ABSTRACT
‘If you want to know about Islam, it is better to go and talk to the imams at a mosque’, a Somali woman told me in the 1990s when I was collecting data for my PhD research in Finland. 1 Somali men seemed to hold a similar opinion, maintaining that Somali women’s religious views and practices were somehow ‘different’ from those of Somali men. At the same time, Finnish authorities were struggling to adapt to increasing numbers of migrants and asylum seekers, many of whom were Muslims (for example Martikainen 2011: 187). There were demands from the Finnish authorities as well as professionals like teachers and health-care personnel to get more information about Muslims, and guidelines on how to handle everyday multicultural encounters or respond to requests about issues such as male circumcision in public health care (Sakaranaho et al. 2004). The partners in the dialogue between the Finnish authorities and the Muslim community were—and still are—mainly men active in Islamic communities. Hence, Muslim women were rendered invisible and voiceless twice over: both in their own religious communities and in the Finnish society.
