Emergent fatherhood: new articulations
of fatherhood among Muslim men in Denmark
Jeppe Schmidt Grüner
1
Accepted: 9 November 2020/
#
Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
This article explores how new practices and articulations of fatherhood are emerging
among Muslim men in Denmark. With an explicit focus on care as both practice and
ideal, the article accounts for the emergence of new forms of fatherly commitment,
intimacy, and caregiving in domestic life. Drawing on ethnographic material from
different social housing areas in and around the city of Copenhagen, I show how these
new practices and imaginaries of fatherhood are assemblages of both Islamic ethics and
values afforded by the Danish welfare state. Exploring the interlacement of care, Islam,
and fatherhood in Denmark, the article provides a nuanced perspective on the various
social roles of Muslim men as both fathers, sons, and husbands.
Keywords Fatherhood
.
Morality
.
Care
.
Islam
Introduction
I want to give my two children what my father he could not give to me ... he came
here to Denmark from Turkey and he would spend all of his time working, you
know, supporting us, and I love him for that, but he was never someone that I
could talk to like a friend and it is not because he didntwantto,butitwasa
different time and as I said he was supporting a big family and that was what he
was doing but I want to talk with my kids, be their friend and help them, give
them what my father couldntgiveme.
Senol
Contemporary Islam
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-020-00455-x
* Jeppe Schmidt Grüner
1
Aarhus N, Denmark
Senol is a 46-year-old man and the father of two. The family migrated to Denmark from
Turkey when Senol was a young child. In our conversations, Senol often expressed his
need to give something else to his children than what his father gave to him. In this
article, I turn to the stories and experiences of Muslim men, who, like Senol, question
what it takes to be a good father and how they want to be remembered by their children.
The concept of fatherhood that I apply here rests on the idea of what Marcia Inhorn
calls emergent fatherhood (Inhorn et al. 2015). I draw on Inhornsdefinitionof
emergent as the kind of new meanings and values, new practices, and new relationships
that are continually being created (ibid.: pp. 69). Drawing on the concept of emergent,
I try to capture the individual change of the life course and change across generations
among the Muslim men I worked with. In the context of this article, my main concern is
to explore how emergent fatherhood entails new forms of fatherly affect and caregiv-
ing, and how we might understand these practices and imaginaries as an assemblage of
both Islamic ethics and values afforded by the Danish welfare state. With an explicit
focus on care as both social practice and ideal, I wish to give a nuanced account of
Muslim men in Denmark and their various roles as both fathers, sons, and husbands. It
is my argument that a study of care and caregiving among Muslim fathers will shed
light on the ongoing transformations and negations of gender relations, masculinities,
and fatherhood among this group of men.
The article is based on 5 months of fieldwork conducted in 2017 in various social
housing areas in and around Copenhagen.
1
The primary sites for my work became
Brøndby Strand and Tingbjerg, which are neighborhoods dominated by immigrant
families. I had rented a studio apartment in one of Brøndby Strandsmanyconcrete
buildings. Through interviews and participation in everyday life and social activities, I
investigated how circumstances of migration pose certain challenges to fatherhood, and
how notions of caregiving and good fatherhood are negotiated and transformed over
time and between generations within Muslim families. My group of interlocutors was
men who had volunteered to join the social program Baba, an initiative that works to
strengthen fathers relations with their children and push forward reflections about
parenting among immigrant men in social housing areas in Denmark.
2
From a circle of
twelve men, four became key interlocutors, with whom I conducted life story inter-
views. Among the men represented in my work, there was a diversity in nationality and
ethnicity ranging from men of Middle Eastern, African, Turkish, and South Asian
origin. The group counts first-generation immigrants, defined as people who were born
in a different country by parents who do not hold Danish citizenship and men of the
second generation who have been born in Denmark by first-generation parents. In his
work on immigration communities in Europe, Steven Vertovec introduces the term
super-diversity to highlight the complex makeup of contemporary immigrant com-
munities (Vertovec 2007). Super-diversity is also what characterizes my group of
interlocutors, as it includes men of different socio-economic and ethnic backgrounds.
