Working from a critique of methodological presentism: Examples from research of Muslim communities in Denmark

Research in migrant religion is easily trapped in overall, societally constituted ideas about what religious minorities are old and what religious minorities are new. This perspective creates blind angles in research that must be scrutinized. In this paper, I will offer an example from Denmark, focusing on the country’s
Muslim minorities. Islam is generally understood as a religion that entered Denmark with the arrival of the so-called guest workers from Turkey in the late 1960s. Deeper investigations of the presence of Muslims in the country are thus quite scarce. Yet, a deeper look into archival sources from the 1800s shows that Muslims both lived and worked in Denmark at that time and that Muslim rituals such as prayer and funerals took place. Some of these research results have been published (Schmidt 2021a, Schmidt 2021b), while new dimensions and results that will be presented are elements of an ongoing research project.

Besides describing these concrete empirical examples and discussing possible methodological alleys for finding archival data, I will underline the importance of working from a critique of methodological presentism (Schmidt 2017) in research on migrant religious communities in (for example) Scandinavia. How may such a critical perspective on our research add new and important dimensions to this research field?