allowances for me,” strangely echoing condemnations commonly

heard from the detractors of Muslims. I pivoted and asked about her personal religiosity.

“Religion shouldn’t influence my work. It exists within me, and at home. I don’t need to

broadcast (skylta) it,” she concluded. It is of especial note that Rabia separates religion

from her work given that she works as a teacher in a Muslim grade school. In this context,

“work” probably functions more as a proxy for public engagement (the opposite of “at

home”) rather than meaning an actual place of employment.

Nisa and Rabia’s reflections discredit a central tenet of prevailing discourse that

argues that Muslims are unable (or unwilling) to keep their faith out of the public sphere.

37
While secularists often harbor an essentialized notion of Islam as intrinsically more public

than other religions (whether through the political dimension of the Ummah, headwear,

bodily practice, or otherwise) numerous Muslims I interviewed vehemently defended the

ability of Islam to “adjust itself however I want,” in Rabia’s words. Nisa and Rabia

repeatedly stressed that their faith is a private matter and emphasized their agency in

controlling their own identity. Nevertheless, both women benefit from looking quite

Swedish and having no visible markers of their faith.59 Their experiences contrast with

those of Fatma, who has much darker skin and wears a headscarf; she looks much more

like what most Swedes imagine a Muslim looks like. Her faith cannot be locked away as

easily in the private sphere; unlike Rabia, she cannot help but “broadcast” her ethnic and

religious identity. Nisa and Rabia have, to a degree, internalized the secular prescriptions

of Swedishness and benefitted from their ability to be physically unmarked as Muslim.

Identity in The Public Sphere: A Theoretical Perspective

Jürgen Habermas’s famous genealogy of the public sphere, The Transformation of

the Public Sphere, emphasizes the public as the provenance of collective norms and

opinions. He describes the bourgeois public as “the sphere of private people come together

as a public” positioning themselves “against the public authorities themselves, to engage

them in a debate over the general rules governing relations in the basically privatized but

still publicly relevant sphere of commodity exchange and social labor.” 60 The coalescence

of private citizens as a discursive body reinforces the public sphere’s role as a “carrier of

59 Nisa was totally white-passing and conventionally attractive. Rabia’s complexion was slightly darker,
though I think she could pass for white as well.
60 Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of

Bourgeois Society, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989), 27.

38
public opinion” and a “critical authority.” 61 In Habermas, I also read a recognition of the

bisection of identity across the public/private division. The idea of a “private people come

together as a public” implies the dualism necessitated by dividing public and private life.

Individuals relinquish some part of their identity when they enter the public realm; they

must leave some distinguishing particularities behind to become, as Habermas’s ideal

public sphere requires, equal, rational non-marked subjects. This postulate, common to

liberal theories of the public, is increasingly recognized as quixotic idealism in the face of

the diversity of human experience.62

Hannah Arendt recognizes the need for accepting human difference in the public

sphere where Habermas does not. She strikes at the deleterious effects of excluding a

formative part of a person’s identity, such as their faith, from the public sphere:

For us, appearance—something that is being seen and heard by others as well as by
ourselves—constitutes reality. Compared with the reality which comes from being seen and
heard, even the greatest forces of intimate life—the passions of the heart, the thoughts of the
mind, the delights of the senses—lead an uncertain, shadowy kind of existence unless and
until they are transformed, deprivatized and deindividualized, as it were, into a shape to fit
them for public appearance.63

In a society like Sweden where so much is public, privacy does bestow a certain value.

Talal Asad seems to notice this, writing that private reason, “is the entitlement to

difference, the immunity from the force of public reason” which would seem to deform or

coerce private sentiments.64 But at the same time as private experiences are dignified by

their existence outside the collective, they are also precluded from the power of public

recognition by their quarantine. In a pervasive public sphere like Sweden’s, an enormous

61 Habermas, Structural Transformation, 2; 40.

62 For instance, in John Rawls’s idea of overlapping values in the liberal public sphere. Habermas’s views
on religion have evolved greatly since Structural Transformation. See Habermas 2006.
63 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1958), 50.
64 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 8.

39
amount of social value inheres in being recognized as an equal member of public life; as

we will see later, distrust and suspicion germinate in the absence of this recognition.

Overlapping Dichotomies

The secular/religious dichotomy is adamantinely yoked to the bisection of

modern life into non-overlapping public and private hemispheres. This bisection is the

predicate for the secular arrangements of Swedish society. The modernity of this

phenomenon is an important specification. As Talal Asad notes, the overlap between

public/private and secular/religious comes from the shared centrality of these systems to

the project of modernity. “Secularism as a doctrine requires the distinction between

private reason and public principle,” he writes, and it “demands the placing of the

‘religious’ in the former by ‘the secular.’”65 That public spaces should be secular appears

obvious only because of the teleological assumption that secularism and western

modernity go hand-in-hand (in a global perspective, the secular dominance of the public

sphere is hardly self-evident). The bifurcation of public and private is the mechanism

required for the forced relocation of religion.

Understanding the relationship between the public/private divide and the

secular/religious divide, we can begin to explain why such anxiety exists around

maintaining a strict boundary between public and private space. José Casanova’s tripartite

taxonomy of secularization makes clear why the poles of public-secular and private-

religious have developed in Sweden. It digests the process of secularization it into three

“very different, uneven, and unintegrated propositions”:

65 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 8.

40
 (1) Separation of religion from state, economy, science, etc. (“differentiation of secular spheres
from religious institutions and norms”)
(2) Privatization of religion (“marginalization of religion to a privatized sphere”)
(3) Diminishing faith (“decline of religious beliefs and practices”) 66

The second criterion is the most explicitly germane, but all three work in tandem to

relegate religion to a private role: stripped of its fair-weather friends, religion is forced

into early retirement where it languishes as its erstwhile lovers slowly forget about it.

Although Casanova partitions secularization into discrete processes, their reliance

on one another means that they fall as a unit. Talal Asad demonstrates this potential in

his criticism of Casanova.67 Asad postulates that religion has already made a “legitimate

entry” into political discussions in the modern West, thereby violating “the principle of

structural differentiation” and invalidating element (1). If religion is active in politics, he

reasons that “it makes little sense to measure the social significance of religion only in

terms of such indices as church attendance. Hence element (3) of the secularization thesis

falls.” Because religion’s political activity gives it a public role, element (2) is reversed,

and thus “it seems that nothing retrievable remains of the secularization thesis.” 68 The

emergence of an established Swedish Muslim community inverts element (3) and

jeopardizes element (2) if only by the public anxiety it engenders. The faltering of any

element threatens systematic collapse and so every small activity Muslims perform

becomes greatly outsized.

The imperative that all aspects of secularization must be preserved for any one to

remain explains the urgency that secularists feel in guarding an intransigent boundary

around the secular public. Any violation can cause the entire apparatus to buckle. In a

66 Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World, 211.

67 Casanova accepts many of these criticisms in Casanova 2006.
68 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 182–3.

41
way, this rings of Émile Durkheim’s idea of the antagonism between the religious and

profane worlds.69 His description of the categorical relationship between the two lays the

groundwork for understanding the threat of collapse:

By a sort of contradiction, the sacred world is as though inclined by its very nature to spread
into the same profane world that is otherwise excludes. While repelling the profane world,
the sacred world tends at the same time to flow into the profane world whenever that latter
world comes near it. That is why they must be kept at a distance from each other and why, in
some sense, a void must be opened between them.70

In the secular social system, the public/private divide functions as this “void,” a

barrier keeping the religious and the secular on their sides of the aisle. The integrity of

the public/private divide requires strict prescriptions to prevent transgressions of this

boundary. The “extraordinary contagiousness” of the sacred “necessitates such

precautions” as ritual washing and forbiddance to consume totemic animals in Durkheim’s

case.71 It also gives rise to the stringent secular social norms we will continue to observe

in Sweden.

The Welfare State as Symbolic Public

The threat of the public/private system collapsing is more than a logical deduction

of Casanova’s theories—it is concretely manifested in the challenges faced by the welfare

state in the last three decades. The welfare state is central to the Swedish ethos as a

structural and symbolic entity; the development of the public sphere in Sweden took place

through the construction of the state-operated welfare system. Welfare, in all its

69 Though both oppose the ‘religious’ category, ‘profane’ in this context has a broader meaning than
‘secular’ and does not implicate culture and politics in the same way.
70 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: Free Press,

1995), 322.
71 Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, 322.

42
expansiveness, is almost synonymous with the public sphere. Contemporary challenges

to the welfare system, then, also threaten the secular state by proxy of the public sphere.

Welfare history in Sweden is intimately entangled with the rise and forty-year

domination of the Social Democratic Party. The Social Democratic Party coalesced early

in the twentieth century as a representative for laborers, mainly rural agrarian workers

who had suffered the costs of industrialization. At its peak in the 1940s and 1950s, it held

a total parliamentary majority and secured 70% of the working-class vote. 72 The Party’s

central project was instituting universal welfare. The consolidation of welfare services

began with employment policy reforms, family allowances, and rent subsidies in the

1930s: universal pension reform, 1948, and health insurance, 1955, soon followed.

Welfare services quickly subsumed the public sphere; in the 1980s, 60% of the GDP was

spent on welfare and the public sector employed 30% of the workforce. 73

In the provocatively-titled Is the Swede Human? Lars Trägårdh and Henrik

Berggren describe the nucleus of the Swedish welfare model as an “individual-state

alliance,” contrasting it with countries in which the family unit is either the main recipient

of welfare (e.g. Germany) or its primary supplier (e.g. the United States). At times, they

wax hagiographic in describing the ramifications of this relationship:

We have become social atoms, free to go our own way so far as our conscience and respect for
collective norms permits us. The state gives us fundamental security that makes us flexible
and open to change. The individual can educate himself, [sic] change jobs, move, divorce,
bear children, without ending up in a position of reliance on family, friends, or employers,
secure in the certitude that the only one he must subordinate himself to is the state’s
impersonal power.74

72 Ali Hajighasemi, The Transformation of the Swedish Welfare System: Fact or Fiction? (Huddinge:
Södertörns högskola, 2004), 93.
73 Hajighasemi, The Transformation of the Swedish Welfare System, 103; 106.
74 Berggren and Trägårdh, Är svensken människa?, 295–6.

