Making European Muslims

Religious Socialization Among Young Muslims in Scandinavia and Western Europe

Mark Sedgwick, Mark Sedgwick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317655657
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Making European Muslims provides an in-depth examination of what it means to be a young Muslim in Europe today, where the assumptions, values and behavior of the family and those of the majority society do not always coincide. Focusing on the religious socialization of Muslim children at home, in semi-private Islamic spaces such as mosques and Quran schools, and in public schools, the original contributions to this volume focus largely on countries in northern Europe, with a special emphasis on the Nordic region, primarily Denmark. Case studies demonstrate the ways that family life, public education, and government policy intersect in the lives of young Muslims and inform their developing religious beliefs and practices. Mark Sedgwick's introduction provides a framework for theorizing Muslimness in the European context, arguing that Muslim children must navigate different and sometimes contradictory expectations and demands on their way to negotiating a European Muslim identity.

1
Introduction

Families, Governments, Schools, Alternative Spaces and the Making of European Muslims

Mark Sedgwick

The first decade of the twenty-first century focused attention on northwest European¹ Muslims, partly because of the growth of what is generally called the Far Right, but what may be better understood as “neo-nationalism”²; partly because of various real social and economic issues among communities of immigrant origin; and partly because of the impact of occasional jihadi violence. Within this, much attention has been paid to the topic of “European Islam.” There has been general agreement that a European Islam is emerging or should emerge, but there has been a lack of agreement over what is actually happening. This is the discussion to which this book contributes by looking at a key stage in the development of Islam in Europe that has received little systematic attention: how European Muslims become Muslim in the first place and what Islam and being Muslim means for their parents and for them. Unsurprisingly, identity emerges as being important. More unexpectedly, proper behavior—the avoidance of temptation and danger—also emerges as being very important.

Conceptions of “European Islam” are varied. Politicians and many members of Europe’s general public often understand European Islam to mean “moderate” Islam. What is meant by “moderate” has never been very clear, but for many the term seems in effect to mean “relatively unimportant”— an understanding of “moderate” that reflects the continued public influence of analyses of modernization that were popular during the first three quarters of the twentieth century. According to this classic modernization theory, religion inevitably fades into insignificance in the face of advancing modernity. Though still popular among politicians and the general public, including many who play a part in the socialization and schooling of young European Muslims, classic modernization theory now attracts little support among scholars.

Many scholars have instead understood the dominant dynamic in the Europeanization of Islam as “individualization.” Islam does not fade into insignificance, but becomes an individual matter, as Islamic “religious authorities” lose their influence. As Frank Peter has pointed out, despite much scholarly support for the individualization thesis, disagreement exists about what individualization actually means. For some, notably Joscelyne Cesari, it in effect means liberalization—the growing autonomy of the individual in choosing which elements of Islam to adhere to, a process often referred to as bricolage, which may be described in terms of the supermarket, where each shopper fills his or her basket with an individual selection of the goods on offer. For others, notably Olivier Roy, it does not mean liberalization, but rather the deculturalization of Islam, a deculturalization that is not attended by significant changes in doctrine—not attended, that is, by significant bricolage.³ It seems likely that both approaches are right in part: sometimes liberalization occurs, but core elements of Islam remain constant. This is not, however, necessarily a Europeanization of Islam. Schirin Amir-Moazami and Armando Salvatore have in effect questioned the assumption that Islam was ever monolithic in the first place, pointing out that a variety of discourses on, and understandings of, Islam have been present for centuries outside Europe.⁴ They have a good point. Bricolage may be characteristic of the religiosity of modern Europe, but it is not exclusive to it.

Accompanying the discussion on European Islam has been a discussion on identity. Again, there is a gap between politicians and the general public on the one hand and scholars on the other. For politicians and the general public, questions of loyalty have often been behind the interest in identity. In raising fundamental questions about loyalty, the emergence in the early twenty-first century of “home-grown terrorism” focused attention on identity, since loyalty and identity are often understood to be related. And loyalty and “moderate Islam” are also often understood to be related, with moderate Islam and loyal Islam often being seen as one and the same.

