A Return to God? Muslim Youth, Education, Politics, and Identity in a Postmodern World

• In Event: 35.037 - Contesting and Embodying Modernity/Islam: Education and Development Paradigms in Nigeria, Pakistan, Mali, and the United States

Abstract

Objectives:
Across the world, we are witnessing a revival of religion, especially among Muslims. Yet, it is becoming increasingly clear that this increasing religiosity across the world is quite different from our traditional understanding of religiosity, and still, the discourse around religiosity does not pay enough attention to this difference. Drawing on the sociology of religion, political science, and the anthropology of citizenship, I will provide a more flexible conceptualization of religiosity as a way to understand why, when, and how religion is implicated in global and local discourses around identity, politics, citizenship, and schooling and with what effects. Specifically, I will examine the seemingly increasing religiosity in both Muslim majority and minority contexts of the Pakistan and the United States respectively. While the salience of religion in a country that defines itself as an Islamic republic should not come as any surprise, the strength of religion in the Muslim immigrant experience in a secular state is perhaps less understood.

Theoretical framework:
Based primarily on Sudipta Kaviraj’s (2010) secularization theory and notions of thick and thin religion, as well as my own concept of religification (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2012), this more flexible rendering of religiosity is a useful lens from which to examine the seeming increase in religiosity in all aspects of life--from the mundane to the political.

Methods & Data Sources:
I choose to focus on schools where religion--and hence religiosity--gains a particular kind of significance: In a secular state, religiosity is an individual project and in the case of American-Muslim youth, manifests as a reaction to the way the secular and religious are framed in socio-political and school discourses; in a religious state, religiosity is very much a state project that seeps through school curriculum and takes on a particular nationalist discourse that heeds allegiance to religion before the state. The two asymmetrical cases draw on very different kinds of data: ethnographic in the case of US immigrant youth and textbook analysis case of Pakistan.

Results:
Drawing on ethnographic data, within the Muslim minority context of the United States, I will present why working-class Pakistani-Muslim youth feel a greater sense of belonging to what we might consider to be a boundless group (the Muslim ummah) rather than the US by focusing on their experiences in a public school. Within the Muslim majority context of Pakistan, I will draw on textbook analysis data show how religion manifests in government school textbooks as an illustration of how religion and citizenship manifest in a religiously zealous curriculum to shape a particular kind of citizen.

Significance:
Focusing on minority and majority Muslim contexts allows for the exploration of the resurgence of religion especially as it pertains to nationalism and citizenship in two different contexts. Together, they offer insights into the ways in which religion influences identity and feelings of belonging. I argue that a re-reading of religiosity is needed by researchers and policy makers in order to better inform our understandings of politics, nationalism, citizenship, and education, particularly among Muslim communities.

Author

• Ameena Ghaffar-Kucher, University of Pennsylvania