43
Claiming that the Swedish state “in a radical way has liberated individuals from mutual,

interhuman dependency,”75 Trägårdh and Berggren imply a peculiar transubstantiation

of the state for human interaction. They assume a nearly religious tone in discussing

state-individualism, calling it “a response to a fundamental existential problem” and a

“solution to the sociable unsociability” that we know plagues Swedes. 76 The disinclination

from conversation and blunting of emotional expression that are stereotypical of

Swedishness are excused by this substitute. “Swedish individualism,” they write, “does

not automatically lead away from interpersonal relationships, but can contrarily deepen

them from the recognition of a mutual autonomy.”77 But this postulation that state-

individualism represents the solution to social inadequacy hangs a paper moon over a

cardboard sea; the reorganization of sociality such that religious people cannot be

represented in the public sphere suggests that the opposite is true.

In the 1990s, capital market liberalization introduced “individualization of the

pension systems…decentralizations and privatizations of education, healthcare, and

social services [and] deregulations of the labour market.”78 The GDP fell, and national

unemployment quadrupled between 1990 and 1993 (from 2% to 8%). 79 This economic

downturn laid fertile ground for further decentralization and privatization of welfare

services between the 1990s and present. Though the private welfare market is still

comparatively small, sociologist Ali Hajighasemi augurs, “a precedent has nevertheless

been set and more far-reaching changes could threaten the system in future.” 80 As former

75 Berggren and Trägårdh, Är svensken människa?, 10.

76 Berggren and Trägårdh, Är svensken människa?, 387–8.
77 Berggren and Trägårdh, Är svensken människa?, 385.
78 Bengt Larsson et al., introduction to Transformations of the Swedish Welfare State: From Social

Engineering to Governance?, ed. Bengt Larsson et al. (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012): 7–8.
79 Hajighasemi, The Transformation of the Swedish Welfare System, 123. Today, the figure is 4% and has

never reached its pre-1993 level.

80 Hajighasemi, The Transformation of the Swedish Welfare System, 16.

44
state services are annexed by private service providers, the private sphere licks its chops

and gnaws at the public sphere from the edges.

Further, as we will see in Chapter 3, a major task of constructing the welfare state

was transferring services managed by the Church of Sweden into the public body.

Nowadays, the Church of Sweden is a prominent agent of private welfare. While the

Church is “mainly complementary to the publicly-provided welfare services,” it also

occupies “a vanguard and value-guardian role,” as a powerful public voice.81 The historical

conditions that allowed universal welfare to succeed—a small and homogenous

population, hegemonic state control of service distribution, and political domination by a

single party—have weakened significantly. Given the symbolic register of welfare

ideology, the suggestion that the structural pillars supporting the welfare state are

corroding unsettles more than just social habit: as a proxy for the public sphere, the

erosion of the welfare state—in part by a religious entity, no less—signifies a threat to

secularism itself.

The Double Bind of Private Religiosity

From the posh restaurants of Lilla Torget in old town Malmö, to the fountains

and fields of the King’s Park, to the immigrant market on Ramels väg where halal

butchers unload whole cows and lamb carcasses from chiller trucks, the broad expanse of

the public sphere is nevertheless quite shallow. Much of the core of private life is excluded

from public appearance. The occlusion of religion from public life rests on a normative

Per Pettersson, “Majority Churches as Agents of European Welfare: A Sociological Approach,” in

81

Welfare and Religion in 21st Century Europe Vol. 2, eds. Anders Bäckström and Grace Davie (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2011): 37.

45
conception of secular modernity and requires the dutiful maintenance of a chasm between

the public and private spheres. While the structural challenges to the welfare public are

deeply threatening to the secular/religious and public/private divides, the totalizing bent

of the public sphere has other troubling ramifications.

The ‘shadowy existence’ on the margins of the public that Arendt speaks of not

only creates a psychological mire for Muslims; it also insinuates a threat from the outside.

Religious groups must exist strictly in private, but their privacy then becomes grounds

for skepticism and government scrutiny to prevent the foment of dangerous ideas outside

the bounds of the public authority. As Rabia reproached, “We have so many basement

mosques and we don’t know what they’re saying…There are too many branches that

aren’t correct Islam.” She expressed that, “I don’t want to have a ban, but instead control

from the government. It feels right now like uncontrol.” I heard concerns like these from

several other Muslims associated with more public organizations.

The government certainly shares the sentiment that increased oversight is

necessary. Sweden’s Agency for Support to Faith Communities is a government body that

provides financial and administrative support to registered religious groups (seven

Muslim groups are supported).82 A member of Agency expressed a suspicion to me. He

suggested that a convenient secondary purpose of the state agency is to keep tabs the

groups it supports. This salutary surveillance allows authorities to monitor religious

groups and preempt extremism while the groups benefit financially.

In a similar vein, a 2009 report commissioned by Parliament investigated

possibilities for implementing state-led instruction for imams. The report suggested

82“Bidragsberättigade trossamfund,” Myndigheter för stöd till trossamfund, 2017. The Agency publishes
plentiful and wonderful publications detailing religious organizations in Sweden.

46
adapting existing programs for language and cultural learning, arguing that, “Even if the

precepts of universalism and equal treatment make up the dominant strand in Swedish politics

and legislation, there are situations where it appears warranted to give special treatment

(särbehandling), for example from an integration standpoint.” 83 The report, co-written by

prominent Islamologist Göran Larsson, actually levies criticism against Parliament’s

interest in imam instruction, claiming, “In many cases it has been interpreted as a way for

the state to discipline the country’s imams through instruction.”84 The report’s authors

recognize the government’s compelling interest in monitoring the same activities it

excludes from the public sphere in the first place.

Muslims encounter a public sphere intolerant of and impervious to their religious

identity. The introduction of a new cultural group makes the constant workings of the

public/private divide noticeable. It draws the blood to the surface of the skin and shows

the veins. The Swedish state shuns faith from public view at the same time as it demands

transparency, for fear of radicalism brewing behind closed doors; a self-fulfilling prophecy

is forged by the forbiddance of religiosity outside private life. As increasing economic

strain is put upon the edifices of the welfare state, the intensity of the situation increases,

such that even small expressions of public religious identity are amplified into threats to

secularism itself. Yet, the most dire challenge to secularism comes not from Muslims

gathered in prayer, in basements, in the shadows of the public arena: it lies in the fragility

of the public sphere itself, emanating from its very heart, in its very blood.

83 Pia Brundin and Göran Larsson, “Staten och imamerna: Religion, integration, autonomi,” (Statens
Offentliga Utredningar: Stockholm, 2009), SOU:2009:52, 102. My emphasis.
84 Brundin and Larsson, “Staten och imamerna,” 106.

47
Interlude: Per Kristiansson’s apartment, Barkgatan

Per Kristiansson’s home was exactly like his smile suggested it would be, homey

and warm. A priest in the Church of Sweden in Malmö, Per had invited me over for an

interview—no small gesture, given the stereotypical reluctance of Swedes to invite

strangers into their homes.85 He opened the door to his apartment in socked feet and

ushered me in to a walled-in patio with tall glass windows overlooking the sprawling

People’s Park. Oversized lithographs and what appeared to be nineteenth-century

postcards hung on the walls. The chair I sat on was laid over with a shaggy white throw

whose matted hairs I stroked absentmindedly during the course of our conversation. I

was lucky enough to have run into Per a few days prior in the courtyard of the Church of

Sweden’s main office in Malmö as he was locking up his bike, and luckier still that he had

agreed to an interview after our brief encounter. I had read about Per almost nine months

earlier when his name was plastered across national newspapers. He was a celebrity

probably only to me, though he seemed flattered by my eagerness.

In November 2015, when as many as 1,000 refugees were arriving in Sweden

daily, Per led the Sankt Johannes Church in taking in refugees living on the streets after

the state Migration Agency (Migrationsverket) had to turn away people seeking housing.

Per had been responsible for refugee matters within the Church for many years, and since

the beginning of the fall, he had been in frequent contact with the Migration Agency as

it became clear that they were no longer able to support the constant stream of refugees.

85The stereotype of inhospitality was one I never saw confirmed: one friend invited me upstairs for tea
two hours after we met; I was invited to a party by another woman after we met in a department store; a
third had me as a guest in his home having only spoken via email. Generosity toward a precocious
American student was perhaps outsized, but on the whole, I found Swedes to be incredibly welcoming.

48
On the night of November 21, as a dense wet snow slumped over the city, the Agency

informed the refugees in its care that it no longer had space to accommodate everyone

and that it would be evicting sixty young men from its facility. Per soon got the call

informing him that the Church’s help was urgently needed. That first night, those sixty

men slept on the pews of the Sankt Johannes Church along with another twenty refugees

already living on the streets; that number grew to one hundred by the end of the weekend.

