Using examples from my research on apostasy from Islam, in this article I address some basic methodological and theoretical issues in the study of religions. The article contains an outline of major Muslim debates about apostasy in Islamic traditions, why apostasy is punished, where it is punished and the methodological challenges involved in its study. My aim in doing so is to show why it is difficult, but also important, to study apostasy and to show why we need to engage with empirical research that takes into consideration the lives of individuals who are accused of it.

This article presents the most important data from a Swedish interview survey on the situation of Islamic communities in Sweden following 9/11 and also discusses how global conflicts affect local communities, even though the latter may be separated from the former in time and space. It argues the need for more empirical data that can be analysed and used for comparisons with other minority groups in Europe and the United States in order to avoid either positive or negative generalizations about Muslims and Islam in the West.

The aim of this article is to investigate through a comparison of the Danish and the Swedish Muhammad cartoons controversies (1) why only the Danish controversy escalated into a conflict of global dimensions; and (2) what accounts for the differences in level and form of local Muslim claims-making in the two cases. The article takes advantage of the initial similarities of the two controversies in making a paired comparison, which provides an opportunity to evaluate the importance of context-specific particularities and of specific events/actions taken in the two cases. Despite several initial similarities, why did the two controversies produce such different outcomes? The article argues that the answer should be found in the interplay between distant contextual characteristics such as dominant elite discourses about Islam/Muslims, different styles of institutionalization of Islam in the two countries, and more situational circumstances of how the publications were initially framed by the relevant newspapers, the contingent choices of action by the political elites and cross-context lesson drawing.

In democratic societies schools have an obligation to address complex societal issues such as ethnic/religious tensions and social conflicts. The article reports an exploratory study of how theatre plays were used in upper-secondary schools to generate pedagogically relevant platforms for addressing the current Middle East conflicts and their impact on European societies in the context of religious education and civics. The schools are situated in areas with substantive migrant populations of mixed backgrounds, and this has implications for how these issues are understood as a lived experience. In the same classrooms, there were students who had refugee backgrounds, who represented different interpretations of Islam, and religion more generally, and whose families were victims of terrorism. There were also students with strong nationalist views. The study is ethnographic documenting theatre visits and classroom activities in relation to two plays about the Middle East situation. The results show that plays may open up new opportunities for addressing these issues, but that they may also be perceived as normative and generate opposition. An interesting observation is that a play may generate space for students to tell their refugee story in class, which personalized the experience of what it means to be a refugee.