Abstract

There is a growing body of scholarly work that addresses the transformations taking place in the ways Muslims experience, practice, and live Islam in Europe. One of the issues that have been taken up is the changing relationship between (established) religious authority and ordinary Muslims. There is a growing consensus that these relations are under pressure. Older, established configurations of authority are destabilized and increasingly challenged by rival voices and practices. However, neither the position that Islamic authority is simply generated from Islamic sources or the depiction of the Islamic landscape in Europe as thoroughly fragmented and individualized properly address the question of how religious authority is produced. How does authority become acknowledged, and how is it incorporated into people's life worlds? In this chapter, I argue that modes of religious knowledge production and conveyance do not just operate cognitively, but also involve a whole range of sensorial experiences that shape the relationship between religious practitioners and leaders.

Keywords: Islam in Europe, Islamic authority, globalization, knowledge production, lived Islam