Challenging From Within : Youth Associations and Female Leadership in Swedish Mosques

This chapter focuses on women members of the Sunnī-dominated national organization Sweden's Young Muslims (Sveriges Unga Muslimer, SUM) and some of its local youth associations in different Swedish towns, to argue that involvement with these associations is increasing Muslim women's engagement with mosques and other venues for acquisition of Islamic knowledge. Illuminating the continuous challenges to the women's presence in mosques and their wider public activism the chapter examines how these women defend their right to exercise religious authority while supporting the traditional sources of Muslim authority in the public sphere. It analyzes how the women reinterpret the Islamic texts to change their daily lives as well as their position within both the Muslim community and Swedish society as a whole. The chapter emphasizes that in more informal situations, backstage among peers, the women put gender on the agenda, initiate reflexive deliberations, and test alternative norms and practices.

Climate and causation in the Swedish Iron Age : Learning from the present to understand the past

The paper reassesses the role of climate as a factor shaping changes in settlement and landscape in the Swedish Iron Age (500 BC to AD 1050). Two reasons motivate this re-evaluation. First, high-resolution data based on climate proxies from the natural sciences are now increasingly available. Second, the climate-related social sciences have yielded conceptual and theoretical developments regarding vulnerability and adaptability in the present and recent past, creating new ways to analyse the effects of climatic versus societal factors on societies in the more distant past. Recent research in this field is evaluated and the explicitly climate deterministic standpoint of many recent natural science texts is criticized. Learning from recent approaches to climate change in the social sciences is crucial for understanding society–climate relationships in the past. The paper concludes that we are not yet in a position to fully evaluate the role of the new evidence of abrupt climate change in 850 BC, at the beginning of the Iron Age. Regarding the crisis in the mid first millennium AD, however, new climate data indicate that a dust veil in AD 536–537 might have aggravated the economic and societal crisis known from previous research.