Though their individual level of religious engagement varies, all of the men I worked
with are Muslims. During fieldwork, it became clear to me that Islamic ethics and
1
The fieldwork was carried out in relation to my master program at the Department of Anthropology at the
School of Culture and Society, Aarhus University, Denmark.
2
Throughout the entire fieldwork, I have had full access to activities and meetings organized by Baba. Most of
the participatory research was done in relation to the various activities and reflection exercises facilitated by
Baba.
Contemporary Islam
concepts seem to be important components in many of these mens search for an
alternative father identity, and with an empirical point of departure in the men that I met
in Baba-program, I will discuss and analyze the interlacement of care, Islam, and
fatherhood.
The article is structured around three parts. In part one, I introduce the discourses
surrounding Muslim immigrant parents in Denmark and take up the concept of care to
discuss the potentialities of exploring emergent fatherhood through a focus on care
practices. Secondly, I introduce two cases illustrating the interlacement between care
practices and ethics offered by both Islam, as well as the values and ideas afforded by
the Baba-program. In my analysis of these two ethnographic cases, I unfold how caring
for intimate others in the form of children and wider family inform not only ideas of
good fatherhood but also aspirations to be a good Muslim. I direct my analytic attention
to the way that religious and emic concepts, such as barzakh, might inform the care
practices that emerge as a part of a new fatherhood identity. With inspiration in the
work of both Amira Mittermaier and Vincent Crapanzano (Mittermaier 2011,
Crapanzano 2004), I suggest that a concept like barzakh can expand the scope of the
analysis and allow us to think of the space that lies between two or more ways of being
in the world as a constitutive space. By accommodating Islamic concepts in the
exploration of care practices, I argue that we are able to extend our analytic thoughts
and vocabulary and account for the ways in which different realities are interwoven and
feedback into each other. In my analysis of the second case, I draw on Joel Robbins
ideas of how the realm of the transcendent shape peoples ethical sensibilities, includ-
ing those they bring to bear in everyday life (Robbins 2016) and stress the necessity of
considering religious imaginaries when working with the concept of care. In the final
section, I reflect upon ethical dilemmas related to the study of fatherhood among
Muslim immigrants in Denmark and how to navigate in a politicized field.
Studying fatherhood
The Danish population has become increasingly multicultural over the past four
decades due to immigration. This development renders the investigation of fatherhood
practices among immigrant men relevant. Today, most Nordic research on fatherhood
focuses on the norms and practices amon g the ma jority po pulation (Eydal and
Rostgaard 2015; Farstad and Stefansen 2015; Brandth and Kvande 2003). I find that
this present study connects with two lines of research: the study that concerns father-
hood more specifically and a broader line of research dealing with generational change
and continuity within Muslim immigrant families. In relation to current research on
fatherhood and immigration in a Danish context, two clusters are apparent. The first
cluster offers insights into themes concerning the representations of Muslim men (Suhr
2013; Rytter 2013; Johansen and Jensen 2017) and the challenges to fatherhood in the
context of migration (Charsley and Liversage 2015;Jensenetal.2007). In the second
cluster, we find studies of both fatherhood and parenting in general. This research has
investigated the meeting between migrant parents and the Danish welfare state
(Johansen 2019; Olwig 2011, Olwig et al. 2012). The second line of research that
has informed this article deals with generational change and continuity within Muslim
immigrant families. Much academic attention has been given to the way that
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intergenerational relations are shaped by the processes of continuity and change that
occur in connection with migration and settlement in a new place (Olwig 2011).
