A senior academic from the University of Aberdeen, with a growing international reputation, will this Friday host a unique event exploring the lives of Muslims in today’s global community.
Dr Gabriele Marranci has organised the seminar Beyond the Stereotypes: Dynamics of Muslim Life in the Globalised World which is sponsored by publishing house Springer and will take place in Amsterdam this Friday (October 26).
Dr Marranci is Lecturer in the Anthropology of Religion in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Aberdeen. His work, which specialises in Muslim societies, has been reported all over the world. Dr Marranci's main research interests concern identity, Muslim migration/immigration, urban sociology, fundamentalism, political Islam, secularisation processes, criminology, and anthropology of music as well as the relationship between anthropological research and cognitive neuroscience.
The Amsterdam event will celebrate the first volume of Dr Marranci's new journal, Contemporary Islam: Dynamics of Muslim Life (Springer), which is co-edited with Professor Daniel Varisco, Hofstra University in New York, who is the author of Islam Obscured (Palgrave) and Reading Orientalism: Said and the Unsaid (Washington University Press).
The symposium brings together, for the first time, some of most important international scholars within the field of Islamic studies, anthropology and gender studies, including Professor miriam cooke of Duke University, a prominent Arabist and feminist scholar; Professor Richard Martin of Emory University, a specialist in comparative religion and Islamic studies; Professor Lawrence Rosen of Princeton University, a well known anthropologist working on Muslim communities in Morocco and the West; and Professor Bryan Turner of National University of Singapore, who is one of the first sociologists to study Islam and Muslims.
Looking forward to the event, Dr Marranci said: "This will be a ground-breaking symposium and I am delighted that so many distinguished scholars from different disciplines will be joining us on the day. Our aim is to explore the contemporary dynamics of Muslim life by focusing on questions concerning the presence of Muslims in the West, as well as the relationship that Muslims have with globalization and its consequences on their lives, dreams and everyday experiences."
Dr Marranci's most recent research, funded by The Carnegie Trust, the University of Aberdeen and the British Academy, was a four-year exploration of how prison life impacts on identity, religion and ideology among Muslim prisoners and former Muslim prisoners in the UK. This work generated much interest worldwide, and in June 2007 Dr Marranci presented his findings at the House of Lords as part of an IQRA Trust event in London. He will soon publish the research results in his forthcoming book, Faith, Ideology and Fear: Muslim Identities Within and Beyond Prisons (Continuum Books).
Previously Dr Marranci has studied and written on identity among Muslim migrants and their children, proposing a new interpretation of the reasons for which Muslims in the West might radicalise or understand jihad as violent struggle. This research is published in the books Jihad Beyond Islam (Berg) and Understanding Muslim Identity, Rethinking Fundamentalism (Palgrave Macmillan).