Per told me that the large crowd lasted for about one week. Nevertheless, the Church

remained continuously open until Easter, offering a place of refuge at night while

maintaining its normal services during the day.86

As Per recounted the story, reclined in a wicker chair, he emphasized the deep

discomfort many Swedes felt about the government system breaking down. Even he

admitted, in a press interview, that he “couldn’t imagine that we would need to fill the

church because the state couldn’t cope with this. It’s astounding… But this is what the

Church’s mission (uppdrag) is. Jesus identified with the vulnerable.”87 Some Swedes were

actually angry at the thought that the state had failed to fulfill its duty. The reaction was

so stark, Per thought, because of how unprecedented the incident was. 88

Even for those on the state side, the situation was rattling. Per said that

responsibility for the displaced refugees was hot-potatoed around the Migration Agency

office almost daily—probably passed down the ranks as higher-ups shirked responsibility,

he surmised. Every time someone new took over, he had to explain the arrangement all

over again and acclimate them to it. “I think it was actually quite difficult for the Swedish

86 Anders Ekhem, “S:t Johannes kyrka i Malmö öppet hela vintern dygnet runt,” Svenska kyrkan Malmö, Dec.
2, 2015.
87 Isabelle Nordström, “Flyktingar sover i kyrkan,” Aftonbladet, Nov. 24, 2015.
88 I remember seeing stories about refugees sleeping on street corners, in school gymnasiums, and even in

the lobby of a Migration Agency office in Norrköping.

49
authorities to accept that they couldn’t cope with this and were forced to turn to a

religious organization,” he remarked. Still, he criticized the state in the press, saying, “It

is, of course, first and foremost the Migration Agency’s responsibility and they have to

receive state aid in some way. But as long as the need exists, we will try to meet it.” 89

He noted amusedly that his American friends, in contrast to fellow Swedes, saw it

as a “given” (självklarhet) that the Church would offer up its facilities. He polled me as well,

asking whether I found it unusual that they got involved (I did not). Swedes do not see

an obvious social role for churches like Americans do. Per added, with a bit of sly glee in

his eyes, that he has had to explain proper church comportment to fellow Swedes many

times; yet, he did not have to say a word to the Muslims sheltered in the church—they

knew immediately how to behave in a sacred space. The destabilization brought on by the

refugee situation is still felt by the Swedish population. The state is nearly always

completely reliable in fulfilling its duties, and so the Church plays almost no regular social

role. When the state finally had to accept assistance from the Church, “It was a big step,”

Per concluded, nodding his head matter-of-factly.

The backlash from the fall of 2015 was borne out in the summer of 2017. On

August 25, 2017, thirty officers from the Malmö Immigration Police, with squad cars and

police dogs, raided a Church of Sweden summer camp for refugee families and took six

undocumented families into custody for deportation. The Church of Sweden in Malmö

released numerous philippics, accusing the police of using the “church as bait” and

declaring in an official statement written by Per Kristiansson that:

89 Magnus Andersson, “Flyktingarna får vara kvar och sova i kyrkan,” Expressen, Nov. 24, 2015.

50
 The Church of Sweden in Malmö has…as a part of its diaconal work, striven to support [refugee]
families and give them a moment to breathe (en andhämtning) in the great pressure under which
many live. It is with great dismay that the Church of Sweden in Malmö asserts that the police no
longer respect that the Church is a safe place for everyone, which is an old tradition the world
over…The Church is no longer a protected zone.90

The public response to Per’s statement was shocking given the power of human rights

language in Sweden: other priests appeared on TV to defend the Church, but press

coverage was bitingly critical. Editorials particularly lambasted the idea that the Church

was, or should be, “a protected zone.” Numerous papers ran op-eds with the same headline,

“The Church Does Not Stand Above the Law” (Kyrkan står inte över lagen). A front-page

article in the southern newspaper Sydsvenskan railed that, “the fact that religiously-

grounded convictions go before laws made by people—in a democratic system—is a

thought that should belong to history, even if it’s not uncommon in many parts of the

world.”91 For such a thing to happen in Sweden was a sign of colossal backslide. These

articles present a clear ultimatum: in 2017, the Church is one of us, no longer special.

Though the state was forced to rely on the Church to shelter refugees, it was taking its

power back now.

90 Per Kristiansson, “Polisen tog papperslösa vid familjeläger,” Svenska Kyrkan Malmö, Aug. 26, 2017.
91 Mats Skogkär, ”Kyrkan står inte över lagen,” Sydsvenskan, Aug. 28, 2017.

51
Chapter 3: Confronting the Legacy of Lutheranism

Within the past decade, religion’s place in Swedish life has attracted increasing

attention. Politicians and the media particularly have put religion in their crosshairs, both

in singing the praises of religious diversity as well as in more antagonistic strokes, like

an ongoing left-wing campaign to outlaw independent religious schools and suggestions

by the right to ban religious head coverings. This shift from apathy and inattentiveness

toward religion occurs contemporaneously with the increased presence of Muslims on the

national stage. In Chapter 2, I contended that Swedish Muslims have spurred heightened

focus on the sanctity of the public/private divide by showing it to be a fragile and

permeable boundary. The public/private divide maps onto the separation of secular and

religious life and thus its destabilization engenders an increased wariness of the

interpenetration of the secular and religious spheres.

This final chapter considers the extent to which former state Lutheranism is still

active in purportedly secular institutions and how the realization of religion’s persisting

power in Swedish life has triggered puissant, even primal reactions in society. The

presence of Muslims in Sweden reveals the ways in which “secular” society and culture

emerge from a specifically Lutheran context, showing how Sweden reflects its religious

origins in such a way that Muslims cannot achieve an equal place in Swedish life. Coming

to terms with Lutheranism’s legacy and the incomplete project of secularism incites deep

anxiety about religion and, indeed, doubt about the very feasibility of secularism itself.

The nominal disestablishment of the Church of Sweden in 2000 was a divorce

ceremony for a couple who had long been sleeping in separate bedrooms. Although

constitutional secularization only legally came at the turn of the century, functional

52
differentiation of the Church and state occurred in a piecemeal fashion over the entire

length of the twentieth century. Incrementally, social services like healthcare, education,

and family support were transferred from ecclesiastical to state control. These Church-

cum-state functions became the foundation for universal welfare (further inscribing

secularism into welfare ideology). However, the social systems that built up surrounding

state Lutheranism remained in place through this transition, and with them, a privileged

position for the newly independent Lutheran church among other faiths. 92

In numerous ways, the Church of Sweden is still able to wiggle across the

stringent boundaries of the public/private and secular/religious divides. As a result of its

heritage, the Church is permitted to exist in significantly greater proximity to the state

than other religions may. This cultural status is perhaps even more important than the

pragmatic bureaucracy that remains under the auspices of the Church of Sweden—claims

to tradition and symbolic value are used to justify the Church’s transgression of the

imagined boundaries of the secular public. I characterize this aspect of the Swedish public

structure with the term ‘post-Lutheran contingency.’ The phrase contains an inherent

irony: Swedish society has, of course, not fully moved away from its Lutheran moorings,

thus the contingency that persists. I employ the term with the same self-awareness with

which Jürgen Habermas uses the term ‘post-secular.’ “A ‘post-secular’ society must at

some point have been in a ‘secular’ condition,” he writes, and yet “the conflicts flaring up

around us in connection with religious issues inspire doubts as to whether the relevance

92This mirrors a prominent idea in modern feminism that argues that women cannot achieve equality
within a patriarchal system because it was constructed to serve men; instead, the system must be
dismantled entirely and reconstructed to remove the imprint of male privilege. Similarly, the
secularization of Sweden excised explicit theology from the state but maintained its outlying form, like a
cannolo holding its fried shape even after the metal dowel in its center is removed.

53
of religion has actually waned.”93 The term post-Lutheran too embodies the paradox it

seeks to name; it points us toward the contingency and circumstantiality of the current

system, the specter that lurks after established Lutheranism has been exorcised.

This chapter begins by briskly outlining the secularization of the Swedish state,

highlighting the inconsistencies baked into the state structure over nearly two centuries.

It then considers a contemporary case study of end-of-term school ceremonies that

evidences the contention over the Church of Sweden’s social position. This example

illustrates two important facets of the contemporary debate over the Church of Sweden:

first, how the privileged role of the Church is defended on the grounds of tradition, and

second, the sudden role that Muslims play in exposing the paradoxical and liminal

position of religion in post-Lutheran Sweden that has existed this way for decades.

An Inconsistent History of Secularization

As noted above, Sweden became constitutionally secular only in 2000, a shocking

realization for foreigners and even some native Swedes, who view Sweden as a secular

haven since time immemorial. A huge part of Swedish identity is grounded in this sort of

secular nostalgia. By “secular nostalgia,” I mean a teleological and mythological process

that casts modern secularity onto the past and erases the long epoch of Church

involvement in society. The projection of an imagined and homogenous secularity onto

the past, despite its recency, masks both the historical process of secularization—which

disappears behind the veil of timelessness—and the persisting influence of the Church—

which seems incommensurable with the secular modernity that Sweden assumes itself to

93 Jürgen Habermas, Europe: The Faltering Project (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009), 59.

54
exemplify. To make the remaining vestiges of the Church visible, then, we have to restore

their historical link and disperse the halcyon haze of nostalgia that occludes them.

Lutheran Christianity was the state religion of Sweden from the Uppsala Synod

(Uppsala kyrkomöte) of 1593 until December 31, 1999. From 1593 to 1873, the punishment

for defecting from the faith was ejection from the country: to be Swedish was to be

Lutheran.94 Until the mid-twentieth century, the Church arm of the government ran

public schooling and was heavily involved in healthcare. The so-called “dissenter laws”

(dissenterlagar) of 1860 and 1873 granted the right to abscond from the Church, but only

to another legally-recognized congregation.95 These laws represented the first erosion of

the established Church, though as noted in the introduction, Church membership

remained well over 90% into the twentieth century. 96

Political developments in the mid-twentieth century accelerated the process of

secularization. From 1932 until 1976, the Social Democratic Party controlled the Swedish

Parliament in an overwhelming majority. Expropriating social services from the Church

was a central facet of the Social Democratic campaign to institute public welfare. Their

antagonism toward the Church is exemplified in a so-called “anticlerical ‘Catechism’” that

was featured in party propaganda:

What is a clergyman? He is the highest paid civil servant in a community. He preaches self-
denial. And how man shall work [sic] six days in the week and rest on the seventh? He himself
rests six days in the week and speaks deliberate untruths on the seventh. A hypocrite dressed
in a masquerade costume!97

94 Richard F. Tomasson, “How Sweden Became So Secular.” Scandinavian Studies, Vol. 74, No.1 (Spring
2002), (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002): 76.
95 Wanda Alberts, Integrative Religious Education in Europe: A Study-of-Religions Approach, (Berlin: Walter

de Gruyter, 2007), 213.

