Emergent fatherhood: new articulations

of fatherhood among Muslim men in Denmark

Jeppe Schmidt Grüner

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 didn’twantto,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 couldn’tgiveme.

Senol

Contemporary Islam

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-020-00455-x

* Jeppe Schmidt Grüner

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 Inhorn’sdefinitionof

emergent as the kind of new meanings and values, new practices, and new relationships

that are continually being created (ibid.: pp. 6–9). 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.

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 Strand’smanyconcrete

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.

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

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.

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.

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concepts seem to be important components in many of these men’s 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 people’s 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 children’s 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. Bydelsmødre 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 children’s 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 children’s 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 Baba’s 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 children’s 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 one’s 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

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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). Hassan’s 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 Hassan’s 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 concrete—a 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 father—they 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 Hassan’s 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

Hassan’s 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 Zigon’s 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 daughter’s 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 Mattingly’s 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 one’s sense of possibility and reframe one’s 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. Hassan’s 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 one’s moral projects (Mattingly 2014),

and in Hassan’s 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.10–11). Hassan’scase

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 Hassan’s 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). Mittermaier’s

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 Hassan’s 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 people’s 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 Saki’s 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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