Between Baghdad and Birmingham: Minorities--Christian and Muslim

This paper deals with majority-minority relations that very much condition relations between Muslims and Christians. The first part gives some factual data about Muslim minorities in Europe and Christian minorities in Muslim countries and makes some comparisons between their situations at present. The second part questions the very idea of speaking of Muslims and Christians in terms of majority and minority, since this imposes a political scheme on human reality, neglecting existing diversities within the communities and in the relations between them. More important questions are: what have Muslims and Christians done with their religions in minority and majority situations? How can a model of participation in civil society replace the traditional Middle Eastern model of social separateness with religiously justified antagonisms? How can the positive potential of minorities be better appreciated? The author pleads for practical realism and enlightened participation instead of fixing and quantifying Muslim and Christian religious communities as closed social entities.     

Integration and identity in Muslim schools: Britain,United States and Montreal

Despite discrimination in mainstream Canadian society, local Muslim communities are a significant resource for immigrants. Recruited by friendship and kin networks, some families choose to educate their children in private full‐time Muslim schools which provide academic/economic credentials and social support. This research depicts a Muslim school in Montreal which both reflects Quebec society and nurtures minority ethnic/religious identity. For many parents, Arabic language classes, academic standards and behavioral norms were as important as the school's religious affiliation. Rejecting the hypothesis that emphasizing religious and cultural identities distanced children from mainstream society, some felt that the psychological and social effects of affirming a child's background were vital to integration and participation in mainstream society. In addition, the school also provided entry into social networks which offered parents an important support system.     

Ethnic identification,religious identity,and psychological well-being among Muslim and Christian Palestinians in Israel

This study examined relationships between ethnic identification, religious identity, and psychological well-being. The participants were 854 indigenous Israeli Palestinians, of whom 520 (36% males and 64% females) were Muslim and 334 (39% males and 61% females) Christian students, respectively. The sample ranged in age between 17 and 38 years, with a mean of 24.31 (SD = 4.43). Measures of Palestinian ethnic identity, religious identity, and psychological well-being were administered to study participants. The analysis revealed that, for each of the Muslim and Christian samples, Palestinian ethnic identity and religious identity were weakly positively correlated, a finding indicating a possible relative independence between these constructs. After partialling out the effect of age and religious identity, increased degrees of Palestinian ethnic identification linked to higher degrees of positive indicators of well-being and to lower degrees of negative indicators of well-being within each of the samples. These findings held, and were even more pronounced, in the case of religious identity, after controlling for age and Palestinian ethnic identity. The study concludes that religious identity may equal or exceed ethnic identity in importance as a feature of minority individuals’ self-concept informing their well-being.     

British Muslim lesbians: reclaiming Islam and reconfiguring religious identity

Religiously infused ideology and doctrine on maleness/femaleness, procreation, family and the condemnatory attitude towards homosexuality has been significantly damaging for lesbians. Lesbians from a Muslim background, in particular, are forced to confront religious dogma, which advocates the punishment of non-heterosexuals leading them to repress and deny their sexuality. Despite this, an investment and belief in religion continues and remains important. In the present study the powerful appeal of religion and its influence on 5 Muslim women who identify as lesbian is explored. The study seeks to understand the way in which the women reconfigure their religious identity to address the difficulties they experience in incorporating discordant identities (faith and sexuality). The data gained indicates that rather than disconnect or reject their association with their faith they contest the condemnation of homosexuality within Islam, which in turn allows them to reclaim their Muslim identity. The alienation and ostracism the women experience from the Muslim ‘community’ has not led to their disaffection from Islam. Rather they resolutely pledge the importance of faith, practice and leading a life according to Islamic moral standards and principles. The women manage and integrate complex and layered aspects of their identity, through their commitment to Islam but also a determination to recognise an intrinsic aspect of the self that they no longer refuse to deny or suppress.     

Ethical selfhood and the status of the secular: Muslim identity in Mumbai

As part of a larger project, this essay contributes to the current anthropological rethinking of categories such as ‘religion’, ‘secularism’ and ‘politics’ in relation to social processes and subjects: a series of ventures that are related, in the Indian context, to modernity and liberal conceptions of statehood, sovereignty and personhood. In discussing everyday phenomena such as piety and religious authority, gender and childraising, and political and professional pursuits in Mumbai, I demonstrate that the ostensibly ‘religious’ domain of Islam is not necessarily the only, or even primary, basis for achieving a self-consciously ethical selfhood for even those who identify as observant and devout Muslims. I argue that the religious domain of Islam in this context is defined as such and intersected by discourses and practices of the self as a political and economic agent defined largely in terms of political modernity.     

Ethos and identity: Expressions and changes in the Israeli Jewish society

Abstract

A fundamental condition for the evolvement of any society is the development of social identity, which confers a sense of belonging and identification. The meaning of social identity is influenced by the ethos that members of a society share. The ethos consists of shared, central societal beliefs that give the society a dominant orientation and characterize it. The societal beliefs that underlie the ethos can change as a result of new, prolonged experiences of the society. Israeli society presents an example of such a process.

