Chaplaincy: Towards an Islamic Paradigm

Reviewed by: Ruqaiyah Hibell, The Islamic Foundation

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Books Reviewed

• Muslim Chaplaincy: Handbook and Voices of Muslim Women Chaplains in Higher Education, edited by Mahshid Turner. Berlin: Gerlach Press, 2025, 248pp. ISBN: 9783959941709.

• Chaplaincy And Practical Theology: Researching a Pioneering Ministry, edited by Stephen B. Roberts and Sarah Dunlop. London & New York: Routledge, 2022, 256pp.

• Complexities of Spiritual Care in Plural Societies: Education, Praxis And Concepts, edited by Anne Hege Grung. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter, 2023, 273pp. ISBN: 9783110717235.

• Islam In Prison: Finding Faith, Freedom And Fraternity (Foreword by Sir David Calvert-Smith and Eoin McLennan-Murray), by Matthew Wilkinson, Lamia

Irfan, Muzammil Quraishi, Mallory Schneuwly Purdie. Bristol: Policy Press, 2023, 298pp. ISBN: 9781447363606.

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Post-Covid awakening has filtered into the public domain to reveal the dire state of mental wellbeing in the UK and the repercussions that poor health outcomes exact on a society encumbered by crumbled health services and disintegrated welfare infrastructure ransacked by a succession of racketeering British governments. Within the UK, as a militarised economy, resources to sustain and enhance life are depleted, yet they are made available in abundance to pursue war and death. Set within this increasingly impoverished environment, chaplaincy undergoes renewal ‒ a revival of interest in what it is, what it does and how it can evolve. While chaplaincy is an established provision, it has been seen as a Cinderella service promoted to circumvent or curtail the use of more expensive modes of provision and therapy, including psychotherapies and counselling. However, it can be seen to emit outstanding merits of its own. In what followes some considerations of Islamic extrapolations of chaplaincy and where they situate within the current milieu are presented.

There are no widely agreed definitions of what chaplaincy is or entails, or where potential boundaries demarcate with regard to the extent and remit of its related activity. Academia could stand accused of complicating what is simple by dressing chaplaincy in academic garb with its attendant theories and models, diagrams and statistics, outcomes and key performance indicators, reports and papers ‒ seemingly designed to placate modern individualistic and materialist demands to quantify, measure and justify time results and resources. This may also serve to obfuscate what is at its simplest ‘‘providing loving care as a reflection of God’s love and care’’ into a combination of process, themes and, that all important component, evidence.