Religious Care in the Reinvented European Imamate Muslims and Their Guides in Italian Prisons

Abstract

Listen

Translate article

This chapter’s intention is to analyse and reconstruct the role Imams play in relation to the religious care provided to Muslims in Italian prisons. In the prison context, one can notice some of the features that are contributing to the creation of a novel European Imamate. Based on a multi-annual empirical research study, it stresses the importance of the intensification or more often the recovery of religious practice as an alternative response, replacing total passivity as the reaction to the existential failure that a criminal sentence and imprisonment may represent for a prisoner. Such a practice should not be seen as an identity ‘refuge’ but rather as a complex cultural resource which can offer a symbolic heritage on which original interpretations and narratives can be built. The author analyses and discusses the forms religious care assumes in this context and how the actors combine religious communication and intercultural mediation, showing in particular the existing continuity with the community outside the prison, where a new Imamate is being reinvented. This reinvention results in a departure from theological traditions, through a dialogue that is both external, with public society, and internal, following the ethical and intellectual developments of the Muslim community.