Scholars, however, have generally had a somewhat different understanding of the importance of identity. For them, identity is not primarily about loyalty. Scholars commonly distinguish between individual or personal identity and collective identity, generally recognizing two varieties of collective identity, the social and the cultural. Both of these are important sources of meaning for any individual. And, as Sissel Østberg has pointed out, a problem therefore potentially arises when social identity and cultural identity do not coincide.⁵

There is, however, more to being Muslim than identity. Islam is not just a source of identity, but is above all a religion, and at an individual level religions are about doctrine, myth, practice and behavior, as well as about identity. Doctrine and practice have received more recent scholarly attention than myth and behavior, or what this introduction will call “proper behavior,” so as to distinguish it from practice, which is of course also a form of behavior. With regard to doctrine, Talal Asad has proposed that Islam may be understood as a “discursive tradition,” a body of related understandings or perhaps a series of overlapping discursive traditions.⁶ This is an understanding that Schirin Amir-Moazami and Salvatore use in their work. It is a useful understanding, and has been expanded to include practice, especially by Saba Mahmood and Charles Hirschkind, who in effect see Islam as also being a ritual tradition.⁷

As Mahmood explains, ritual is sometimes understood in opposition to the spontaneous, creating an opposition of “stereotypical versus spontaneous action, rehearsed versus authentic emotions, [and] public demeanor versus private self.”⁸ Mahmood, however, proposes that Islamic ritual and practice may instead be understood after Foucault as “technologies of the self,” producing a particular habitus, a difficult but again useful term also employed by Bourdieu and Gregory Starrett, among others, though in different senses. Mahmood uses the term to describe a way of being, including not only practice and doctrine, but also all that they, in turn, produce, and linking the individual to the larger society and culture. For Mahmood, habitus is “a quality that is acquired through human industry, assiduous practice and discipline such that it becomes a permanent feature of a person’s character.”⁹ In this sense one may speak of an “Islamic habitus,” though there is of course more than one possible habitus within Islam. Although Bourdieu would not agree, it may also be possible in this sense for an individual to have more than one habitus. The Islamic habitus is similar to what Iram Khawaja calls “Muslimness” in this book, and to what Laura Gilliam elsewhere calls “habituated dispositions”¹⁰ and Østberg simply calls “a way of life.”¹¹ Habitus also overlaps with proper behavior, which is often defined in Islamic terms: the eating only of food that is halal (i.e., religiously permitted) and abstention from premarital sex are both part of proper Islamic behavior. Proper behavior is sometimes defined differently by non-Muslim European society, which cares more about whether food is ecological and fair-trade than whether it is halal. European society and Islamic doctrine agree, however, with respect to some other aspects of proper behavior, including virtues such as altruism and honesty and vices such as the use of narcotics drugs and the criminality associated with gangs. These virtues are encouraged and these vices are discouraged equally by Islamic doctrine and by European laws and social norms. Proper Islamic behavior and European conceptions of proper behavior sometimes differ, but often agree.

Habitus and proper behavior, then, are major topics considered in this book, as are related discourses and discursive practices, following in the tradition of “the anthropology of Islam” as represented by Mahmood and Hirschkind. Habitus also brings us back to identity, since, as Gilliam points out, “identification with a Muslim community of practice” is an important aspect of identity.¹²

The school known as the anthropology of Islam is appreciated by many for having provided a solution to the problem of how to avoid two well-established and problematic positions—essentialism and cultural constructionism. At its extreme, the essentialist position, criticized most famously by Edward Said, holds that Islam is one and has an autonomous existence and that Islam is the essence of Muslim societies and individuals and is thus the route to understanding both of these. Cultural constructionism, in contrast, views individuals, cultures and societies as the route to understanding Islam, which has no autonomous existence and is multiple and diverse. Extreme essentialism ultimately denies the existence of the individual, whereas extreme cultural constructivism ultimately denies the existence of Islam. The concept of Islam as a discursive and ritual tradition was thus welcomed as a liberation from the sterile contest between these two opposing positions.

