[Review] Máiréad Dunne, Naureen Durrani, Kathleen Fincham and Barbara Crossouard (2017) Troubling Muslim Youth Identities: Nation, Religion, Gender (original) (raw)
Related papers
Conclusions: Intersecting Nation, Religion and Gender
Troubling Muslim Youth Identities, 2017
This chapter draws together the main conclusions of our analyses of four country case studies that set out to 'trouble' Muslim youth identities. Our cases, Pakistan, Senegal, Nigeria and Lebanon, all in the Global South, provided contrasting contexts in which to explore how youth constructed and performed their identities along the intersecting axes of nation, religion and gender. We begin by revisiting the key arguments and theorisations that provided the basis for the empirical work on youth identities. We elaborate our theorisation of identity as a fluid, dynamic and discursive process of becoming, constituted within local places and replete with reference to particular histories and cultures. This identity work involves the constant reiteration of the inclusions of 'us' as well as the difference and distinction from 'others'. Our theorisations resist and trouble homogenised and essentialised understandings of identity and attend to the intersections and sutures of different identity discourses in a located way. This provides the theoretical backdrop for our synthesis of the four country case studies. Our analyses illustrate the complexities of youth identity narratives and the ways these are infused by historical and contemporary discourses of belonging. Importantly, these provide nuanced explorations that challenge 8 Conclusions: Intersecting Nation, Religion and Gender
Pluralising Islam: doing Muslim identities differently
Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2020
This paper challenges the stereotypical homogenisation of Islam often circulated in global discourses. We do this by focusing on the different ways youth across four national case studies constructed their religious identities. The analysis is informed by our understanding that local, national and global discourses are significant to the interpellation of subjects and the production of identities. These on-going processes produce plurality and diversity within and across particular historical contexts. We begin by highlighting the commonalities in youth's representations of Islam. These included proclamations of values such as universal peace and harmony as intrinsic to Islam and the global Ummah. The suturing together of discourses of religion with those of national belonging led us to explore the different socio-historical conjunctures of youth’s respective postcolonial nations. This connection of the local with the national illuminated plurality as the historical and political contours in each nation produced different internal/external others against whom Muslim youth identity narratives were established and re-iterated. Finally, we turn to consider the intersections of these diverse identity narratives with global discursive flows around Islam and the responses these provoked for Muslim youth participants. In this multi-layered exploration of the complex intersections of religion with other identity narratives within four distinct historic and political contexts, we have illuminated the multiplicities and hybridities of youth's religious identities within and across the cases. Through this discussion, we challenge stereotypical tropes evident in the contemporary circulation of global discourses, which too often conflate professions of Islamic faith with religious fundamentalism.
Ethnicities, 2015
With the rise of multiculturalism in Britain the visibility of religion, in particular Islam has increased. This growing religious diversity has created new contexts and affected young people's identity and transitions to adulthood. This article applies and extends Bourdieu's theory of habitus and social fields to a new area which is the study of how South Asian young Muslims living in England negotiate between the Muslim and British aspects of their identity. The set of individual dispositions (habitus), which originates in the family field under the influence of South Asian cultures and Islam, changes and is transformed when it comes into contact with non-Islamic fields. As with the concept of habitus, identity involves reconciling individual dispositions and structural conditions. Based on qualitative insights emerging from 25 semi-structured interviews with South Asian young Muslims, the article presents different strategies of identity negotiations exemplifying the constant and complex interplay between individual agency and the social world.
Profiles of British Muslim identity: Adolescent girls in Birmingham
Journal of Adolescence, 2010
By asking students to fill in 10 statements beginning with 'I am.' and a further 10 statements beginning with 'I am not.' we constructed profiles of British Muslim ethnic and national identity. Participants were 108 British Muslim girls of mean age 12.6 years studying in a single sex girls' school in Birmingham, UK. Using content analysis we found that some adolescent girls are rooted only in their personal identity. Others are rooted in their social identity. We found a number of major categories: rooted in ethnic identity only, rooted in ethnic identity but differentiating self from other groups, rooted in bicultural identity, rooted in national identity and confused ethnic and national identity . Significantly a number of participants were concerned to transcend group identities and described themselves as 'not racist' or 'not prejudiced'. A model of ethnic and national identity is presented incorporating rootedness, differentiation, confusion and transcendence. Ó
The Youth of Muslim Diaspora and Identity Markers: The Crossroads of School, Religion, and Society
Journal of Educational and Social Research
This study addresses the religious identification of young people from an immigrant background in the context of a sociological perspective. This study is essentially focused on young people's perceptions of their religious identities. We tried to understand the religious markers exhibited by young people attending a religious Muslim school in Canada. How do these students construct identity in the gears of religion, school, home society and parental culture? Young people are thus given the opportunity to express their identity-building perspectives. Through an ethnographic stay, the data collection took place in a private school located in Quebec, Canada. The data analysis allowed us to identify some religious identity markers developed by participants during their biographical and social paths. Participants are hence distinguished as a cultural group in a minority context. These religious markers also seem more adapted to the context of young people and more open to others
Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture , 2020
This paper focuses on youth’s constructions of their national identities in two contrasting Muslim-majority contexts – Senegal and Pakistan – with very different histories of nation-state formation and post-independence trajectories. Drawing on case study research, we take up the historical specificities of their respective state formations and emergence as independent nations from their colonial past. After describing our theoretical frameworks and research methodology, we present our analysis of the identity narratives of 65 Pakistani and 75 Senegalese youth. We show that youth in both contexts were proud of their democracies, although with different inflections in each context. Our analysis shows that youth’s national imaginaries were predominantly produced with reference to significant external others which had deep historical roots. In Pakistan, this involved the external other of India, an articulation that has been historically sedimented on religious grounds since their partition. In more contemporary times, youth imaginaries of religion and nation remained intertwined, being constructed together against external others associated with the ‘War on Terror’. Similarly, religion was central to the national imaginaries of Senegalese youth. Senegal’s Sufi leaders were constructed as national icons and particularly valorised for their peaceful resistance to the colonial ‘other’. Youth also valued Senegal’s syncretic forms of Islam, constructing this against ‘jihadist’ Islam that they associated with other African, Middle Eastern and South Asian nations. Finally, our analysis highlights how the salience of external others in youth narratives in our two case studies worked to diminish the significance of internal differences and make internal power hierarchies invisible.
Understanding agency differently: female youth's Muslim identities
Social Identities Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture, 2020
This paper draws on our recent research into Muslim youth identities to consider theoretical and methodological issues with respect to gender and Muslim women's agency. Western constructions of Muslim women often portray them in essentialised ways as subordinated and without agency. We take up alternative theoretical frameworks that illuminate the limitations of modern understandings of the self and agency, and in particular their problematic association of agency with autonomy. These alternative frameworks also alert us to the possibilities of a different ‘ethics of the self' in which cultivation of Islamic values and submission to the will of God can involve agonistic work on the self which is not without agency. They prompt us to consider the methodological limitations of our research approach, in particular how this agonistic work on the self could readily be flattened and rendered invisible within a focus group discussion. We reflect on the kinds of research spaces which could have been more productive for a richer portrayal of Muslim women's agency. We then turn to our data to explore the complex entanglements of our participants' submission and agency, indicating the different ways female youth assumed, negotiated, and contested ‘subordinated’ identities.