Anthropologists working on the theme of generational relations among immigrants in
Denmark have studied how ritual spaces facilitate the transmission of religious prac-
tices from one generation to another (Pedersen 2011:118), and how global conflicts are
reproduced and transformed across generations of Palestinians in Denmark (Kublitz
2011:161). While these scholars explore generational relations as something that are
negotiated and transformed over time or in the context of ritual events, I suggest a
different focus on generations. In the following pages, I draw attention to the renego-
tiation and transformation of generational relations that takes place within everyday
practices between fathers and their children. I argue that we should consider ordinary
social situations as potential spaces of possibility in which new forms of fatherhood
emerge. Inspired by the analytic vocabulary offered by anthropologist Cheryl Mattingly
(2014), I bring into view how these everyday spaces create experiences that are also
experiments on what good fatherhood looks like, and how ideas of fatherhood are
redefined across generations.
Muslim fathers in question
In recent years, there has been a great deal of public attention to fatherhood and
masculinity among immigrant men in Denmark. In her study of Scandinavian immi-
grant policies, Anniken Hagelund argues that the immigrant family has become a key
site of conflict in Scandinavian debates about integration, multiculturalism, and ethnic
relations (Hagelund 2008:71). Denmark is no exception, and a growing suspicion and
anxiety towards the nature of parenthood and family structures within ethnic minority
communities, and especially in Muslim communities, has colored the public and
political discourse over the course of the last decade (Rytter and Pedersen 2014). In
the Danish context, there is a tendency to frame Muslim men in particular an d
stereotypical ways, and within the public debate, Muslim men are at times reduced to
one-dimensional figures that form a stark contrast to men of the majority group (Jensen
et al. 2007). The group is generally associated with phenomena such as social control,
domestic violence, and cultural backwardness (ibid.:14). The local and negative repre-
sentation in Denmark mirrors a more general portrayal of Muslim men in the Western
world, namely one that rely heavily on stereotypes of Muslim men as patriarchal,
oppressive, and even brutal (Inhorn and Naguib 2018). In Denmark, this underlying
suspicion towards Muslim family life, and men in particular, has generated an overall
political strategy of social engineering, intended to alter the family life, religion, and
traditions of immigrants in order to make them become Danish. The Danish welfare
state has a strong history of intervening in the lives of its citizens, and the area of
immigration is no exception (Rytter and Pedersen 2014:8), and we see a political and
public conceptualization of the Muslim family as an entity that needs to be monitored
and governed by the welfare state (ibid.: 2014). The Baba-organization, that was my
primary site for fieldwork, is in many ways designed to make interventions in the lives
of immigrant families, a kind of intervention that aims at transforming notions of good
fatherhood among this particular group of men. The program came into being in 2013,
as a request from the Danish Ministry for Children and Social Affairs. In broad terms,
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the ambition of the project is to strengthen and enable minority fathers to take part in
their childrens lives and to close what is considered a gap between minority fathers and
the Danish education and welfare system. The program is hosted under the state-
sponsored umbrella organization, Fonden for Socialt Ansvar (The Foundation of Social
Responsibility), which works with social innovation. The organization hosts different
socia l programs and especially, the program called Bydelsmø dre (Neighbor hood
Moms) is well known and popular in social housing areas throughout the entire
country. Bydelsdre is targeting ethnic minority women of all ages, and their aim
is to battle isolation, poor integration, and social control among minority women in
social housing areas. While this program targets women, the Baba-program became an
alternative that targets minority men. Public schools and daycare institutions had for a
long time requested an effective social program that would help fathers with a minority
background to take a more active part in their childrens schooling, their general well-
being, and development in institutions like daycare and kindergarten. As the main
component of a father-friendly welfare state like the Danish one (Fa rstad and
Stefansen 2015:54), daycare and public schools have expectations for fathers that
reflect a specific Scandinavian fatherhood model. This kind of ideal father figure is