96 The 1860 law is titled “Ordinance Concerning Alien Confessants and Their Religious Practices.” The

Lutheran norm is still obvious in its diction.

97 Herbert Tingsten, The Swedish Social Democrats: Their Ideological Development, trans. Greta Frankel and

Patricia Howard-Rosen, (Totowa, NJ: Bedminster, 1973), 592.

55
At the same time, the Church’s role in healthcare and education increasingly imbued it

with more “secular” predilections; in the early 1800s, for instance, bishops were

conventionally chosen from among the country’s most cosmopolitan and erudite, not its

most theologically-esteemed.98 The Church had equally compelling reasons to distance

itself from the antagonistic Social Democratic state.

In 1951, a constitutional amendment granted universal freedom for every Swedish

citizen to “freely practice his [sic] religion, so long as he does not thereby disturb societal

peace or bring about public disturbance.”99 Until that date, Lutheran confession was

required of public school teachers and parliament members. 100 The adoption of religious

freedom catalyzed the first serious discussion of disestablishment in 1958. 101 Such debates

occurred cyclically in Parliament and the Church Council throughout the second half of

the twentieth century. The parliamentary debate resulting in constitutional

secularization came in 1995, when “changed relations” between the Church and the state

were resolved to take place on January 1, 2000.

The remnants of the old system remain imbedded throughout Swedish life, left

behind in this haphazard uprooting of Sweden’s religious origins. Some are obvious: the

monarch of Sweden is still constitutionally bound to profess Lutheranism; candidates in

Church elections run within national political parties; and refugee care, as we saw, is also

still contingent on Church engagement. Despite phenomenally low church attendance

rates—the European Values Study found in 2008 that only 8% of Swedes attend church

98 Tomasson, “How Sweden Became So Secular,” 77.

99 Sveriges Riksdag, SFS 1951:680. Note the association of religious practice with disturbance of public order.
100 Larsson and Sander, Islam and Muslims in Sweden, 50.
101 Sara Gunnervik, “Kyrka-stat debatt i hundra år: en analys av hur maktdebatten återspeglades i

offentligt tryck,” (Law dissertation, Lund University, 2002), 65.

56
once a month or more102—the Church of Sweden boasts 6.1 million members, 62% of the

population.103 In spite of dulled faith and infrequent visits, Swedes retain a huge degree

of ceremonial affiliation with the Church: in 2016, 44% of Swedes were baptized in the

Church, 27% confirmed in it, 34% married in it, and 75% buried through it. 104

Vestiges of State Lutheranism in Post-Lutheran Sweden

The contents of the parliamentary session that resulted in disestablishment

indicates that the Church of Sweden’s persisting role was planned even at the secular

state’s inception. Previous discussions established that the Church of Sweden would

retain certain practical connections to the state, mainly economic support and a right to

collect church and burial taxes. The privileged symbolic role of the Church, however, was

explicitly delineated in the December 1995 parliamentary session. A debate between

Birgit Friggebo of the People’s Party and Nils Fredrik Aurelius of the Moderates

portended the symbolic consequences of this arrangement. Friggebo noted, not

captiously, but demonstratively:

Nowhere—as far as I can see—does it say that the state church or the state church structure
will be done away with. It doesn’t say anything about separation or dissolved ties. Instead the
word choice is ‘changed relations’ or ‘changing of the relations’ between the state and the
Church of Sweden. It talks about an increased equality between other faith communities, not
equality. We’re talking about a balancing point between the Church of Sweden’s distinct
position and the precept of religious freedom.105

Yet, when Aurelius defended the Church’s special treatment on the grounds of historical

significance, Friggebo accused him of using practical excuses to justify a symbolic

102 European Values Study 2008 (EVS 2008). GESIS Data Archive, Cologne. Liebniz Institute for the Social
Sciences.
103 “Svenska kyrkan i siffror,” Svenska kyrkan, 2016.
104 “Döpta, konfirmerade, vigda och begravda enligt Svenska kyrkans ordning år 1970–2016,” Svenska

Kyrkan, 2016.
105 Riksdagens snabbprotokoll 1995/96:34: Fredagen den 8 december. Transcript.

57
argument. Friggebo fretted over the possible extrapolations of engineered separate

treatment, warning that they “provid[e] an argument for people who want to symbolize

this distinct law with a need for overarching special treatment of the Church of Sweden.”

Friggebo and Aurelius’s tête-à-tête was followed by a protracted debate over fishing

rights in private waters.

The maintenance of preferred status was a compelling interest for the Church of

Sweden as well. Clerical officials had long balanced their disinclination toward sacrificing

“the status of a public body [and] the right to taxation” 106 with the equally fearsome

prospect of a Church controlled by state interests. Church budgets were still managed in

part by municipal authorities for most of the 1900s. The decision to open priesthood to

women in 1960 came after a great deal of pressure from the state and hesitancy from the

Church. The entanglement of Church and state was uncomfortable for lawmakers and

clerics alike. Birgit Friggebo expressed discomfort with having “been forced to participate

in a number of decisions which I have felt the Church should have decided upon,” in her

parliamentary capacity, such as “prescribing which prayers should be prayed” and

“appointing spiritual leaders in the Church.”107 Measured disestablishment would promise

mutual benefit. Each party gained the latitude to focus on their individual pursuits while

maintaining the boon of economic association.

Numerous people I met recalled that a popular description of the arrangement was

that the Church and state were “divorced but still living together.” A front-page article

in Dagens Nyheter deemed the friendly exes, “split [but] economically cohabitating.” 108

106 “Ledare: Skilsmässa, men ingen separation. Svenska kyrkan och staten skils äntligen men förblir
ekonomiskt samboende,” Dagens Nyheter, Aug. 29, 1995.
107 Riksdagens snabbprotokoll 1995/96:34.
108 “Ledare: Skilsmässa, men ingen separation”.

58
Writing in a “fact sheet” about the newly disestablished Church, the state announced,

“The decision [to disestablish] means that the Church of Sweden has left the public sector

and is thus more on par with other religious communities.”109 Friggebo’s concerns had

materialized: the state had formalized separate treatment. Despite the systemic vestiges

of state Lutheranism, it is this symbolic position that the Church occupies that proves

most consequential. Unlike the lingering functional presence of the Church of Sweden,

which resulted accidentally from capricious spurts of secularization, the symbolic

privileging of the Church was established intentionally during the process of

disestablishment. The Church of Sweden was to be the favored church among many—a

Jacobian Joseph among its brothers, primus inter pares.

“Everyone is Welcome at the End-of-Term Ceremonies—Except God”

The imbalanced relationship between the Church and the state becomes tangible

when looking at a contemporary debate going on in Sweden. During the past decade,

regular spats have cropped up surrounding the tradition of holding secondary school end-

of-term ceremonies (skolavslutningen, literally “the end of school”) in the Church of

Sweden. The customary structure for these ceremonies, held before Christmas and

summer break, includes optimistic speeches from principals and priest and students

singing the psalm “Den Blomstertid Nu Kommer” (The Time of Flowers Now Arrives).

This perennial issue dominates the spring news cycle each year, with op-eds

sprouting up like weeds as local incidents percolate up to the national news: in 2012 alone,

every major newspaper ran at least one editorial and there was even a televised debate

“Changed Relations Between the State and the Church of Sweden: Fact Sheet,” Ministry of Culture, Feb.
109

2000. My emphasis.

59
between a priest, humanist, atheist, and Muslim on the subject. There are a handful of

notorious conflicts: in 2015, a principal in Skara County decided to relocate their

celebration from the Skara Cathedral to the public park after a fight broke out between

parents.110 In 2016, parents in Herrljunga County arranged a private celebration in the

Church after the school planned theirs elsewhere. And in 2010, the Sotenäs County school

board overrode the principal’s decision to relocate the ceremony and passed a resolution

mandating that all ceremonies must be held in the Church for the next five years. 111

Press coverage of these incidents tends to defend the tradition from a secular-

liberal perspective. Columnists assert, with little variation, that ceremonies in the Church

are acceptable because they do not contain any religious content. An opinion piece in

Aftonbladet captures the notion quite succinctly: “Everyone is Welcome at the End of the

Term Ceremony—Except God.”112 The state School Agency (Skolverket) defends this

rationale; in fact, it makes it policy. In a 2012 document titled “End-of-term Ceremonies

in the Church,” it lays forth a number of guidelines for schools. It affirms that celebrations

are allowed in the Church so long as “the emphasis lies on traditions, ceremony, and

shared togetherness [and not] prayer, blessing, or confession of faith.” Despite the

restriction on religious content, the School Agency specifically notes, that “it is acceptable

to sing the psalm ‘Den Blomstertid Nu Kommer’ [which] in this context is rather an

expression of tradition than religion.”113 This explanatory document was published after

numerous schools interpreted previous policy as making Church ceremonies illegal. The

Lord is effectively evicted from his House two days a year.

110 Linda Asmar, “Skolavslutning i kyrkan eller inte,” SVT Nyheter, June 5, 2015.
111 Människor och Tro, “Skolavslutning i kyrkan,” Sveriges Radio, June 11, 2010.
112 Matilda Andersson, “Alla får komma på avslutningen—utom Gud,” Aftonbladet, May 2, 2016.
113 “Skolavslutningar i kyrkan,” Skolverket, May 16, 2012.

