‘Society does treat me differently and that is a shame’: understandings and feelings of Britishness amongst visibly observant young Muslims

There has been increasing media and political questioning of the national loyalties and identities held by young British Muslims, with a particular focus on those seen to separate themselves through strict and religiously observant dress and lifestyles. This paper draws primarily on research focusing on the meanings of ‘Britishness’ held amongst a group of visibly observant young Muslim adults. Empirical evidence is provided to demonstrate that although these young adults demonstrated an explicit and visible sense of Muslim identity, this co-existed without any conscious conflict with their British identity. The young adults’ acknowledgement of their religious attachment developed from a positive and proactive identification with Islam rather than one in opposition or rebellion against a British identity. Therefore, in a wider context, their lives must not be analysed only through the lens of religion, dress and appearance as this has repercussions in relation to national policy formation and subsequent perceptions of wider society.     

Managing ‘American Islam’

Focusing on the case of Islam in post-9/11 United States, this article highlights the particularity of how US secularism is enacted by the state. In much sociological theory, the United States has been understood to be a neutral and non-interfering state with regard to religion, thereby fostering a pluralist religious context of free consumer choice. Some Muslim reformists have argued that this context makes the US highly fertile ground upon which to reform Islam and to improve women's status in Islam. This article argues that, in the context of the US-led ‘war on terror’, the government has drawn on and amplified this discourse in the service of producing a representation of the US as tolerant, while also seeking to promote a concept of ‘true’ Islam and produce patriotic Muslim citizens. At the center of this discourse are contested portrayals of Muslim women as symbolic of a modern and liberated Islam that is uniquely ‘American’ and opposed to other presumably oppressive Islams. While this context may in fact promote the reform of Islam, it does so with state involvement rather than as a result of state neutrality.     

Young British religious ‘nones’: findings from the Youth On Religion study

This article contributes to an understanding of diversity in beliefs and practices among young religious ‘nones’ who report the absence of a specific religious faith. It focuses on those describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or otherwise of ‘no religion’ within (a) a large-scale survey of over ten thousand 13–17-year-olds, and (b) interviews, discussion groups and eJournal entries involving one hundred and fifty-seven 17–18-year-olds, in three British multi-faith locations. Compared to the study population as a whole, the young religious ‘nones’ were particularly likely to be white and born in Britain. There was, nonetheless, considerable diversity among this group in beliefs and practices: almost half the survey members mentioned some level of belief in God and most of the interview participants pointed to some presence of religion in their lives. Being a religious ‘none’ is, furthermore, not necessarily a stable identity and some young people had already shown considerable fluidity over their life cycles. Around half the survey members said they had maintained similar religious views to their mothers, but participants in both quantitative and qualitative studies pointed to the impact of their experiences and interactions, as well as the role of science, as factors affecting their beliefs and practices.     

Muslim women as ‘ambassadors’ of Islam: breaking stereotypes in everyday life

This article explores the efforts of Dutch Muslim women who try to break the ‘oppressed Muslim woman’ stereotype by monitoring their own behaviour in everyday interactions with members of the non-Muslim ethnic majority. In representing themselves as modern and emancipated, they try to change the dominant image of Muslim women in Dutch society, and thus also that of Islam. Based on interviews and archival material, I demonstrate that initially this strategy was mostly adopted by Dutch converts to Islam, and later also by ‘born’ Muslim women. Why do more and more Muslim women turn themselves into ‘ambassadors’ of Islam? And what are the costs of this form of self-essentialization? This article demonstrates the usefulness of studying self-representations of minority groups in the light of existing stereotypes, arguing that Muslim women’s self-representations should be seen as part of a politics of belonging.     

