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Tracing the afterlife of our explorative article on marriages of Dutch-speaking women travelling to areas held by jihadist movements in Syria, we analyze the harm the celebration of transparency may do. Through an auto-ethnographic reflection, we address how the demand for transparency was used in a media hype that engendered parliamentary questions and an external reflection audit. To understand the appeal to transparency, we argue for the need to relate anthropological ethics to epistemological concerns, and to link transparency to power. Whereas anthropological research needs some level of trust and confidentiality, the quest for transparency starts from distrust and an impetus to control. Neoliberal forms of public management make universities vulnerable to external pressure, with anthropology as an interpretative discipline that values complexity an easy target. Researchers who are recognizably Muslim are exposed to particular harm as heightened ethno-nationalism and an anti-Islam political climate produce them as a category already ‘under suspicion’.

As anthropologists we are increasingly confronted with attempts – be it by employers, the media, or policy makers – to regulate our work in ways that are both epistemologically and ethically counterproductive and threaten our scientific integrity. This document is written out of concern about the problems that occur when protocols for data management, integrity, and ethics, developed for sciences that employ a positivistic, hypothesis-testing and replicable style of research, are applied to different scientific practices, such as social and cultural anthropology, that are more explorative, intersubjective and interpretative. In social and cultural anthropology, issues of scientific governance and its ethics are strongly case-specific. Still, concerns about the imposition of scientific protocols from other disciplines require anthropologists to develop some general guidelines for data management, integrity and ethics of anthropological research. Rather than fixed rules, these are broad principles to guide work and adapt it to specific cases.

Drawing on long term research – including topical life stories, interviews and participant observation – we analyze how women converts to Islam in the Netherlands signify and experience making hijra. Our interlocutors, all observant Muslims, had left the Netherlands between the late 1990s and the mid 2010s. In the course of the last 5 years many have again returned to the Netherlands. Their life courses indicate that physical and existential mobility are interconnected in their everyday lives as well as in their migration trajectories. Whereas they considered conversion to Islam as moving forward, the majority society did not share this perspective. They were sharply aware of how they were no longer seen as self-evidently part of the Dutch nation. This produced feelings of stuckedness - in an existential and a material sense - for themselves and their children, and hence a desire to move to a Muslim majority country. They differed amongst themselves as to whether and how they signified leaving Europe as making hijra in an Islamic sense. To some, making hijra was a highly desirable religious act. Others did not foreground such religious signification, but nonetheless expected positive effects of living in an environment where Islam would be an integral part of daily life. Their attempts to settle in various Muslim majority countries were, however, often not successful. Material conditions made it difficult to enact their ethical aspirations, that included the moral and material wellbeing of others, especially their children. Moreover, their appreciation of the self-evident presence of Islam in the countries of settlement was tempered, first, by the tension between their quest for a reflexive, deculturalized Islam and the culturalized practices they encountered in their new environment, and second, by their growing awareness of how their sense of self was much more shaped by habitual ‘Dutch’ conventions than most of them had envisioned beforehand. As a result they were often unable to develop meaningful social relationships in their new environment. Eventually, almost all of them returned to the Netherlands.

Muslim marriages have been the focus of considerable public debate in Europe and beyond, in Muslim-majority countries as well as in settings where Muslims are a minority. Most academic work has focused on how the majority Sunni Muslims conclude marriages. This volume, in contrast, focuses on Twelver Shi'a Muslims in Iran, Pakistan, Oman, Indonesia, Norway, and the Netherlands. The volume makes an original contribution to understanding the global dynamics of Shi'a marriage practices in a wide range of contexts--not only its geographical spread but also by providing a critical analysis of the socio-economic, religious, ethnic, and political discourses of each context. The book sheds light on new marriage forms presented through a bottom up approach focusing on the lived experiences of Shi'a Muslims negotiating a diverse range of relationships and forms of belonging.