60
 People who oppose ceremonies held in the Church find themselves in a convoluted

position. hose from other faiths who object to the privileging of Lutheranism must justify

their religious discomfort in secular terms to be taken seriously in the public sphere. On

the other hand, hardline secularists are ironically tasked with convincing more moderate

secularists that the church is an overly and overtly religious venue, something a secularist

is usually already convinced of. Officials within the Church of Sweden also find themselves

in the ludicrous position of defending the religious nature of the Church. The bishop of

Uppsala actually advocated for the end to Church ceremonies saying, “If everyone must

feel welcome, then the religious elements must be taken out, which would do violence

against the Church.”114 These ceremonies seem to undo the achievements of

secularization, which restored the Church’s ability to function in a fully religious manner.

Liberal proponents assert the tradition as a secular custom, or more nearly, a

desacralized event, one cleansed of its religious content. Remarkably, far-right politicians

rely on the same argument. Jimmie Åkesson, the controversial leader of the Sweden

Democrats Party stated in an interview that “It is utterly frivolous [to consider a ban on

these ceremonies]. It has to do, of course, for pretty much everyone, with maintaining

tradition in life” and not anything religious. He portended, “This is a sign that we are

ready to sacrifice our basic values that we experience as Swedish.”115 The synchronicity

of these arguments is fascinating; it is a rare moment indeed that liberal journalists,

education policymakers, and conservative nationalists agree on anything.

Their assertions mirror similar justifications for the Church of Sweden’s role in

the public sphere—that the Church is really a secular creature, something having more

“Skolavslutning i kyrkan stark tradition,” Dagen, May 17, 2009.

114

Johan Delby and Magnus Wrede, “Jimmie Åkesson: Även svenskar behöver assimileras,” Dagens
115

Samhälle, Feb. 20, 2013.

61
to do with tradition than with God. Defenders of church ceremonies attempt, in essence,

to secularize the church building (a true feat!) and to transform a psalm which praises “the

kingdom of God’s goodness” and “thou, sweet Jesus” into an insipid traditional ditty. 116

Any remnants of the religious past, in which the Church directed all aspects of education,

disappear. Voices throughout the public sphere make the jarring claim that the Church

should not be perceived as religious, despite simultaneous measures being taken to keep religious

elements separate from public life. Only this pernicious and cheeky word, “tradition,” which

obfuscates its import under clichés and platitudes, can account for this subversion.

Tradition and its Euphemisms

Eric Hobsbawm’s notion of the “invention of tradition” is made no less

fundamental by its notoriety in nationalism studies. He writes:

[Invented traditions] are responses to novel situations which take the form of reference to old
situations, or which establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition. It is the contrast
between the constant change and innovation of the modern world and the attempt to structure at
least some parts of social life within it as unchanging and invariant, that makes the 'invention of
tradition' so interesting for historians of the past two centuries. 117

The temporal relocation of modern tradition in the distant past makes a historical claim

to legitimacy, operating in the same teleological way that secular nostalgia does. And the

invention of tradition in fact is connected to secularism: Hobsbawm sees the rise of

invented national traditions in the nineteenth century as filling “the space left by the

secular decline of both old tradition and custom.”118 Invented tradition as a repository for

modern values is a crucial concept because it accounts for the how national values are

expressed and enforced through public habits.

116 That the song’s second verse is rarely sung may be as much an issue of time as a way to excise these lyrics.
117 Hobsbawm, Introduction to The Invention of Tradition, 2.
118 Hobsbawm, Introduction to The Invention of Tradition, 11.

62
 The case study of school ceremonies presents a lucid glimpse into the struggle

with secular identity by exemplifying how the notion of tradition jams the mechanics of

the secular/religious divide. The Sotenäs school board president, for instance, defended

church ceremonies as “old traditions from many, many years back in the Church,” and yet

later admitted that her school had only observed the tradition for last thirty years. 119 An

innovation of the 1980s is romanticized as a storied secular practice and thus immediately

imbued with an air of tradition. Tradition cloaks its novelty while it also tuning its

practice to a universal register, one speaking to societal values across time.

The placement of the Church of Sweden on a pedestal unshared by its peers is

based on a basically euphemized claim to tradition in the form of “cultural value.” The

Church’s contribution to Sweden’s cultural heritage is significant, but it gets overblown

because it must act as a buttress for an increasingly fragile secular system. In the prolixly-

titled “Agreement Between the State and the Church of Sweden on Issues that Surround

the Cultural-Historical Values Within the Church of Sweden,” the state defends

maintained relations with the Church, saying that “Through the Church’s historical position,

church cultural heritage has come both to reflect and to constitute an essential part of our

history. It is of great importance that this common cultural heritage is protected for future

generations.”120 The Church, this document argues, is not just a historical monument, but

an equally vital faction in perpetuating Swedish culture in the future.

The Church of Sweden not only preserves cultural heritage, but also bolsters

Swedish values of human rights and equality. In 1908, Court Chaplain Waldemar Rubin

119Människor och tro, “Politiker i Sotenäs: Skolavslutningen ska firas i kyrkan,” Sveriges Radio, Feb. 25, 2011.
120Marita Ulvskog and KG Hammar, “Överenskommelse mellan staten och Svenska kyrkan i frågor som
rör de kulturhistoriska värdena inom Svenska Kyrkan (2000),” Ministry of Culture, March 2, 2000, 1. My
emphasis. The concrete manifestation of this agreement was the payment of two billion Swedish crowns
(300 million USD) between 2002 and 2009 toward the preservation of church buildings.

63
declared that “with the State churches fall also our states,” so vital was the Church in

inculcating social virtue.121 While such a proclamation would never be heard today, the

Church continues to promote Swedish humanitarian mores. I have attended almost a

dozen services in the Church of Sweden, and the focus on humanitarian values of

compassion, respect for diversity, and aid for the needy is overwhelming. The secular

efficacy of Church values makes it a convenient ally of the state.

All of the convolutions of the state-church relationship point back to the centrality

of tradition in dictating what is acceptable in the public sphere. The vestiges of the state

Church are made largely invisible because they blend seamlessly with the system they

were developed in historical conjunction with. And, when they are noticed or pointed out,

they are permitted to remain because they constitute and permanentize Swedish national

identity: they are Swedish tradition. It is no wonder that attempts from Muslim groups

to gain equal footing—to establish a political party, be involved in refugee care, or run

independent schools—are met with less acceptance than equivalent endeavors by the

Church of Sweden. They are made disruptive because they break with the established

system of preference, like step-siblings jockeying for a mother’s love already given away.

Interrogating the Future of Post-Lutheran Sweden

An obvious question about end-of-term ceremonies has been intentionally elided

until now: why has this topic become so prominent recently? The tradition is at most fifty

years old or so, but public interest has bubbled up only in the past decade. In polls, support

for the tradition is high (78% as of 2016), and while the media make ample use of

121 Kyrkomötets protokoll 1908, 39. Quoted in in Gunnervik, “Kyrka-statt debatt i hundra år,” 26.

64
flashpoint conflicts, these incidents are rather uncommon in actuality. 122 There is a

general assumption that the increase in Muslim students is pressuring schools to leave

the church. Jimmie Åkesson distills this idea neatly, fulminating that “Swedish schools

are going to institute new holidays to celebrate the end of Ramadan at the same time as

Church end-of-term ceremonies are forbidden at more and more schools.” 123

But in actuality, Muslim demands rarely underlie the issue. In response to an

interviewer’s statement that many people believe “our immigrants, and especially

Muslims, are the ones who oppose church celebrations,” the school board president in

Sotenäs County countered, “No, we have had very few…we have had more concerns from

those who have chosen to turn away from the Church, to leave the Church of Sweden.”124

Elisabeth Gerle, a theologian at Lund University, accuses the far-right particularly of

using Muslims “as a pawn (slagträ) in the debate, [while] the strongest voices one hears

are aggressive atheists.”125 In Skara County, though it was in fact students from a

Pentecostal independent church that motivated the change in locale.

The issue is plainly not Muslims, but the revelation they bring. By running up

against the imbalanced system, Muslims reveal what was hidden to Swedes before, just

as the topography of furniture in an unlit room becomes clear only as you encounter it

with shins and elbows. Through their complication of secular Swedish identity, one of

Swedish Muslims’ greatest powers has been to acutely reflect the idiosyncrasies and fault

lines in the Swedish relationship to religion. It should be unsurprising that the state’s

connection to the Church is coming under greater scrutiny in response to increased

122 Viktor Aldrin, ”Svenska folket om religion och tradition i skolan,” SOM-insitutet (Göteborgs
universitet), June 8, 2017.
123 Jimmie Åkesson, “Åkesson: Muslimerna är vårt största utländska hot,” Aftonbladet, Oct. 19, 2009.
124 Människor och tro, “Politiker i Sotenäs.”
125 Människor och tro, “Skolavslutning i kyrkan.”

65
religious diversity—the first parliamentary discussion of secularization in 1908, though

a stillborn one, began at the same time as independent churches began to increase in size

and power.126 Nor should the defensive posture taken by proponents of school ceremonies

in the Church be unexpected; as Hobsbawm alerts us, the cycle of repetition and

historicizing of invented tradition intensifies as traditions become more embattled.

The post-Lutheran contingency in Sweden is becoming increasingly clear as it

becomes ever more fragile. Digging into pragmatic issues like school celebrations reveals

a substratum of theoretical tension: the imbrication of the public and private spheres

despite their antagonism, the lingering flame between a Church and state divorced two

decades ago, and the peculiarly efficacious secular function of Church tradition. Sweden’s

Lutheran legacy seems deeply at odds with the basic objective of secularism.