Looking beyond ethnicity: the negotiation of Chinese Muslim identity in Penang,Malaysia

The conflation of ethnic and religious identities, particularly that of Malay and Muslim, has long historical and political roots in Malaysia. Being one of the most safeguarded identity marks in Malaysia, Islam has become part of the core of Malay ethnicity and plays a prominent role in ethnic politics. Muslim converts from ethnic minorities, such as the Chinese and Indians, are therefore faced with social expectation and pressure to ‘become Malay’. This paper discusses the difficulty and improbability of Chinese Muslim identity in the previous literature and the recent development that enables the decoupling of religious and ethnic identities. By looking beyond ethnicity, the most salient social divider in Malaysia, and looking into other possibilities, such as religious identity, this paper aims to paint a picture of social relations and identification that is more complex yet flexible amongst the Chinese Muslim converts in Penang.     

Recalling the ‘Islam of the parents’ liberal and secular Muslims redefining the contours of religious authenticity

Scholarship on Islam in Europe has largely invested in examining the generational dynamics in the lived religious experiences of Muslims. Within this perspective, the idea of a generation gap, which revolves around a distinction between ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’, has figured as an important account in assessing some of these religious transformations. Drawing on fieldwork with Belgian Muslims of Moroccan origin, this paper seeks to nuance this perspective by exploring accounts wherein this ‘traditional’ Islam of the parents is actively reclaimed. This was especially the case for respondents who were quite critical of Islamic revivalist trends. In many of these stories, the parents’ Islam was understood as tolerant and open, in a way that was consonant with ‘tradition’. By focusing on these narratives, a first aim of the paper is to understand how genealogy and ancestry figure as distinct criteria in determining the ‘real Islam’. A second aim is to complicate the understanding of the liberal and modern self, and its relationship to the past.     

Conceptualising Euro-Islam: managing the societal demand for religious reform

Political, public and academic debates about the need for a ‘Euro-Islam’ as a necessary condition for the full integration of Muslim are widespread and strong. For Muslims and Muslim organisations in particular, Euro-Islam can be understood as subverting the very nature of their religious identity, making change or reform impossible. This raises the question as to how Muslim organisations reject the idea of the need for a Euro-Islam by construing the core of their faith as not being contradictory with Western values, norms and beliefs. The current study examines this question amongst two major Turkish Muslim organisations (Milli Görü? and Fethullah Gülen) in the Netherlands and Germany. The analysis shows that in managing the demand for reform a distinction was made between Islam as a belief system and Muslims as a group of people, between religion and culture as two types of belief systems and between politics and the true nature of the West.     

Muslim women between secular state and religion

The main thesis of this paper assumes that, while we are not arguing for a full-fledged personal law system in Italy (which provides Muslims with different legal systems), we assume that diversity-conscious respect for difference and its legal recognition is a better strategy for achieving justice than a blindfolded Eurocentric vision, based on uniformising secular methods. This paper suggests the adoption of a model of legal intervention for integrating Muslims into Italian liberal democracy. I will call this model a ‘pluralistic institutional approach to integration’, based on a ‘a joint governance approach’. It requires a conceptual break with absolute, unlimited and undivided sovereignty and jurisdiction. Such a pluralistic institutional approach to integration encourages the accommodation of some of the most pressing minority demands in some limited areas. In family law – as we will see – there can be different possible solutions available to conduct their private relationship compatible with their understanding of Islam. However, any policy of accommodation needs to pay special attention to the fact that traditional religious Muslim norms contain practices that may cause harm to vulnerable subjects. Therefore the advocacy and introduction of a plural legal order must be based on respect for key liberal values. In this paper I will not use the generic term sharia (Islamic law) but the term Muslim norms, because I would like to underline the fact that some Muslims are calling for accommodation of norms that derive from their understanding of their religion, including not only standards based on or derived from sharia or fiqh (jurisprudence) but also general ethical principles derived from Islamic religious culture (see Nasir 2002). The focus on religious norms or values makes it clear that the main motivation for the accommodation of Muslim norms would be to maximise individual autonomy and minority protection. In this sense, the accommodation of Muslim norms is subject to the ultimate regulation of the Italian constitutional and legal system. The paper is structured in the following way. Section I of the paper deals with the ‘myth of legal centralism’ and presents a general overview of the empirical situation created by the troublesome Muslim integration in Italy. We will provide some quantitative data on Muslim immigration in Italy. Since ‘Muslim’ is a broad category, it needs to be given as much specificity as possible in order to avoid producing images of a monolithic and undifferentiated religious community. Section II sets out the model of what I have labelled ‘a pluralistic institutional approach to integration’. The substantive claim is that this pluralistic institutional approach to integration provides promising options for the incorporation of cultural and religious minorities, challenging the assumption that it is impossible to grant consideration to religious diversity and gender equality at the same time. Of special interest here are those situations in which claims for so-called ‘Muslim Sharia Arbitration Councils’, religious-based arbitration tribunals, interact with public concerns about power disparities between men and women in the resolution of family law disputes. We will demonstrate the possibility of implementing such a vision by reference to a recent decision by the Supreme Court of Canada, Bruker v. Marcovitz (2007), which breaks new ground.     

