Research profile
Islamic thought, ethical agency, and public life
My research brings Islamic theology and philosophy into conversation with sociology of religion and political analysis. Across textual interpretation, qualitative inquiry, and constructive theology, I examine how Islamic ethical ideas shape authority, belonging, civic participation, and struggles for justice.
Research themes
Muslim liberation theology and Islamic ethics
This strand develops Islamic ethical resources—justice, dignity, trusteeship, excellence, and resistance—as foundations for constructive liberation theology. It asks how inherited concepts and practices can orient emancipatory knowledge and sustainable social transformation.
Representative work: Islam as Method; The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Muslim Liberation Theologies; Towards an Understanding of the Political Theology of Malcolm X; Malik al-Shabazz’s Practice of Self-Liberation.
Political theology, citizenship, and authority
This research examines sovereignty, legitimacy, reform, citizenship, and state power in modern Muslim thought. It compares how Muslim thinkers and movements negotiate Islamic normativity, pluralism, authoritarianism, and the institutions of the nation-state.
Representative work: Negotiating the State; The Power of Elective Affinities in Contemporary Salafism; New Islamist Movements and Concepts of Citizenship; The Ambiguity of Citizenship in Contemporary Salafism.
Lived Islam, Muslimness, and methodology
This theme explores how Islamic traditions are embodied, interpreted, and negotiated in everyday life. A phenomenological approach connects subjective experience and social practice to theology, tradition, civilisational context, and the researcher’s interpretive responsibility.
Representative work: A Phenomenological Approach to the Study of Lived Islam and Muslimness; Islamic Faith between Testimony and Response; In Pursuit of Authenticity: Becoming a Salafi; Contemporary Salafism: Expressions, Practices and Everyday Living.
Islamophobia, civil society, and conditional belonging
This research analyses how law, public funding, security discourse, and civic institutions govern Muslim presence in Sweden and Northern Europe. It studies the racialisation of Muslimness and the conditions placed on Muslim organisations seeking equal participation.
Representative work: Civic Suspicion and Moral Sorting; Adjudicating Muslimness; Sweden’s Governance of Suspicion; Islamophobia in Sweden: National Report 2021.
Approach
The work is comparative, historically attentive, and methodologically plural. It combines close reading of Islamic intellectual traditions with qualitative fieldwork, phenomenological interpretation, sociology of religion, and normative analysis. The aim is to understand religious agency without separating theological meaning from institutions, political conditions, and lived experience.
Emin Poljarević 