Disestablishment intended to remove religion from the public sphere, but it

concomitantly made the church (and by extension, the mosque or synagogue) an

inexorably religious venue with no secular, public elements. The intransigent dichotomy

of secular/religious relies on categorical absolutism, and so any manipulation of this

boundary seems both to permit the Church to reemerge in public life and simultaneously

to allow the public sphere to inch progressively back into the Church. Thus, the

realization of small, banal interactions between Church and state calls forth the threat of

the system dissolving entirely. The full measure of the Swedish Muslim’s revelatory

power becomes clear: their presence triggers a sudden, panicked self-consciousness whose

subject is not Islam, but Swedish identity itself.

126 Gunnervik, “Kyrka-stat debatt i hundra år,” 5.

66
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Interlude: the Wakf Mosque and Culture Center, Danska vägen

It was 11PM and it was pouring. Clinging to a feeble orange umbrella, I sped

along an unlit industrial stretch, clutching in my other hand a research journal, some

consent forms, and my iPhone, which guided me through the darkness to an unfamiliar

address. I was on my way to meet Salim, a prominent figure at a new Sunni mosque and

cultural center, Wakf, on the edge of town. I had interviewed Salim a year earlier and he

generously agreed to talk again but said, “It’s hard to organize meetings during the day

during Ramadan, but you can come at 11:30PM” when the fast is broken after the late

Swedish sunset. Pitch-black and nearly subaqueous, the journey was hardly pleasant for

a solo traveler—I walked briskly and jumped every time someone went whipping by on

a bike. At last, Google Maps delivered me to an abandoned lot. In a moment of drama, I

wheeled around, prepared to find a hidden assailant ready to abduct me, but instead saw

a line of cars down the street. Content with this portent, I followed where they pointed.

A gravel path took me through a construction area to a big white building. I

stepped inside and, not seeing Salim anywhere, lingered in the foyer and tried to get my

hair de-volumized. A boy with huge brown eyes, no more than five, walked up to me and

asked in Swedish, “Are you going in for the prayer?” I told him that I was not.

Admonishingly, he reminded me, “Prayer is good, though, you know!” “Yes, it’s very

good!” I assured him. Satisfied with this, he wandered away. I took stock of my

environment: the foyer was laid with white marble floors swept in brown and yellow hues,

with clean white trim on the doors and a blue carpet leading into the ablution room. On

one wall was a flat screen TV showing a four-part live security feed. My new friend saw

me looking and said, “You can see the prayer room! There are lots of cameras here!"

67
 At last the prayer ended and men began to stream into the foyer. Salim emerged

from the prayer hall wearing a grey t-shirt and sweatpants and a black Dave Chappelle-

style hat. He waddled over, as gruffly warm as the first time we met, and introduced me

to a man named Jamil, a member of the board. Standing no more than 5’6”, he wore a

sharp gingham shirt, dark jeans, and nice brown dress shoes which he slipped back on as

we greeted each other. With his short stature and poise, he could have been a movie star.

They led me up to the second floor, which was still under construction—the entry was a

plywood door with a piece of printer paper labeled “2” taped to it. We settled in a furnished

meeting room. On the table, I spotted the Swedish grammar book I had used in class the

previous semester. Salim immediately brought in coffee and a plate of dates to break the

fast. Trying to be a good guest, I took a cup of coffee even though it was nearing midnight.

Salim plucked up a date and offered the plate to me. I watched him extract the sticky pit

between two fingers and drop it into a plastic cup, imitating him as carefully as I could.

When I spoke with Salim a year earlier, he was working at the Salsabil Culture

Center, a temporary prayer location while Wakf was under construction. After seven

years, the first building in the complex finally opened in April 2017. The construction

was funded by community members and some outside donors. In addition to a sizeable

donation from an anonymous benefactor in Kuwait, 30 million crowns (3.6 million USD)

were given by the state of Qatar, accounting for one-fourth of the total budget. The Qatari

money went toward the ornate prayer hall on the building’s first floor. In April, Wakf

held an induction ceremony for the prayer hall at which the Swedish press and a

representative from the Qatari government were present.

For a while, we discussed the vision behind this new organization and Salim and

Jamil’s roles in it. But quickly, the conversation turned to the press coverage of the new

68
mosque. The southern Swedish newspaper, Sydsvenskan, covered the induction ceremony

and interviewed members of Wakf. They published an article titled, “Money from Qatar,

Souls to Salafism,” which as the title suggests was blatantly accusatory. The author

begins by tallying Qatar’s affronts to human rights (Qatar is Sweden’s Middle East

anathema of choice). He then intimates, “The mosque leadership claims that there aren’t

any demands from Qatar in return…It might be that way. As long as Wakf, the

organization behind the mosque building, in all aspects shares the literal interpretation

of Islam that prevails in Qatar.” He concludes by accusing Wakf of “spread[ing] a

fundamentalist interpretation of Islam” whose teachings “depart radically from the values

of majority society.”127 This article sparked a wave of coverage denouncing the mosque

and targeting a politician named Frida Trollmyr, of the Social Democrats, for giving a

speech at the induction ceremony.

First, Salim wanted to make one thing clear: Qatar’s donation stipulated only two

things. First, that they would be invited to the induction ceremony, and second, that a

plaque would be printed commemorating their contribution. “Nothing else! They haven’t

sat down with the imam and said, ‘you should spread this, or this, or this type of faith, and

you should cite this or this scripture.’ They haven’t done that!”

Salim and Jamil expressed their dismay at how the press handled the situation.

“No one has gone out and written one good thing, right? I mean, give this Wakf situation

a chance! They’re showing what they have as their baggage.” One article called Wakf “a

megaphone for Qatar,” a claim which Salim thought was “almost defamation.” He feared

that “Swedes read this and think, ‘Are they loyal to this state?” Muslims, on the other

127 “Ledare: Pengar från Qatar, själar till salafismen,” Sydsvenskan, May 22, 2017.

69
hand, read it and “become critical of the media. They feel like they can’t trust it.”

Repeatedly, Salim and Jamil called the Sydsvenskan article a “smear,” but Jamil also framed

it more as sloppy reporting, conceding that the reporter was “super stressed” and said he

“wanted to publish it before [news outlet] SVT had time to, so that it would be exclusive.”

I asked the two how they responded to the claims levied against them. Jamil

insisted that the answer was not to avoid the press: “We haven’t said ‘no’ to a single

journalist, but instead we want more journalists to get answers to their questions.” Salim

was more stalwart. “We will not let ourselves be disturbed by these baseless criticisms

and smears. It’s just a smear, nothing else, right? And we know what direction it’s coming

from.” By this, he meant the far-right. Jamil repeated this suspicion later, saying that in

addition to their anti-Islamic agenda, “people on the right-wing want to mudsling the

left,” pinning responsibility for the mosque’s approval on them to “win political points.”

Salim was adamant that Wakf poses no threat to Swedish society. “It’s in our

charter: Wakf is a Swedish Muslim institute. It’s there clearly for everyone. It is a Swedish

institute that practices Swedish laws and rules, and the whole purpose with that is that

we will contribute to integration. We reach our hands out to everyone that wants to work

with us.” And, as if that was not sufficient, he added, “By the way, we haven’t burdened

society at all. We haven’t taken a single cent from Sweden.” Jamil confirmed, “It’s actually

the opposite. With this building, we’ve paid around 20 million crowns (2.45 million USD)

in taxes and work fees.”

When I walked by Wakf a few days late, I noticed another way that they were

responding to the situation that I had missed in the dark: a tall fence lined with barbed wire.

70
Conclusion: What Lies Ahead

The future of the Swedish Muslim community is inextricably connected to the

meteoric rise of the far-right in Sweden, which is totally reshaping the discourse around

national identity and belonging. When Sydsvenskan published their inflammatory article

about Wakf, Samir and Jamil attributed its bias to right-wing political maneuvering. Yet,

Sydsvenskan is, in a broad view, relatively centrist in its political inclinations. The day after

our interview, I started scouring really far-right news sites, tatty personal blogs, and the

true bowels of social discourse: internet forums. I found dozens of articles, all using the

same rhetorical tropes and plastered with photos of huge assemblies of Muslims in prayer

(which a cursory Google search revealed to all be taken in the Middle East).

The far-right news site Samtiden’s headline read, “Mega-Mosque Inaugurated in

Obscurity in Malmö.” They also ran an almost laughable article called “Mega-Mosque

Neighbor with Christian Macedonian Congregation—‘Could be a Problem’” in which a

member of the county zoning board from the Sweden Democrats Party denounces his

political opponents on the board but does not pen a single sentence addressing interfaith

issues.128 An article in Fria Tider uses a typical structure—enumerating Qatar’s atrocities

and accusing Sweden of endorsing them—but with piquant rhetorical development. It

begins by calling Wakf a “big mosque.” Halfway through, it has engorged to a “gigantic

mosque.” And by the end of their jeremiad, they have worked themselves into a tizzy over

“the construction of this extreme mosque.”129 Multiple personal blogs target the politicians

who approved the building, one even publishing private emails with Frida Trollmyr. An

128 Anna Ernius, “Megamoskén Granne Med Kristen Makedonisk Församling—“Kan Bli Problem,”
Samtiden, May 12, 2017.
129 “Qatar anklagas för terrorism—men bygger stormoské i Malmö,” Fria Tider, June 5, 2017. My emphasis.

71
open letter addressed to Liberal zoning board member Olle Schmidt rages that, “starting

to protest a mosque building at the eleventh hour when it concerns the country’s total

collapse rings false…You and your political supporters have blood on your hands

considering how many Swedes have been murdered, assaulted, raped, robbed, and

harassed.”130 The post has a 5-star rating with 47 votes.