Gender relations,transnational ties and rituals among Bosnian refugees

In this article I show how Bosniak (Bosnian Muslim) refugees reproduce, contest and construct their ethnic and religious identities. Using ‘ritual’ in a broad sense to refer to everyday routinized activities and practices that characterize family hierarchies and gender relations, as well as more easily identifiable religious rituals, I show that rituals assert belonging to a community and an identity, but are also, in the process of construction and contestation, selectively evoked and ignored. ‘The Other’ constructed through certain rituals is not merely the non–Muslim Bosnian (Serbs and Croats), but also, for refugees, other Bosnian Muslims who stayed behind. Moreover, engagement in secular and religious rituals, and the wider issue of identity constructions cannot be understood fully without exploring the dynamics between refugees and people who have remained in Bosnia. Competing constituencies claiming ‘Bosnianness’ and ‘Muslimness’ can be found across national boundaries and complicate the attempt to construct a community of believers or nationals, or both.     

Secular state,religious lives: Islam and the state in Malaysia

Debates on secularism in Malaysia often revolve around the legal, especially the constitutional, framework. To this end several NGOs organised a road show in 2006 to debate issues surrounding freedom of religion. Not only were these events mobbed by angry crowds, but also the state intervened and shut down these and future discussions on the topic of religion, deeming such debates sensitive. This article addresses the particularities of secularism in Malaysia vis-à-vis Olivier Roy's thesis in ‘Secularism Confronts Islam’ that sees religious space and secular space as discernable yet not antithetical and Charles Taylor's thesis in the ‘Secular Age’, where he points to a new definition of secularism as a pluralist and transcendent notion of belief. In Malaysia both variants are present, with the state playing a dangerous game situating itself between reactionary Muslim forces and a moderate majority.     

Navigating religious diversity: exploring young people’s lived religious citizenship in Indonesia

Against the backdrop of several concerning reports which have noted growing socio-religious conservatism and intolerance amongst Indonesia youth, this study examined how school-aged Indonesian young people navigate encounters with religious difference in their everyday lives. Recognising the significance of religious and citizenship education curricula, the research included classroom observations and interviews with 20 religiously-diverse Indonesian young people in three purposively selected high schools in Jakarta. The paper reveals that participants in all three schools agreed that religious studies and their personal religious frameworks were central to their approaches toward religious tolerance. However, their lived everyday experiences of rubbing shoulders with religious ‘others’, expanded upon and critiqued the narrowness and rigidity of these frameworks and showed greater religious inclusivity. Through this analysis the paper integrates prior work on ‘lived religion’ and ‘lived citizenship’ to fuse a ‘lived religious citizenship’ concept, arguing that this adds depth to both fields by recognising that religion cannot be separated from the experience of being a citizen. A focus on lived religious citizenship provides a deeper account of individual identity and highlights the importance of qualitative studies focused on the living out of religion and citizenship.     

