Abstract
Recent studies conclude that ethnic minority families in Denmark tend to be dismissive of senior housing and municipal homecare services for elderly family members. A large proportion of Muslim minority families in Denmark attach great importance to caring for the elderly as a tradition and prefer to take care of their own elderly family members at home. Nevertheless, the fact that morality, incentives, and obligations in relation to care for the elderly may be legitimized and/or contested with reference to cultural traditions and Islam has not received much attention in current research. In this article, drawing on material from ongoing ethnographic fieldwork among Arab Muslim families in Denmark, I discuss how cultural and religious backgrounds may determine and influence perceptions and behavior regarding care for the elderly. By observing and engaging in the everyday life of an Arab Muslim family, I explore how caring for elderly people with health problems at home raises specific questions about obligations and triggers negotiations across genders and generations. I argue that besides kinship and ethnicity, it is equally important to consider religiosity in an attempt to learn more about how Arab Muslims care for their elderly family members.
Highlights
Contemporary Islam (2021) 15:215–232“And your Lord has decreed that you not worship except Him, and to parents, good treatment
The notion of care has become prominent in the social sciences in the course of the last two decades (Alber & Drotbohm, 2015; Buch, 2015; Oxlund, 2018b), research which seeks to examine the perception of care and aging among Muslim minority families, or which deals with questions relating to old age and care for the elderly in Muslim families more generally, remains scarce (Zubair & Norris, 2015)
Amne is an example of how an Islamic care script takes shape between different people and generations within a multigenerational Arab family residing in the Danish welfare state
Summary
“And your Lord has decreed that you not worship except Him, and to parents, good treatment. This article presents the story of Amne, an 86-year-old Arab Muslim woman in need of care who married at the age of 14 and fled from Palestine to Lebanon in the 1940s. She gave birth to 12 children in Al-Jalil Camp in Lebanon and arrived in Denmark with her late husband as an asylum seeker in 1988. Based on the case of Amne and her family, this article discusses how the Islamic script regarding care for the elderly may structure and influence perceptions and behavior relating to such care in Arab Muslim families. Amne is an example of how an Islamic care script takes shape between different people and generations within a multigenerational Arab family residing in the Danish welfare state
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