During the years of intractable conflict, Israeli society developed societal beliefs of a conflictive ethos that were conducive to successful coping with the conflictive situation. The ethos included beliefs about the justness of the Jews' goals, about security, and about delegitimising the Arabs, together with motifs of positive self-image, patriotism, unity, and peace. These beliefs characterised Israeli Jewish society and contributed meaning to the Israeli social identity. As the peace process developed, the societal beliefs of the conflictive ethos began to change, at least among part of the society members. But as the violent conflict re-erupted in fall 2000, the ethos of conflict is strengthening its standing in the society. The present paper describes the changes in the conflictive ethos with regard to each of the societal beliefs and discusses the implications of these changes for the meaning of the Israeli Jewish identity. Finally, general conclusions regarding the presented conception of social identity are outlined.     

Gender role identity among adolescent Muslim girls living in the U.S.

Gender role identity is acquired through exposure to societal expectations and beliefs about behaviors and characteristics appropriate for males and females. This study examined influences on gender identity among ninety-six Muslim adolescent girls living in the U.S. and attending an Islamic high school. Over three-quarters of the sample characterized themselves as Middle-Eastern or Arab-American. Participants completed a survey in English or Arabic containing background questions, the Bern Sex Role Inventory (Bern, 1974), the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (Phinney, 1992), and a religiosity scale. These young women had comparable femininity scores, but higher masculinity scores than Bern's normative female samples. Results also indicated that those girls who had lived in the U.S. for longer periods reported more masculine attributes. Greater sense of belonging to one's ethnic group and greater religiosity were associated with greater femininity. Thus, identification with one's own culture, adherence to religious practices, and exposure to foreign cultural values were related to gender role identity.     

Gender role identity among adolescent Muslim girls living in the U.S.

Gender role identity is acquired through exposure to societal expectations and beliefs about behaviors and characteristics appropriate for males and females. This study examined influences on gender identity among ninety-six Muslim adolescent girls living in the U.S. and attending an Islamic high school. Over three-quarters of the sample characterized themselves as Middle-Eastern or Arab-American. Participants completed a survey in English or Arabic containing background questions, the Bern Sex Role Inventory (Bern, 1974), the Multigroup Ethnic Identity Measure (Phinney, 1992), and a religiosity scale. These young women had comparable femininity scores, but higher masculinity scores than Bern's normative female samples. Results also indicated that those girls who had lived in the U.S. for longer periods reported more masculine attributes. Greater sense of belonging to one's ethnic group and greater religiosity were associated with greater femininity. Thus, identification with one's own culture, adherence to religious practices, and exposure to foreign cultural values were related to gender role identity.     

Discrimination and religiosity among Muslim women in the UK before and after the Charlie Hebdo attacks

In January 2015, media outlets reported a series of attacks by Islamic terror groups in France, instigated at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo publication. Previous research has indicated that the consequence of exposure to terrorist attacks can extend beyond the immediate victims, with a potentially international reach. This secondary data analysis compares the perceptions of discrimination, religiosity, and religious engagement of 240 Muslim women in the UK, recruited before and after the Charlie Hebdo attacks. The results indicate greater religious engagement and perceptions of discrimination among those women recruited after the attacks. This suggests that the impact of such events may reach beyond the immediate victims, and societies need to develop and provide support in response to such attacks, regardless of the geographical location of the event.     

Narrative identity,practical identity and ethical subjectivity

The narrative approach to identity has developed as a sophisticated philosophical response to the complexities and ambiguities of the human, lived situation, and is not – as has been naively suggested elsewhere – the imposition of a generic form of life or the attempt to imitate a fictional character. I argue that the narrative model of identity provides a more inclusive and exhaustive account of identity than the causal models employed by mainstream theorists of personal identity. Importantly for ethical subjectivity, the narrative model gives a central and irreducible role to the first-person perspective. I will draw the connection between narrative identity and ethical subjectivity by way of an exposition of work by Paul Ricoeur and Marya Schechtman, and a brief consideration of Korsgaard’s work on practical identity and normative ethics. I argue that the first-person perspective – the reflective structure of human consciousness – arises from human embodiment, and therefore the model of identity required of embodied consciousness is more complex and irreducibly first-personal than that provided in a causal account. What is required is a self-constitution model of identity: a narrative model of identity.     

Muslim evolution and conversions in Karikal,South India

In South Asia, conversions to Islam seem to have been effected through persuasion or pressure or due to the social discontent of some low caste Hindus. Some modern scholars lay more stress on the factor of force than on that of persuasion to explain conversions, while some others subscribe to the role played by the Sufis and the missionaries. In the present study, the veracity of these claims with regard to the Muslims of Karikal is explored. It is shown that conversions actually depend upon many local factors such as famine, epidemics, natural calamities and migrations, apart from force or the role of Sufis. It is also stressed that only area-restricted studies can bring to light the real circumstances of conversion in every region of South Asia.     

Muslim women, middle class habitus, and modernity in Indonesia

This article asks how pious religious practices, which are often highly gendered, and implicated in diverse formulations of “the modern” in non-Western contexts. Based on ethnographic research among women members of Indonesia's Prosperous Justice Party (PKS), I argue that PKS women’s pious practices are part of the creation of a particular kind of middle class subjectivity. An examination of two constitutive elements of this habitus, clothing and marriage, reveals how these pious Islamic practices enact class and gender difference, and simultaneously produce “modern” selves. While scholars have shown that gender is an important axis for class difference, I extend this argument to suggest that gendered forms of piety are key ways class in which distinctions are embodied and expressed. Yet the habitus of PKS women is just one of several competing Islamic habitus in Indonesia. The question of which habitus is most culturally legitimate, I maintain, turns on the hegemony of particular understandings of piety and ideas about how modernity should be defined–issues which remain unresolved in contemporary Indonesia.