Muslim Political Activism or Political Activism by Muslims? Secular and Religious Identities Amongst Muslim Arab Activists in the United States and United Kingdom

Scholarship on Muslim political mobilisation in the West has developed as an important counterpoint to public discourse, which has tended to cast Muslims as a threat to social cohesion, liberal democracy, and national security. But even as scholarly literature has shed light on civic participation among Muslims, it has sidelined the diversity of political identities and values that motivate them. Most, if not all, Muslims in the West find their identities politicised in some way, but the question of whether this leads to a consensus amongst Muslims about the role of religion in public life often remains unexamined. In this article we draw on interviews with seventy-eight activists in Britain and the United States who are both Muslim and Arab to complicate ideas about the political mobilisation of Muslims in the West. Respondents, we show, are far from unified in their views on religion as a basis for political action and mobilisation. Some are keen to place Islam squarely in mainstream political spaces; most, however, are insistent that Islam should remain a private faith and identity and that political mobilisation should take place under the aegis of Arabness or other ‘secular’ identities. Using theoretical perspectives on the public sphere, we explain the complexity of our respondents' political identities and activism. Our overall aim is to broaden perspectives on the ways in which people from Muslim backgrounds participate in public, political life in Western contexts.     

Environmental conversions and muslim activists: constructing knowledge at the intersection of religion and politics

ABSTRACT

This paper examines the production of knowledge by Muslim environmental activists in the United States and Great Britain, applying Eyerman and Jamison’s theory of cognitive praxis to demonstrate how religious and political knowledge and practices are synthesised by the activists. The paper emerges from research conducted with Islamic environmental organizations in the United States and Great Britain in 2012–2013 and utilises data gathered from interviews conducted with Muslim environmental activists working in those organizations and from the publicly available newsletters, websites, and articles produced by the activists and organizations. I argue that through the integration of environmental and religious knowledge, Muslim environmentalists construct a ‘critical community’ within Islam that seeks to transform orthodox Islamic knowledge and practice. In the process, Muslim environmentalists demonstrate that religiously-grounded social movements may simultaneously pursue religious and political change.     

Warriors and Terrorists: Antagonism as Strategy in Christian Hardcore and Muslim “Taqwacore” Punk Rock

This article contributes to new scholarship in the sociological study of religion, which looks at how people define and communicate religion in secular spheres. I show how U.S. Christian Hardcore and Muslim “Taqwacore” (taqwa means “god consciousness” in Arabic) punks draw on the tools of a punk rock culture that is already encoded with its own set of symbols, rituals and styles to: 1) understand themselves as religious/punk and 2) express religion in punk rock environments. I find that both cases draw on a punk rock motif of antagonism—oppositional attitudes and violent rituals and symbols—to see themselves as religious/punk and express religion in punk in different ways. Christian punks use this motif to condemn other Christians for denouncing punk and create space for Protestant evangelical Christianity in punk. Taqwacores use this motif to criticize Islam for its conservatism as well as non-Muslims for stereotyping Muslims as religious fanatics. In the process, Taqwacores build a space for alienated brown youth who exist on the margins of mainstream American culture and traditional Islam.     

阿拉伯民族身份认同的文本学分析

文本被视为一种记忆。本文以《一千零一夜》为例,从文本学分析的角度,探索《夜》反映的阿拉伯伊斯兰帝国鼎盛时期——阿拔斯王朝前期的社会风貌、文化背景和价值观念。通过故事的表征分析,我们看到,《夜》的民族身份认同本质上是以阿拉伯—伊斯兰文化为同一性,并以伊斯兰教为核心思想,"阿拉伯人"不再仅仅限于种族和血统含义,而是包含了宗教和文化概念,甚至以"穆斯林"的宗教身份涵盖"阿拉伯人"的民族身份。     

A Christian identity for the liberal state?

