Spyros A. Sofos

Spyros A. Sofos

Spyros is a political scientist based at the Middle East Centre of the London School of Economics and Political Science. His latest book - Turkish Politics and ‘The People’: Mass Mobilisation and Populism (Edinburgh University Press) – explores the emergence of populism in contemporary Turkey and its genealogy as a tradition of action and discourse. His other publications include Nation and Identity in Contemporary Europe (Routledge), Tormented by History: Nationalism in Greece and Turkey (Oxford University Press), Islam in Europe: Public Spaces and Civic Networks (Palgrave). Spyros is founder and lead editor of openDemocracy’s #rethinkingpopulism. He has a PhD in Regional and Cross-Cultural Studies from the University of Copenhagen and has previously worked as a Researcher and Lecturer at the Centre for Advanced Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) of Lund University, Senior Research Fellow in Politics at Kingston University and Senior Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Politics at Portsmouth University.
Spyros's research focuses on the study of social movements, identities and collective action, particularly in the case of Muslim communities in Europe, populism, nationalism, Islamism, conflict and coexistence in the Middle East and Southeastern Europe.

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Muslim associations in Malmö and Lund - a snapshot [part 1]

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translated from 'Muslimska föreningar i Malmö och Lund – en ögonblicksbild'  originally published in islamologi.se on December 2nd, 2010 and translated by Spyros A. Sofos By Erica Li Lundqvist & Leif Stenberg During a visit to the urban district of Rosengård in Malmö in order to photograph the "cellar mosques", we suddenly got lost in the suburban jungle. A group of children and young people noticed us wondering and asked us what we were doing. "We are looking for a mosque", we said, after which they replied in chorus: "There are many!" And they pointed in all directions. The development of Muslim neighbourhoods in Malmö and Lund has been gaining momentum since the first Muslim community was established in Malmö in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today, Islam is a natural, albeit controversial, part of Swedish society. Nevertheless, very little commentary on Islam in Sweden is premised on comprehensive empirical investigation. [1] A prob
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The voice behind the veil

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The debate about the face veil, and more generally the acceptability of other forms of female Muslim attire in the West, is not a novel one. Muslim notions of modesty, have often been subverted and colonized by patriarchal practices seeking to restrict women's autonomy. As such, the veil issue has mobilized social forces inspired by liberalism and feminism and generated valuable criticisms of patriarchy in Muslim communities. On the other hand, the 'out of place' look of veiled women in European public spaces has provided fertile ground for the transformation of the veil issue into a potent mobilizing symbol for xenophobic, right wing forces only too happy to jump into the bandwagon of the secular, liberal and feminist opposition to the veil and, often, to incorporate these discourses into their own arguments. In this way, for example, spokespersons of the conservative Spanish Partido Popular such as Alberto Fernandez, a Barcelona city councillor, shed crocodile tears about
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Brown and white men and other stories ...

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Courtesy of Washington Post A cartoon that appeared recently in the Washington Post reminded me of a topic I have often discussed in classes and have written about in my book Islam in Europe , notably the construction of the Muslim woman as "subaltern". The cartoon powerfully points out the aporia of the woman over whose body two men, representing ‘Islamic traditionalism’ and ‘European secularism’ respectively are challenging each other. Gayatri Spivak has pointed out this aporia in her discussion of widow self-immolation in colonial India: "The relationship between the imperialist subject and the subject of imperialism is at least ambiguous. The Hindu widow ascends the pyre of the dead husband and immolates herself upon it. This is widow sacrifice… The abolition of this rite by the British has been generally understood as a case of "White men saving brown women from brown men." White women-from the nineteenth-century British Missionary Registers to M
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