Al-Mahdi Institute convenes scholars on care practitioners in Muslim contexts

Al-Mahdi Institute in Birmingham, UK convened an international conference, "Who Cares? Care and Support Practitioners in Muslim Contexts," bringing scholars and practitioners together across three themes: the lived challenges -- mental health, divorce, domestic abuse, ex-offender reintegration -- that create demand for care within Muslim communities; the professional, ethical and religious frameworks practitioners use, including how they draw on or reinterpret Islamic scriptural and legal traditions; and the socio-political context, from Islamophobia to toxic digital media, that shapes both the challenges and the responses available to them. The call deliberately crossed disciplines -- sociology, psychology and counselling, traditional Islamic studies, social work, chaplaincy and anthropology -- and paired academic contributors with non-academic practitioners attending to share direct experience. Selected papers are being developed into an edited volume with Brill Academic Publishing, giving what the institute calls an under-theorised area of Muslim communal life -- who actually does the caregiving, and how it is sustained -- its own durable scholarly literature rather than leaving it to individual practitioner judgment.

This is a QeRN summary by Ahmed Qerni. Read the original at Al-Mahdi Institute: https://almahdi.edu/msc-cfp/.