It seems to be impossible for the liberal state to embrace a Christian identity, because ‘liberalism’ is exactly a device for separating state and religion. Discussing the implications of a recent decision of the European Court of Human Rights, Lautsi v. Italy (2011), I argue that this is not necessarily so. If paired with a liberal commitment to pluralism, a Christian identity might even be more inclusive of minority religions than a narrowly ‘liberal’ state identity, which has been the dominant response in Western Europe to the challenge of immigrant diversity, especially that of Muslim origins.     

Reactive transnationalism: homeland involvement in the face of discrimination

In this article we examine whether migrants' perceived discrimination in the country of settlement leads to an increase of their transnational involvement. So far, this so‐called ‘reactive transnationalism’ has not been studied extensively. Based on literature on discrimination and transnationalism, reactive transnationalism is expected to be most prominent among socioeconomically successful migrants, particularly among males and those who consider themselves Muslims. Our research among middle‐class migrants in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, indeed shows that the more respondents experienced discrimination, the more transnationally involved they are, both regarding transnational identifications and transnational activities. While no gender difference was found regarding reactive transnational activities, for women perceived discrimination proves to lead to stronger instead of weaker transnational identifications than for men. The fact that no difference was found between Muslim and non‐Muslim respondents regarding reactive transnationalism suggests that, despite heated public debates about ‘Islam’, in the Netherlands, ethnic divides – being considered as ‘Dutch’ or ‘non‐Dutch’ – are even more prominent than religious ones.     

Religion and Incorporation: Islam in France and Germany

This article attempts to examine religion, particularly Islam, as an emergent type of corporate ethnicity in France and Germany and how Islam is represented and recognized in relation to the established principles governing the interaction of church and state both in the histories of each country and in comparison to the United States. Although religion constitutes one element of pluralism and diversity in which Islam would be the “religion of a minority” among other ethnic groups in the United States, in Europe Islam emerges as a “minority religion” in European nation‐states. Such a conceptual difference is reflected in the understandings and applications of multiculturalism and recognition in European countries and the United States. The question then is how to insure a historical continuity between principles and ideals of states on the one hand and how to integrate the religious diversity raised by Islam into the secularism of liberal European societies on the other.     

Religious Identity and Family Ideologies in the Transition to Adulthood

This article examines how religion shapes family ideologies in young adulthood. Using the 31‐year Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children (N= 909), we find relationships between mother’s religious characteristics when her child was born and the child’s own family ideologies in young adulthood. Further, multiple dimensions of young adults’ religious identities are independently related to their family ideologies, suggesting unique influences of both religious service attendance and the importance of religion. Our results vary across time and family ideologies in interesting patterns, but relationships between religion and attitudes are remarkably consistent. From early in life, mothers’ and children’s religious characteristics shape family ideologies in ways likely to help explain relationships found between religion and family behaviors.     

A home far away? Religious identity and transnational relations in the Iranian diaspora

Abstract In this article, I address the influence of religious identity on the discourses of national belonging that traditionally dominate transnational discussions. Many of the children of the Iranian diaspora live in a state of exile from contemporary theocratic Iran. Living at a temporal and physical distance from the homeland has resulted in differential long‐distance imaginings mediated by the diasporic context. Through the reflections of the children of Iranian migrants on the desire to ‘return’, a picture is painted of differing transnational trajectories divided along religious lines within the Iranian diaspora. For many of the second generation from a Muslim background their centrality in the discourses of national belonging, typified through the conflated ‘Muslim Iranian’ of media representations, feeds a desire for return. In contrast, for many second‐generation Baha ‘is their positionality as a minority, in both the homeland and the diaspora, combines with an eschatological problematizing of national belonging, to lead them away from Iran. In this article I draw on discussions about email communication in the diaspora(s) carried out as a part of research with the Iranian communities of London, Sydney and Vancouver.