The anthropology of Islam, as it has so far developed, however, may also be criticized. In the first place, it may be too normative. It might be argued that Mahmood and Hirschkind’s informants tended merely to repeat normative discourse drawn from classic Islamic sources, and the resulting understandings often merely mirrored those sources. It has been argued by Samuli Schielke that there is “too much Islam in the anthropology of Islam,”¹³ that the anthropology of Islam forgets that not all Muslims are devout activists, and that even devout activists have lives that include many things that have nothing to do with Islam. This is undoubtedly true, and it is possible that what started with Asad as an attempt to avoid essentialism can become simply another form of essentialism, with Muslims understood only as Muslims, and understood then in terms of normative discourse. Asad noted that power must be considered, because disputes within a discursive tradition do not take place in a vacuum,¹⁴ but sometimes much of the anthropology of Islam does seem to assume a vacuum, and to ignore power.

Some critics go further, arguing that to understand Muslims as Muslims is not only to essentialize them, but also to reinforce mechanisms of oppression, both those that operate within the imagined “Muslim community” and those that operate from without. In understanding Muslims as Muslims, researchers may join with some European governments, which, it is suggested, accidentally support the construction of restrictive norms and impede the development of individualized, varied, fluid versions of Islam. Normative understandings of Islam promoted by religious authorities that have the ear of government are not necessarily those of many or most Muslims and are not necessarily in the interests of society as a whole. Understandings of Islam that are favored by parents are not necessarily in the interests of their children.¹⁵

These are valid concerns. This book’s contributors agree with Shielke that not all Muslims are devout activists, or even devout; that even the lives of the devout contain much that is not related to Islam; and that Muslim children are many other things as well as Muslims. This, and the related point that there are many ways of being Muslim, is important. However, it is also important not to go too far, not to take the Islam out of Muslims altogether. Even though not all those who are identified as Muslim by governments, by Islamic religious authorities, or even by their parents need actually be Muslim in any important way, many are, and some who are not identified as Muslims by these sources of authority choose to define themselves as Muslims, as Gilliam shows in this book. Even if the Islamic habitus is only one part of any individual Muslim, and a part of varying importance and significance at that, it is still one of the most important things that makes a Muslim Muslim—or, by a slightly different definition, it is precisely what it is that makes a Muslim. The Islamic habitus of any given individual varies from the normative in various ways, of course. Actual, everyday, lived Islam is not the same as normative Islam, whether that is the normative Islam constructed by Islamic religious authorities or that constructed in books written by non-Muslim scholars. Similarly, the impact of power—of government policies, of parents and schools and of peers—is among the questions that this book seeks to answer on an empirical basis, by examining what religious and nonreligious norms are actually being supported, for what reasons, and with what effects.

The origin of the religious habitus and of related identities, like the origin of much else, lies in childhood, though of course it changes, to a greater or lesser extent, in later life.¹⁶ And like many other forms of socialization, religious socialization begins in the family, which is why this book also starts in the family. In Part 1, the book looks at Islamic religious socialization in families and in “mosque schools,” which are sometimes also called Quran schools. It shows how this socialization aims not only to develop an Islamic habitus, but also to reinforce identity and to encourage proper behavior, protecting young European Muslims from the many temptations and dangers present in European society—from alcohol and premarital sex to drugs and gangs. Some parents, notably Swedish Somali parents, feel that the proper socialization of their children must be done against the efforts of the surrounding society.

In religious Muslim families, in Europe as elsewhere, religious socialization takes two main forms. One is learning those “technologies of the self” that contribute significantly to the production of the Islamic habitus, notably prayer and fasting, but also including the many acts that incorporate Islamic practice into general life: the etiquette (adab) relating to cleanliness, eating, starting a journey and other such acts. Whether or not these are taught intentionally, children in a family where parents pray normally join them, first in play and then in earnest. The same is true of fasting. The other main form that religious socialization takes within the family is more doctrinal: the answers received to the questions that all children ask about life and death involve God, and answers to questions about right and wrong involve the Quran and the Prophet. In addition to these main forms, many other factors, from the social to the emotional, intervene.

In the book’s second chapter, Marianne Holm Pedersen looks at how thir...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction Families, Governments, Schools, Alternative Spaces and the Making of European Muslims
• Part 1 Islamic Religious Socialization
• Part 2 Government Policies
• Part 3 Public Schools
• Part 4 Alternative Spaces
• Contributors
• References
• Index