I also read a post on Situation Malmö called, “Hello There, Secret Mosque” which

was written by an Iranian refugee turned advocate for the Sweden Democrats. He writes

that, “When Scandinavia’s biggest mosque pops up as your neighbor, you expect a few

lines in the newspapers. That’s how it works in normal countries with normal media and

normal journalists.” This “secret” mosque was of course under construction for seven

years and quite uninteresting to the press until it was politicized by Sydsvenskan. The

author spins this fact to discredit the media, accusing them “through their obfuscation” of

sowing “suspicion against [Wakf] that isn’t going to dissipate all at once.” 131 This author,

in a sense, expresses similar sentiments about the media as Samir and Jamil.

But why should it matter that a handful of extremist blogs bemoan in canon the

construction of one mosque in one city? First, because these websites feed back into the

news cycle; major publications like Svenska Dagbladet, Expressen, and Metro reported on

Wakf only after the far-right blogosphere had its way. So these truculent blogs and

ludicrous headlines are influential to the mainstream and merit serious consideration.

Second, the far-right blogosphere, though fringe, represents and nourishes the Sweden

Democrats, which, if extremist, is certainly not fringe.

130 Sandor Herold, “Ångrar sig om moské,” Petterssons gör skillnad, June 23, 2017.
131 Nima Gholam Ali Pour, “‘Allå, ‘Allå, ‘Emliga Moskén,” Situation Malmö, May 15, 2017.

72
 An attentive reader may already have noticed the recurrence of the Sweden

Democrats Party (SD) in these accounts. The Sweden Democrats are a neo-nationalist,

anti-immigrant, and anti-Islamic populist party, and currently the nation’s third-largest

political party. SD was founded in 1988 with close ties to the neo-Nazi movement but

entered Parliament only in 2010. Their old motto, mentioned in Chapter 1, was “Keep

Sweden Swedish!” though they have now transitioned to subtler “Security and Tradition.”

They also use the tagline, “The Sweden-Friendly Party” (Det Sverigevänliga partiet) and

address their supporters as “Sweden-friends” (Sverigevänner). SD has a particular grip on

the south of Sweden: in Skåne, the region surrounding Malmö, they poll as high as 27%.132

In concluding, I point our attention to the rise of the Swedish far-right because

their nationalist rhetoric completely flips the script on established narratives of

Swedishness: they say in almost as many words that immigrants cannot be equally

Swedish, advocate for an explicit exclusion of Muslims from the public sphere, and

candidly admit that Lutheranism is the only faith that belongs in Sweden. Their claims

to tradition are equally transparent (consider their motto, “Security and Tradition”). To

be frank, the Sweden Democrats undermine most of the analytical work I have undertaken

in drawing out the paradoxes of Swedishness by proudly proclaiming them and claiming

them as their own. And all that the far-right does will not remain merely domestic because

Sweden is a strange and potent symbol for American neo-nationalists, as I will evince. 133

SD’s reversal of our expectations about nationalism is the ultimate inversion to bring

every previous inversion back into alignment.

Julia Åberg, “SD största parti i Skåne,” SVT Nyheter, March 23, 2017.
132

The rise of a right-wing populist party obviously has consonances with similar movements in
133

Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, and beyond.

73
Rites of the Far-Right

The Sweden Democrats completely disrupt the status quo by institutionalizing

the previously unspoken norms of nationalism. On national identity, they write:

Every country needs common norms and values, collective memories, common myths, common
holidays and traditions, common customs and habits to hold together in the long-run. It is
especially important in a state like the Swedish one, with a solidarity-financed welfare model
because the solidarity that maintains the system is in turn based on identification and a strong
feeling of community.134

This first sentence almost sounds like a direct excerpt from Hobsbawm. Note also the

admission that the welfare system is built on normative national identity, a concession I

have not heard made by other politicians. SD also makes the explicit turn from national

belonging based on social virtue to cultural assimilation. In their official immigration

policy, they support only immigration “of such a character that it doesn’t pose a threat to

our national identity or our country’s welfare and security.”135 Across numerous

documents and speeches, SD advocates for a “common majority culture” or “common

cultural heritage” based on whiteness and nativeness.

One of the Sweden Democrats more surprising aspects is their Christian turn.

Consider, for exposition, a section on their website labelled “SD wants…”: “Stronger

support for Christians who are persecuted on the basis of their faith in different parts of

the world” is the first wish.136 In their 2011 party platform, they assert that, “The Swedish

state cannot and should not be religiously neutral. Sweden has been a Christian nation

for over a thousand years.” Ten years ago, this declaration would have been

unthinkable—even today, no other party would dare utter it. The party platform argues

that to be religiously neutral, the government must “estrange a significant part of the

134 “Kulturpolitik,” SD.se.

135 “Invandringspolitik,” SD.se.
136 “En politik för en stark, demokratisk, och självständig svensk röst i världen,” SD.se, 2014.

74
Swedish cultural heritage from public activities and public space, and that is not

something that the Sweden Democrats see as desirable. Christianity should, by virtue of

its history, be allowed to occupy a separate position in relation to other religions in

Sweden.”137 This invocation of Christianity in secular Sweden is baffling. More than just

a provocateur’s errand, I think this Christian referent is really a claim to tradition in

grosser form. SD verbalizes in one sentence the relationship between Lutheranism,

tradition, and the public sphere that usually takes significant analysis to draw out.

SD’s anti-Muslim sentiment is equally unguarded. Their party platform deems

Islam “the religious outlook that has shown itself to be the most difficult to co-exist

harmoniously with Swedish and Western culture” and calls for “starkly limited”

immigration from “Muslim countries with strong fundamentalist elements.” 138 In 2000,

they published a remarkable document titled, simply, “Swedish Muslims: a contradiction

in and of itself.” But their views are often much more vitriolic. Former Party Secretary

Richard Jomshof once called rape an “expression of Islamic values” in a press interview. 139

Party Leader Jimmie Åkesson also penned an infamous 2011 editorial in which he accuses

Muslims of many things, including “actively reject[ing] the Enlightenment and

humanism,” wasting tax dollars on unnecessary circumcisions, and causing Sweden to

“have the most rapes in Europe [with] Muslim men overrepresented greatly among

perpetrators.”140 The article is titled, “The Muslims Are Our Biggest Foreign Threat.”

The use of the word “foreign” reveals much about Åkesson’s views.

137 “Sverigedemokraternas principprogram 2011,” updated Feb 24, 2014, 27.

138 “Sverigedemokraternas principprogram 2011,” 27.
139 “Jomshof: Våldtäkt uttryck för islamisk kultur,” SVT Nyheter, Feb. 25, 2014.
140 Åkesson, “Muslimerna är vårt största utländska hot.”

75
 Finally, the Sweden Democrats’ history of campaigning against mosques extends

far before Wakf. When an Ahmadiyya mosque outside Malmö began construction in

2013, the regional representative from SD warned about the “strong symbolic value” the

mosque would have, which he felt would “further sharpen the feeling among native

Swedes of estrangement in their own country” and increase “the district’s attractiveness

as an immigration destination for Muslim immigrants”—clearly undesirable. 141 Recently,

a friend of mine posted a picture on Snapchat of a flyer handed to him on the street reading

“Say NO to a mosque in Norrköping!” He captioned it, “Thanks for the free toilet paper.”

The Far-Reach of the Far-Right

“The alt-right obsession with proving everyone in Sweden is terrified is definitely one of
the strangest internet traditions.”
—@IanDunt, Twitter, Nov. 20, 2017

“It’s a combination of factors that makes it so perfect: social democracy + feminism + ‘PC
culture’ + immigration ‘soiling’ a mythical white European Disneyland. The first three
lead to the fourth.”
—@ChrChristensen, Twitter, Nov. 20, 2017142

Sweden has appeared frequently in American headlines in the past year. It was

invoked repeatedly by Bernie Sanders as a model for welfare (though he really preferred

Denmark),143 and famously mentioned in the President’s cryptic comment about terrorist

attacks, “You look at what’s happening last night in Sweden—Sweden, who would believe

this?” which become an instant Swedish meme.144 What mainstream headlines do not

141 “Ny moské byggs i Malmö,” Fria Tider, June 15, 2013.
142 Ian Dunt, “The alt-right obsession…,” Twitter, Nov 20, 2017; Christian Christensen, “It’s a
combination…,” Twitter, Nov. 20, 2017.
143 Jason Margolis, “Bernie Sanders wants us to be more equitable like Sweden. Could it work?”, Public

Radio International, Feb. 9, 2016.

144 Sewell Chan, “‘Last Night in Sweden’? Trump’s Remark Baffles a Nation,” New York Times, Feb. 19, 2017.

76
reflect is how much the growing far-right phalanx in Sweden is connected to the

American “alt-right” movement. As the two Twitter users above hint at, Sweden has

become a symbolic martyr for American neo-nationalists who seek to prove the

destructive effects of immigration. The opening of Wakf was actually reported on in both

Breitbart and Jihad Watch. Breitbart described Malmö as “a hotbed of drug crime, gun

crime and extremism following large-scale Muslim immigration,” “infamous for

explosions,” and “grenade attacks” and deems Wakf just another symbol of Sweden’s

surrender to Muslim violence.145 Jihad Watch republished the article word-for-word, save

a breathtaking new introduction: “The colonizers need a place to worship…This is the

future of Sweden, and Europe, courtesy of the European political and media elites.” 146

In 2015 and 2016, my newsfeed was flooded with similar articles alleging violent

immigrant gangs or a Swedish “rape crisis” perpetrated by Muslims. One particularly

vituperative bog of a blog that I saw repeatedly was “The Atheist Conservative,” run by

British author Jillian Becker, who now lives in the US. Really a filter feeder of sorts,

Becker reposts far-right screed with her own approbations and emendations. She has

nearly one hundred posts mentioning Sweden with ludicrous titles like, “The rape of

Sweden,” “Sob for Al-Sweden,” “Sweden dying cries for help,” “Pity the feminists of

Sweden—ha-ha!”, and “The Arabization of Sweden and the end of days” (with the opening

lines, “‘Need a country? Take ours. It’s okay, we’re dying anyway.’”). 147

But the confluence of two far-right movements extends beyond the media. Richard

Spencer—the self-proclaimed founder of the alt-right who was famously punched in the

145 Jack Montgomery, “Qatari Government Opens Mega-Mosque in Malmö, Sweden,” Breitbart, May 5, 2017.
146 Robert Spencer, “Qatar Government Opens Mega-Mosque in Malmö, Sweden,” Jihad Watch, May 5, 2017.
147 Jillian Becker, “The Atheist Conservative.”

