Lived Islam: religious identity with ‘non-organized’ Muslim minorities

The purpose of this article is to show how a focus on ‘non-organized’ Muslims in Europe can contribute with insights on the everyday lives and practices of Muslim minorities. The empirical foundation is interviews conducted in Germany and Denmark. I argue that by focusing on institutionalized forms of Islam we run the risk of reifying Muslims as being ‘all about Islam’. The article reflects and discusses the benefits of adapting the framework of lived religion methodologically to investigate how Muslim makes sense of Islam on a micro-level. I show how the interviewees in this study have reconfigured religious practices, or no practice at all, which is connected to attitudes of privatization, individualization and pragmatism. The everyday practices and identities can be seen as expressions of minority identities, and as a type of individualized religiosity, and I discuss how these identities are different from the identities of activist and vocal Muslims.