someone who is family oriented, child centered, involved in care work and the raising
of his children (Eydal and Rostgaard 2015). The call for immigrant fathers to become
more involved reflects a general Nordic and Danish parenthood policy, which is
dominated by the effort to reconstruct gender and gender relations towards a more
active fatherhood (ibid. 2015). In general, we can say that contemporary policies and
representations of fatherhood emphasize greater emotional closeness in fathers rela-
tionships with their children, as well as an increased sharing of childcare between
mothers and fathers (Farstad and Stefansen 2015). This dominant narrative of involved
fatherhood relates to the idea of the new father who is more involved in contrast to
the old patriarchic provider (ibid.: 56). Seen from the perspective of the state, the
immigrant father is in many cases absent in their childrens life outside of the
household, and the Baba-program was motivated by the wish to introduce a shift from
the old to the new fatherhood model in immigrant communities. In 2013, the program
was introduced as a pilot project in various social housing areas in and around
Copenhagen. The head of the program insisted on building a program that was based
on a strong sense of ownership and community among the men involved in the
program. He explains how it was and continues to be Babas main ambition to
stimulate a change in the way men think of their fatherhood and the way they interact
with their children. This individual and collective change would strengthen and enable
fathers to take an active part in their childrens lives. Based on this specific model of
involved fatherhood, the founding pillars in the project became a community, peer-to-
peer work, and personal change in the perception of the role as a father.
As I will present in the cases here, the Baba-program becomes a certain social space
that facilitates a transformation in the perception of caregiving among the involved
men. As expressed in the opening quote by Senol, caring for ones children concerns
more than providing material stability and economical means. In the conversations I
had with my interlocutors, I found that the task of providing care refers to the kind
relation that a father has with his child. So caring in this context means that you aspire
to make and maintain a relationship that builds on virtues such as involvement,
intimacy, trust, friendship, patience, creativity, compassion, and empathy. With a focus
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on care practices, I want to highlight how emergent models of good fatherhood are
taking shape within these communities, and how these new ideals of fatherhood might
serve as a counter-image to the prevailing discourse that surrounds Muslim men and
their parenthood. Before I turn to some of the ethnographic accounts, I want to dwell on
the concept of care and discuss how taking the concept of care as an analytic anchor
brings forward new insights into the study of emergent fatherhood.
Anthropological perspectives on care
The topic of care has come to occupy a central space in anthropology and especially in
the field of ethics and morality (Mattingly 2014, Ghannam 2018, Al-Mohammad
2010). Within the broader anthropological literature, the theme of care is dealt with
in relation to three main themes, namely care as work,”“care as kinship, and care
and the life course (Alber and Drotbohm 2015). In this article, care is situated in the
context of kinship. The framing of kinship in my work is informed by contemporary
anthropological readings, in which kinship has to be actively made, chosen, and
maintained (Carsten 2000;Howell2006). Therefore, care practices are essential in
the making and maintenance of kin relations. When studying the transformations that
fatherhood undergo among Muslim men in contemporary Denmark, it is relevant to
explore how men relate to their children, and how certain kinds and modalities of care
become important in the search for a new fatherhood identity. Here I make use of the
powerful definition of care put forward by anthropologists Arthur Kleinman and Sjak
van der Geest,
The term care has various shades of meaning. Its two basic constituents are
emotional and technical/practical. The latter refers to carrying out activities for
others who may not be able to do them alone. Parents take care of their children
by feeding them, providing shelter, educating and training them, and so forth.
Healthy people take care of sick ones and young people of older ones. Techni-
cally, this type of care has a complementary character: one person completes
another one. Care also has an emotional meaning; it expresses concern, dedi-
cation, and attachment. To do something with care or carefully implies that one
acts with special devotion (Kleinman and van der Geest 2009).
