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

ABSTRACT

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Secular Muslim
• genealogy
• traditional Islam
• authentication
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Tunde Adefioye, Christian Suhr Nielsen and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This idea is expressed in some early studies that highlight the oppositions of young Muslims (women) to the ‘rigid’ and ‘patriarchal’ religious conceptions of their parents (Lacoste-Dujardin 1994, 169), insist on the declining mosque-visit and limited religious knowledge (Lesthaeghe and Surkin 1997, 45) or underscore the gradual erosion of ritual practices (Dessing 2001, 183).

2. Vertovec and Roger’s Muslim European Youth (1998) has been a key intervention in the Anglo Saxon world, which has underlined this generational approach in the study of Islam among the diaspora. Other early works include Sunier (1996) for the Netherlands, Dassetto (1996) for Belgium, Babès (1997) and Khosrokhavar (1997) for France. This generation paradigm continues to figure as one of the key analytical angles through which contemporary transformations among the Muslim diaspora are assessed, both in Western Europe and in the US (Meer 2010; Güngor, Fleischmann, and Phalet 2011; Voas and Fleischmann 2012; Jacobsen 2011; Ali 2011). Some critiques have, however, been expressed towards this perspective. See, for instance, Rytter, who proposes a ‘life-trajectory’ instead of a ‘generation’ approach in order to account for the transitions among these communities (Rytter 2013, 185).

3. The first data were gathered between 2004–2006 and 2008 in the framework of a doctoral thesis that focused on the religious diversity of Muslims in Brussels and Antwerp. The research has been resumed in 2013, with a more distinct focus on this particular group and on Brussels.

4. Of the recorded 72 interviews, 11 are analysed in detail in this paper.

5. All names used in this paper are pseudonyms and interviews have been translated from French by the author.

6. This argument resonates with the constructivist premise, developed by Maurice Halbwachs, that memories are not simply a blueprint of past events, but rather figure as collectively shared enactments of that past which are closely tied with processes of identity construction of the (collective and individual) self (see also Whitehead 2009).

7. Lara Deeb defines, in An Enchanted Modern, this notion of authentication as the process through which the ‘true or correct meaning’ of a particular life form becomes determined (Deeb 2006, 20).

8. The concept of tradition evokes here a different set of associations. Rather than describing an ‘open’ view on religion, as observed earlier, it is used here in its more ‘conventional’ non-liberal, signification. It is, therefore, another illustration of the polysemical nature these concepts, and how these are mobilised to either demarcate continuity with the past or to insist on a discontinuity. I am grateful to the second anonymous reviewer, who noticed this difference.