77
face on Inauguration Day—spoke at a far-right conference in Sweden in November 2017

arranged by Daniel Friberg and Christoffer Dulny. Friberg and Dulny are leaders of the

Swedish alt-right and travelled to the US to attend the Charlottesville white nationalist

rally.148 Friberg and Spencer co-founded and edit AltRight.com together. And if the

lineage from SD, to Swedish far-right, to American alt-right was not already evident,

Dulny was once the president of the Stockholm branch of SD; in 2014, he was ejected

from the party for leaving hate comments on Neo-Nazi websites under a pseudonym. 149

What the Sweden Democrats do and say is of great consequence for the United

States. The internal feeling of being unparadised has facilitated the rise of the far-right in

Sweden, which capitalizes on the feeling of instability and desire for simple answers. But

Sweden’s irenic international image as a “mythical white European Disneyland” is also

being eroded, and the sense of desecrated chosenness that surrounds Sweden in the global

eye makes it potent political fodder for white supremacists and xenophobes abroad.

What Lies Ahead

The revelations brought on by the development of a Swedish Muslim identity and

the rise of the far-right go hand-in-hand. Muslims bring into relief facets of Swedish

society that make many Swedes feel deeply uncomfortable: the incomplete secularization

of society, the permeability of the public/private border, the Lutheran heartbeat of

secularism, and so on. The secular identity crisis of Sweden casts shadow on what has so

long been a clean, well-lighted place. The price that Muslims must pay for their

prophethood is high.

148 Carl Cato, “Svensk extremhöger mobiliserar internationellt,” Svenska Dagbladet, Aug. 15, 2017.
149 David Bass and Christian Holmén, “Här är SD-toppens inlägg på hatsajten,” Expressen, Sep. 8, 2014.

78
 The rise of the far-right is engendering a sea change in the way that nationalism

and secularism are discussed in Sweden and leading to an increased acceptance for

outright xenophobia and anti-Muslimness. The Sweden Democrats prey on anxiety about

anxiety and speak where Swedes are so often silent. I leave this work with two

ruminations, the first on the future of political discourse about religion, and the second

on how Muslims might continue to become Swedish in ways both large and small.

Nevertheless, we must remember that Sweden is in a time of great flux. Returning to

Malmö after one year, I was floored by the major changes that had taken place. The future

of Sweden is uncertain, but with better knowledge of the present, we may point the way.

In the rise of the far-right, we see the Swedish political spectrum stretching

toward the extremes at the same time as it seems to melt together. As we saw in the

discussion of end-of-term ceremonies, secularism in Sweden permeates the political

spectrum in a way that breaks the American assumption that left and secular are posed

against right and religious. They all fall underneath the super-structure of secularism and

are shaped by the dim and monstrous specter of tradition. And so, the far-left and the far-

right are increasingly often making the same kinds of comments on Islam’s threat to the

Swedish way of life—their concerns are just couched in different rhetoric. The

conversations that Muslims spur about national belonging cause the political vault to

collapse, left, right and center, falling together in a heap. This simultaneous expansion

and condensation of secular discourse makes it difficult for Muslims to defend themselves

against criticism from all sides.

We have already seen one tactic to legitimate public Muslim presence:

emphasizing Islam’s contribution to humanitarian values. Instead of trying to enter the

public sphere as a religion—a category which has no grip—Islam enters as a

79
humanitarian value set. In this way, Islam could become like the Church of Sweden,

though if the secularists have their way, both will be privatized into oblivion. Islam's

challenge will be to convince its detractors that human rights atrocities propagated in the

name of Islam are not indicative of their faith, a challenge which nowhere seems to have

yet been conquered. The other sticking point will certainly be women’s rights, a point on

which Swedes are just shy of obsessive (so central it is to their international image).

Across the political spectrum, there is a persistent consternation about Islam’s view of

women. A huge force in combating this is going to be young, Muslim, Swedish-speaking

women like Fatma and Nisa who can use their command of Swedish language and culture

to convince others that Islam is genuinely compatible with Swedish feminist views. More

celebrities like Sana from Skam will continue to chip away at existing prejudice.

Another approach is to capitalize on Sweden’s fixation on civil society. There are

countless Muslim educational groups, inter-organizational Muslim coalitions, and

interfaith activities (such as a summer camp run by the Islamic Center of Malmö and the

Church of Sweden in Malmö). I have even heard of mosques running programs to teach

people about filing taxes and getting healthcare. In short, Muslims are playing by the

rules; yet, they are still suspect in a way. A member of the Agency for Support to Faith

Communities told me that during the refugee crisis in November, the city of Malmö found

that the Islamic Center of Malmö was suitable and prepared to house the evicted refugees

but chose Sankt Johannes Church instead thinking it would be less controversial.

Basement mosques cannot be tolerated because they exist outside the surveillance of the

public sphere; yet, even when a mosque like the Islamic Center or Wakf pops up, actively

working to be a public force, it is still totally alienated from public society, utterly suspect.

The catch-22 of the public/private divide has caught another prey.

80
 Hearteningly, the literature on Sweden is beginning to keep pace with real life. A

forthcoming statistical study considers conceptions of nationalism and anti-Muslim

attitudes in 41 European countries. Unexpectedly, it finds that “civic nationalism is

associated with greater antipathy toward Muslims,”150 but only in Northwest Europe and

Scandinavia. This exclusion of Muslims from purportedly accepting national conceptions

“legitimate[s] anti-Muslim sentiments not only on the radical right, but also in

mainstream political culture.”151 The study controlled for general anti-immigrant

sentiment, meaning the correlation goes “beyond any hostility toward Muslims qua

foreigners”; something about Muslims in Scandinavia makes them odious. 152 The authors

attribute the unexpected results, as I do, to “a legacy of historically contentious church-

state relations and the dominance of Lutheranism in the region.” This latitudinal study

further supports my contention that the public/private divide and the lingering presence

of Lutheranism are integral, linked forces in Swedish society.

This thesis has focused on how Muslims upset prevailing notions of secular

Swedishness, placing the emphasis not on how Muslims can alter themselves to fit in, but

rather on how Swedish culture faces its own reckoning. Swedish Muslims encounter a

public, national culture not only unaccustomed to their presence but employing an entire

system of prohibitions and anxieties that preclude their full participation in national life

as religious individuals. In asserting their belonging as religious Swedes, Muslims make

evident the permeability of the boundary between religion and public life and the fragility

of a national identity moored in secular norms; they show that a society that so prizes its

150 Bart Bonikowski and Kristina Bakkær Simonsen, “Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive?
Conceptions of Nationhood and Anti-Muslim Attitudes in Europe,” forthcoming, 1. Article generously
shared with me by the authors.
151 Bonikowski and Simonsen, “Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive?”, 1.
152 Bonikowski and Simonsen, “Is Civic Nationalism Necessarily Inclusive?”, 26.

81
secularity, its openness, and its equality is not resiliently secular, not reliably open, and

not really equal. With the leveling of secular discourse around the political spectrum,

there is an increasing awareness of how even civic conceptions of Swedish nationalism

are complicit in the exclusion of Muslims from national belonging.

Unlike indulging in sundry fermented fish products or joining in for Midsummer

maypole-ing—granular cultural rituals—to become Swedish in a deep way, Muslims

must riddle out how to affirm universalized norms of Swedishness in a way that is

commensurable with the indelible particularity of their religious identity. In other words,

there is much “becoming Swedish” left to be done. But at the same time, Sweden must

become something too, a renewed vanguard of openness, inclusiveness, and equality in

plurality. Given how much Swedes relish in self-criticism, this should be a welcome

challenge to take on. In pondering how Sweden will face the future, I look back to an

unexpected source, Susan Sontag. She ends her famous letter from almost fifty years ago

with gospel worth quoting at unusual length:

Sweden has set me thinking more about the relation of national character to the possibilities and
direction of social change. The Swedish hang-ups I've been describing are obviously old and yet
they are also of a piece with the society in its present form. Many foreigners have complained about
the disillusioning dullness of the Swedish “welfare state,” but this is facile. First, Sweden isn't dull.
That's not how to describe what goes wrong here. Second, it seems clear that the basic features of
Sweden's problem date from centuries ago and constitute a kind of national temperament, a
collective historical tradition of emotional disablement: the evidence of accounts by travelers who
visited Sweden in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries indicates that the general outline of Swedish
temperament has remained amazingly stable. I don't believe for a moment that Social Democracy
or the “welfare state” is responsible for the profounder defects in the quality of Swedish life. But it
is necessary to observe that the advent of totally secular, “enlightened,” society operating under
the aegis of capitalism and Social Democracy hasn't fundamentally altered the Swedish problem.
Which is perhaps only to say that Sweden has enjoyed a great reform, not a radical change.
Humane and ingenious as these reforms are, they don't strike at the root of the situation of the
Swedes as human beings. They have not awakened the Swedes from their centuries' old chronic
state of depression, they have not liberated new energy, they have not—and cannot—create a New
Man. To do that Sweden needs a revolution.153

Muslims may be just the revolution that Sweden needs.

153 Sontag, “A Letter to Sweden,” 38.

82
Appendix

Please navigate to the following link to view an interactive, annotated map of Malmö,
marked with important locations discussed in this work as well as additional
information and extra pictures:
https://tinyurl.com/Benjamin-Grimm-Thesis-Map

83
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