Within the current Western European context, where the presence of Islam in the public sphere has become an object of continuous polemics and debates, emigrating or ‘leaving Europe’ has emerged as a conceivable option among a wide range of people who identify as Muslim. Both within and beyond specific pious circles such migratory moves have sometimes been framed as hijra. This special issue enquires into the way hijra is imagined and experienced, but also how the issue of hijra is debated and acted upon among European Muslims who are contemplating the possibility of leaving Europe, or who have already left the continent. In order to cover both the specific and the more general dynamics surrounding hijra, this thematic issue is motivated by one, albeit multi-layered hermeneutical objective. In general terms, we aim to understand the complex and multiple significations operating around the notion of hijra among European Muslims of various backgrounds and convictions. In so doing we seek to contribute to the mounting anthropology of Islam in Europe by examining articulations of mobility and migration through religious imaginaries and repertoires. This implies ethnographically accounting both for the perspectives and assessments of those who are situated and located in Europe and desire to leave the continent in order to perform the hijra, as well as for the ways in which hijra is lived and practiced by those who have left Europe and moved to a Muslim-majority context. In order to buttress further the emerging anthropological field at the nexus of religion and mobility/migration, this introduction cautiously maps out a number of analytical concepts which we think could strengthen the multifaceted ethnographic ventures of the contributions comprising this thematic issue: the ‘ethics of dwelling’, ‘regimes of mobility/diversity’ and religious imaginaries and repertoires, being the most prominent.

... one of those rare edited volumes that advances social thought as it provides substantive religious and media ethnography that is good to think with. -- Dale Eickelman, Dartmouth College Increasingly, Pentecostal, Buddhist, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu, and indigenous movements all over the world make use of a great variety of modern mass media, both print and electronic. Through religious booklets, radio broadcasts, cassette tapes, television talk-shows, soap operas, and documentary film these movements address multiple publics and offer alternative forms of belonging, often in competition with the postcolonial nation-state. How have new practices of religious mediation transformed the public sphere? How has the adoption of new media impinged on religious experiences and notions of religious authority? Has neo-liberalism engendered a blurring of the boundaries between religion and entertainment? The vivid essays in this interdisciplinary volume combine rich empirical detail with theoretical reflection, offering new perspectives on a variety of media, genres, and religions.

Perspectives and practices of couples in unconventional Muslim marriages. Unconventional Muslim marriages have been topics of heated public debate. Around the globe, religious scholars, policy makers, political actors, media personalities, and women’s activists discuss, promote, or reject unregistered, transnational, interreligious and other boundary-crossing marriages. Couples entering into such marriages, however, often have different concerns from those publicly discussed. Based on ethnographic research in Europe, the Middle East, North Africa and Asia, the chapters of this volume examine couples’ motivations for, aspirations about, and abilities to enter into these marriages. The contributions show the diverse ways in which such marriages are concluded, and inquire into how they are performed, authorized or contested as Muslim marriages. These marriages may challenge existing ties of belonging and transform boundaries between religious and other communities, but they may also, and sometimes simultaneously, reproduce and solidify them. Building on insights from different disciplines, both from the social sciences (anthropology, political science, gender and sexuality studies) and from the humanities (history, Islamic legal studies, religious studies), the authors address a wide range of controversial Muslim marriages (unregistered, interreligious, transnational, etc.), and include the views of religious scholars, state authorities, and political actors and activists, as well as the couples themselves, their families, and their wider social circle. Ebook available in Open Access. This publication is GPRC-labeled (Guaranteed Peer-Reviewed Content). Contributors: Joud Alkorani (Radboud University), Rahma Bavelaar (University of Applied Sciences Leiden), Loubna Elmorabet (University of Amsterdam), Annerienke Fioole (University of Amsterdam), Shifra Kisch (University College Utrecht), Iris Kolman (University of Amsterdam), Martijn de Koning (Radboud University), Eva F. Nisa (Australian National University), Ibtisam Sadegh (University of Malta), Samah Saleh (An-Najah National University), Vanessa Vroon-Najem (Amsterdam Museum), Dina Zbeidy (University of Applied Sciences Leiden).

When I read this article, I was surprised to see that the authors use the term autoethnography for something that seems to me much closer to a social experiment. They argue that autoethnography 'uses the researcher's personal experiences as primary data' and that 'the consensus view is that autoethnography relies on using and analyzing the researcher's own experiences'. I doubt whether there is such a consensus, and if there were, I would like to question it. Anthropologists engage in participant observation as a main method to learn about the lives of others. Many of us live with our interlocutors, listen to them, engage in some of their activities and reflect on our experiences. Would this mean anthropologists always also engage in autoethnography?