According to Kleinman, caregiving is central to what it means to be human, it is the
very definition of how families and friendship networks cope (ib id.: 2009). The
ethnographic cases that I bring into view in the coming pages speak to a specific
way of attending to and providing care for those significant others who matter. The men
that I interviewed and portrayed illuminate a transformation in the practices and
imaginaries of good fatherhood and stress that fatherhood is not a thing or a constant
within Muslim families; rather, it is an act is ever in progress and an ongoing relational
process of change in the articulations and practices. As mentioned earlier, we see how
caring concerns different virtues such as intimacy and friendship rather than it concerns
providing material stability and economical means. As a route to a more in-depth
understanding of the intimate link between care practices and religious aspirations, I
Contemporary Islam
will bring my ethnographic data into dialogue with different analytic ideas afforded by
the contemporary anthropological literature on ethics and morality. With a departure in
the study of ethics, I want to direct attention to the way that such caring relationships
are made and maintained within the realm of everyday life and discuss how everyday
practices of care intersect with religious aspirations.
Hassan: How do you want to be remembered as a father?
In September 2017 when I first attended a Baba meeting at a local community house in
central Copenhagen, Hassan was one of the first to welcome me. Like many others who
volunteer to join the Baba-program, he is a second-generation immigrant in Denmark.
His parents came as work migrants from Morocco during the 1970s and he grew up in
social housing area in the suburbs of Copenhagen. Hassan works as a bus driver and
lives close to his childhood neighborhood with his wife and two children. It was a fairly
cold fall evening and as we were heating our fingers on the warm coffee mugs, Hassan
told me about his way into the program. His commitment comes from an ambition to
bring about change in his relationship between him and his children. At the heart of his
endeavor, is the idea of becoming a caregiving, observant, and attentive father figure
instead of the distant breadwinner that he sometimes feels like. Hassan was a teenager
when the family decided to relocate and settle permanently in Denmark. The father had
left to work in Denmark years before, and Hassan would see him a couple of times
during the year when he was visiting the family back in Morocco. Hassan talks about
him with warm feelings, and after his death, they brought his burial casket back to
Morocco to bury him there. Despite his feelings for his father, he does not think back at
him as someone who took any part in his upbringing. He explains how the father was
distant in both a geographic and emotional sense. In his work on Pakistani migrant
families, Mikkel Rytter reminds us that generations are not only generated in different
times but also in different places, so in that sense, generation does not only connect the
past, present, and future of a given family but is also intertwined with different
experiences of living in, and being formed by different local settings and societies
around the world (Rytter 2013:6). Hassans experience of being brought up in a
different cultural setting without a present father leaves him without a figure that he
can emulate when he must take on the role of being a parent himself. These complex
and at times disrupted relationships between generations pose a challenge to the
second- or third-generation fathers who are living and raising their children in Den-
mark. As Hassans story shows, migration may bring different models for family life
into contrast. In our conversations, Hassan would often talk about how he wants his
children to remember him. The questions concern the experience of being both a son
and a father, and exactly this experience is explored in one of the key exercises
facilitated in the Baba-program.
Through self-reflection exercises, and peer-to-peer conversations, Baba works to
generate change in the way that men view the task of fatherhood. From the many
conversations I have had with these fathers, it is obvious how it is not a matter of them
being poor fathers but rather that they actively seek to become even better fathers and to
inspire each other in that process. This process of self-examination and reflection is
initiated during a weekend trip to a boarding school outside of Copenhagen. The
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purpose here is to create a space for conversation and reflection on family life and
fatherhood. At the end of this weekend, the men write down a vision plan in which
they make their individual goals concretea vision plan includes three issues that each
father wants to work with. For instance, Hassan wrote down that he wanted to
implement small walks in the neighborhood with his kids as a weekly routine, and
secondly, he wanted to dedicate 2 hours before dinner to play with his youngest and
help the older kids with their homework. The vision plan is produced on the basis of the
question, how do you want to be remembered as a father? As a way of working with
this question, the men are taking part in three fundamental reflections exercises during
the weekend. Indiv idually, they are asked to reflect upon and write down good
experiences that they have had with their children; this could be anything from
major- to small-scale events from their daily life. As the next step, they put into words
who am I as a fatherthey imagine situations and scenes from their everyday life and
put themselves in the shoes of their children. The final exercise, which has come to play
an important part in Hassans view upon himself, is the so-called postcard from the
future exercise. The fathers are invited along to a nearby graveyard where are they are
instructed to each find a gravesite that they can sit at while working with the question.
