Religion,Culture and Psychology.

In a previous post, I focused on the problem of Muslims in Sweden. The comments I got were encouraging and I think this topic needs to be explored further.
From the Culturism blog comes the article about Muslim mindset as researched by Danish psychologist Nicolai Sennels.

My experience from working psychologically with Muslims shows that the Muslim culture does not find it easy to be “equal.” Either you are over or you are under: You can be different and unequal, but you cannot be different and equal. The chiefs of the police and many politicians hope for some kind of “mutual acceptance,” but this is not possible in cultures developed under Islam.

What we must consider is how closely religion and culture interrelate.

A lot of aspects of Muslim culture that we find abhorrent in the west are sometimes founded in religion but not necessarily are part of the religion. For example, can we ever know for sure if the burqa is purely a religious observance of more of a cultural tradition? What about genital mutilation? What about honor killings?
And so it's enlightening to read about the Muslim mindset from the point of view of a psychologist.
People might reject the truth when confronted with aspects of Islam that they find distasteful but they can't also deny that the psychology of Muslims doesn't accommodate rational discussion and argument of ideas.
The strongly held beliefs of multi-culturalism ideology look definitely bogus when confronted with the mindset of Muslims as described by Nicolai Sennels.

Representatives for secular authorities are very often attacked in Muslim-dominated areas in Denmark and the rest of Europe. The police and politicians are not safe in these areas. Police get mocked, receive threats and are often attacked physically when entering Muslim areas. We recently had the tragic yet comical experience of seeing one of our most politically correct politicians, the mayor of integration in Copenhagen, Jakob Hougaard, being attacked by Muslims who tried to stone him and a journalist during an interview in the Muslim ghetto, Tingbjerg. The ironic thing is that Hougaard is “on their side,” claiming that there are no problems with violence in Tingbjerg and that Islam has nothing to do with terror and integration problems. Hougaard even promised in the Islamic magazine “Akhbar” to sponsor religious Islamic festivals if he got re-elected as mayor at the elections on November 17th, 2009 – which, by the way, he did not win. 

 In another blog, Citizen Warrior, in a post dated November7th,  I read of the example of the Maori who had a culture of violence and how that culture was the cause of the decimation of the Moriori culture. The article was from a book by Jared Diamond titled  Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies.

So, my point is that religion,culture and psychology all work together to create what we commonly refer to as Muslims. Never before has there been a such an urgent need to understand Muslims than now.
It is a subject that will become increasingly relevant as countries begin to review their policies on immigration and re-asses the commonly held beliefs associated with multi-culturalism.


In February 2009, Nicolai Sennels, a Danish psychologist published a book entitled Among criminal Muslims. A psychologist’s experience from Copenhagen. In his book, Nicolai Sennels shares a psychological perspective of this Muslim Culture, its relationship to anger, handling emotions and its religion. He based his research on hundreds of hours of therapy with 150 young Muslims in the Copenhagen youth jail. EuropeNews interviewed the author about his book and its consequences on integration of Muslims in Europe.