A repertoire of everyday resistance: young Muslims’ responses to anti-Muslim hostility

ABSTRACT

Research has shown widespread discrimination and hostility toward Muslims in Western countries. There is less knowledge of how Muslims resist, oppose, or challenge such behaviour. Based on in-depth interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway, this study explores responses to anti-Muslim hostility. We describe a repertoire of everyday resistance: talking back, entering dialogue, living the example, denying significance, and talking down. The first three forms occur in face-to-face encounters while the latter two are retrospect sense-making of negative experiences. We conceptualise these responses as everyday resistance because they entail ways of actively countering anti-Muslim hostility, as opposed to passively accepting or adapting to it. This repertoire of everyday resistance can make it easier to avoid victimisation, protect religious identities, and ease the daily lives of young Muslims. Increased attention to narrative resistance in studies of everyday resistance will provide a better understanding of the many ways in which marginalised groups cope, resist, and struggle with their stigma.

KEYWORDS:

• Anti-Muslim hostility
• everyday resistance
• narrative resistance
• religious discrimination
• Islamophobia
• Norway

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Radicalization and Resistance research team at the University of Oslo for conducting and transcribing interviews and for an initial coding of data. We are also grateful to Azin Banafsheh for her assistance in the later more detailed coding of data for this paper. Finally, we would like to thank the two anonymous referees for Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies for their valuable insights and input.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Norwegian Research Council: [Grant Number 259541].