In the following snippet, the instructor is talking to the small group of men and
instructing them in the assignment:
Imagine yourself standing at a graveyard, looking down on one specific stone.
The stone has your name on it. () From a distance you are able see your son
who is now a grown man. He is walking towards your grave holding his son,
your grandson in his hand. As they are standing in front of the grave your
grandson asks your son, what was your dad like? What you need to do now is
to write a postcard to the future and answer this question. You need to write down
the ultimate best answer that your son can give to your grandson.
Hassan refers to an imaginative space that opens through the postcard exercise as a
motivating force in daily life. His experience seems to push forward his continuous
efforts of realizing his particular versions of good fatherhood. In the exploration of
Hassans experience, I turn to the idea of the moral breakdown as Jarret Zigon presents
it in his work on ethics.
Moral envisioning
With his notion of the moral breakdown (Zigon 2007), Jarret Zigon makes an important
contribution to the anthropological study of morality (Mattingly 2014, Laidlaw 2014,
Mahmood 2005,Robbins2013, Zigon 2007). Zigon distinguishes between morality as
the unreflective mode of being in the world and ethics as a tactic performed in the
moment of the breakdown and of the ethical dilemma. According to Zigon, morality
should be limited to those social and personal moments when persons or groups of
persons are forced to step away from their unreflective everydayness and think through,
figure out, work on themselves, and respond to certain ethical dilemmas (Zigon 2007:
p. 137)like Hassan in the postcard exercise. Within Zigons framework, ethical life is
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dynamic, disorderly, liminal, and transgressive, and he demarcates the breakdown
moment in which the very norms and morals by which one ordinarily lives are
themselves problematized and become objects of reflection—“it is the moral break-
down, or the moment of problematization, that I call the ethical moment (ibid). Within
this understanding, the primary goal of ethics is to move back into the world and to
once again dwell in the unreflective comfort of the familiar (Zigon 2007). This return
from the ethical moment is however never a return to the same unreflective moral
dispositions, the very process of stepping-out and responding to the breakdown in
various ways alters, even if ever so slightly, the aspect of being-in-the-world that is the
unreflective moral dispositions. It is in the moment of breakdown, then, that it can be
said that people work on themselves, and in so doing, alter their very way of being-in-
the-world (ibid.:138). Zigon points out that we should look to those moments of moral
breakdown in which reflection and critique of moral norms are intensified, and in
which our ways of being in the world are altered. When talking to Hassan about the
moral experience that presents itself in the exercise, he mentions how he wants to be
remembered as someone who was there, someone that my kids could talk to, and
come to with their day-to-day problems. To realize this vision, Hassan ha s to
reorganize his week, so that he can go fishing with his son on a regular basis, and he
makes sure to put aside his phone and computer during the afternoon so that he can
help with his daughters homework. In my analytic approach to Hassan story, I adopt
the dynamic and altering moral experience that Zigon has described as the ethical
moment. However, where Zigon refers to this disturbance as a moral breakdown, I
suggest a twist in the analytic framework. I frame this ethical moment as a moment of
moral envisioning in which an imaginative space of the ultimate good is created.
