How the Workers Became Muslims

The author, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Tulane University and living in Denmark since 1979, attended Loughborough University (UK), the University of Colorado as well as Pennsylvania University. Strangely enough, the book under review opens on the first page with a 1923 anti-Jewish quotation from Adolf Hitler. Yilmaz, a Muslim since 1994, considers himself a leftist intellectual (p. 12) and sees his book as a case study of what has been taking place in Denmark since the mid-1980s, arguing that immigration has always been part of Danish history. (In fact, more than 11% of its population are foreigners). In Yilmaz’ theoretical universe, ‘the rhetoricity of society has much to do with the inherently fragmented and disjointed nature of the social world’ and he takes ‘the ontologies of the social as empty categories that cannot be apprehended objectively’ (p. 13). He adds: ‘If all discourse is contextual and thus rhetorical, the critical question becomes: How can we make sense of ontologies of the social that appear to be stable constructions?’ (p. 14)....