Successful PhD defence by Frida Nome

On Friday 10 June NOREF’s Frida Nome successfully gave her public defence for the degree of PhD, at the Norwegian School of Theology. In the field of religious studies, her thesis Making Islam in times of crisis: The Friday sermon and the Syrian uprising explores how Syrian Islam was shaped when protests against the Assad regime began in the spring of 2011. Her focus is on Islamic orthodoxy as it is delineated by Muslim scholars. Today’s single-minded attention to jihadism and the Islamic State (IS) gives an unbalanced image of Islam in Syria, she argues. If violence is our only window into Islam as it is practiced in Syria, it will distort our understanding of the role religion plays in the Syrian crisis.

Nome’s interest is in how the Islamic tradition is mobilised to make sense of the Syrian crisis. She has explored how the uprising was brought into the Sunni Friday sermon and has studied the Islamic concepts that were used to explain it. She has analysed 18 Friday sermons, and found a divided Syrian Sunni orthodoxy. At the rhetorical level, the sermons were highly ambiguous. At the doctrinal level on the other hand, a pattern emerged. The sermons mobilised two different parts of the Islamic tradition: one that legitimised the protests and another that delegitimised them.

On this basis, Nome concludes that if the aim is to understand Islam in authoritarian settings, one must look beyond rhetoric and give more attention to how the Islamic tradition is used to make sense of the present.

For her trial lecture, Nome analysed two sermons that were held in Damascus and Aleppo in 2016.

More about the defence and thesis

Contact
Senior Adviser Frida Nome: frida.nome@peacebuilding.no