Looking at it this way, Hassan becomes a beholder that observes how his life and
legacy as a father is enmeshed into the lives of future generations. This perspective
resonates well with Cheryl Mattinglys idea of narrative re-envisioning, as she refers to
narrative re-envisioning as the activity of coming to see oneself in a new way, and
coming to reform ones sense of possibility and reframe ones commitments (Mattingly
2014). It is this exact idea of reorientation and moral transformation that I want to
capture and unfold by introducing moral env isioning as a gateway to a deeper
understanding of how Hassan comes to articulate and act out his role as a father in
an alternative and new way. Hassans case shows how the moment of moral
envisioning provides an ethical weight to ordinary life in which small events and acts
of care like playing, fishing, or helping with homework become a way of responding to
and working towards a realization of the ultimate good that in envisioned while doing
the exercise. Having gone through these transformative moments of moral envisioning
means that even a small act of care between a father and his child gives a broader and
fundamental sense of moral direction. Mattingly suggests that there is a mutually
constitutive relationship between the self and ones moral projects (Mattingly 2014),
and in Hassans story, we see glimpses of the way in which a sense of self emerges in
moments of caring interacting between him and children. By attending to the moment
of moral envisioning, we can understand how these moments of stepping out of the
world, and into the realm of the imaginative, might inform and push forward everyday
acts of care. Hassan would often explain the imaginative space at the gravesite with
reference to the Islamic idea of barzakh, I try to visualize myself being in the realm of
the barzakh - somewhere between paradise and hell, he would say. The Islamic
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concept of a world between two lives, the barzakh world, is a temporary station
between this world and the world hereafter (Lange 2015:pp.1011). Hassanscase
is interesting as it discloses how transformations towards a new model of fatherhood
are brought forward by an imaginative space that is afforded by a certain Islamic
understanding of death and resurrection. Hassan envisions how his children will come
to his grave to say the traditional dua, and how he must realize his ambition of being a
caring and involved father to ensure that his children will commit to prayer and care for
him, even after his death. In the context of Hassans story, the barzakh world is a
constitutive space, which engenders action and transformation in the living world. In
her influential work on dreams and Egyptian landscapes of the imagination, Amira
Mittermaier directs her attention away from the observable and material realities, and
towards the emergent, the possible, and the visionary (Mittermaier 2011). Mittermaiers
engagement with dreams allows us to rethink the ethical and political importance of the
imagination. The imagination in this context is a broader range of meanings that
encompasses a variety of space modes of perception and conceptualizations of the
real. The same kind of ethnographic outlook and attention to the imagination and its
ethical potential might also inform an understanding of Hassans experience by the
grave where the in-between space of the barzakh world becomes an intermediary reality
that pushes forward commitments of care between him and his children. Therefore, I
would argue that by including the sense of forward movement and ethical potential that
the realm of the transcendent holds, we might expand our insights into the lives of men
like Hassan who strive to become the best possible fathers for their children. In his
article from 2016, Joel Robbins urges us to take into consideration how the realm of the
transcendent shapes peoples ethical sensibilities, including those they bring to bear in
everyday life (Robbins 2016). Robbins suggests that the current discussion concerning
the anthropology of ethics tends to sideline the importance of religion and ritual in the
exploration of morality and value. Going along with this argument, I would claim that
our understating of the ethnographic material is enriched by attending to the realm of
religion, as it illustrates the entanglement of Islamic cosmology, everyday fatherhood,
and caregiving.
Saki: Emulating the prophet
In the final part of this article, I want to provide another case in which religious
aspiration intersects with the emergence of new care practices and models of father-
hood. I met Saki at a community house in Tingbjerg, a social housing area on the
outskirts of Copenhagen. The house serves as a meeting point for a group of local men,
who are all current or former members of the Baba-program. Saki was twenty-eight
when I met him, and one of the youngest in the group. Once every second week, the
group would meet up for dinner and discuss different issues. I was there for 5 months
helping in the kitchen and hanging around for social activities like fishing trips or
games at the local cricket club. Saki had recently become a father and was living at his
parents house with his wife and their newborn daughter. The family originates from
Pakistan, where Sakis father had migrated from to find a job and new opportunities in
Denmark. As I was also about to become a father for the first time, we would spend a
lot of time talking about the practical and emotional issues that come along with
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