Responding to the ‘crisis of masculinity’: the perspectives of young Muslim men from Glasgow and Edinburgh,Scotland

Debates about the so-called crisis of masculinity have tended to focus on the experiences of white working class young men and black young men to the exclusion of other groups of men. This article seeks to redress this omission by exploring young Muslim men's knowledge and understanding of the crisis of masculinity and the ways in which they respond to such discourses. Using qualitative data collected during interviews and focus groups with young Muslim men – mainly of Pakistani heritage – living in Glasgow and Edinburgh in Scotland, I demonstrate that young Muslim men's responses to the crisis of masculinity debate are informed by a complex range of issues including their own class position, familial and related gendered expectations alongside the young men's interests in sport and leisure activities.     

‘From cricket lover to terror suspect’ – challenging representations of young British Muslim men

In contemporary media and policy debates young British Muslim men are frequently described as experiencing cultural conflict, as alienated, deviant, underachieving, and as potential terrorists. In this article we seek to convey the everyday negotiations, struggles and structural constraints that shape the lives of young British Pakistani Muslim men in particular. We draw on interviews with British Pakistani Muslim men aged between 16 and 27 in Slough and Bradford. These are from a broader project, which focused on the link between education and ethnicity, and analysed the ways in which values and norms related to education, jobs and career advancement are accommodated, negotiated or resisted in the context of their families, communities and the wider society. A range of masculinities emerge in our data and we argue that these gender identities are defined in relational terms, to other ways of being Pakistani men and to being men in general, as well as to Pakistani femininities. While we recognise the fluidity, instability and situatedness of social identities, we also illustrate the ways in which masculinities are negotiated at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, religion, age and place and enacted within contexts which are themselves subjected to racialised and gendered processes. Our findings offer a varied and contextual understanding of British Pakistani masculinities.     

Intersections of Gender/Sex,Multiculturalism and Religion: Young Muslim Minority Women in Contemporary Bali

This article examines the experience of Muslim female students in high schools in Bali. Since the religion of the majority of the population of Bali is Balinese Hinduism, these young women are part of a Muslim minority – unusual in Indonesia. Data were obtained through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2010. Interviewees were mainly Muslim students, but teachers and Muslim parents were also consulted. Some of the students are a minority within a state senior high school, and some attend a private Islamic school in Denpasar. Interviewees identified choice of school and the wearing of the jilbab (Islamic head-scarf) as issues for them in their everyday lives. The Islamic school is (mis-)perceived as a morally safe environment by parents. The state school does not allow the wearing of the jilbab, showing the limits of multiculturalism in Bali. While the jilbab should express piety and morality, there is some hypocrisy among some young jilbab-wearing women. Some young women have internalised the Balinese objection to poor Muslim immigrants, and feel inferior when they wear the jilbab. The data suggest that their female sex/gender flags their unequal Muslim-minority status in ways that Muslim-minority men do not experience.     

Devout Muslim masculinities: the moral geographies and everyday practices of being men in Turkey

While the academic focus on Muslim women’s dress and comportment has enriched our understanding of the multifaceted formation of pious femininities, there has been much less consideration of the embodied practices of Muslim men. What work does exist on Middle Eastern men’s piety, sexuality, and everyday conduct too often falls back on established categories, such as traditional, Western, or Islamic identities. Yet it is crucial not only to critically examine how we conceptualize masculinity in the Middle East, but also to recognize the political and cultural importance of how masculinities are enacted through everyday practices. In this article, we argue that questions of dress and bodily practice are relevant to an understanding of how young devout Muslim men navigate the complex spatiality of piety, morality, and masculinity in contemporary urban Turkey. Drawing on fieldwork with young devout men in Konya and Istanbul, we illustrate how multiple, competing devout Muslim masculinities participate in the production of uneven moral geographies in these two very different Turkish cities. Further, we find that the possibility of different ways to enact devout masculinity opens questions about the universality of Islamic knowledge and practice. We suggest that the embodied construction and regulation of the looking-desiring nexus tethers male sexual desire to the public performance of Islamic morality. Our intervention is thus to demonstrate how different versions of masculinity and Islamic piety striate the moral geographies of these two Turkish cities, and thereby to further recognition of the contingency and plurality of both masculinity and Islam.     

The Canadian Council of Muslim Women: A Chapter in the History of Muslim Women in Canada

We want to identify and collect data on the special need concerns, interests, talents, successes and frustrations of Canadian Muslim women; we intend to sensitize Canadian Muslim men and women, young and old, so that they may understand each other better and relate to one another more meaningfully and effectively. We want to inform and educate fellow Canadians about our Islamic heritage. We also plan to reach out to, and build coalitions with, other women's groups who share and respect our ideals and concerns. Beyond Canada, we shall join hands with sister organizations in promoting human dignity and world peace. In these endeavors, we seek your cooperation and support. The Canadian Muslim Woman is your voice. Help us make it a voice of reason and moderation.¹     

Hybrid identities: American Muslim women speak

Drawing upon postcolonial theorizing on diasporic positionalities and Homi Bhabha's theorization on ‘third space’ and hybridity, this study shows how young American Muslim women engage in their own interpretations of Islam based on their individual needs and situations. Individual in-depth interviews were conducted with 26 respondents in Ohio and Texas in order to gain insights into the identities of American Muslim women with immigrant backgrounds. Respondents emphasized their own ‘research’ on Islam as an important foundation of their faith. The narratives of the American Muslim women showed that they subverted and transgressed dominant meanings, while negotiating new ones through their everyday lived experiences. However, without indulging in an uncritical celebration of interstitial spaces, this study also strives to highlight the power relations implicit in the performances of complex, hybrid identities in the post-9/11 American context.     

Riding the Rhino: Conservation,Conflicts, and Militarisation of Kaziranga National Park in Assam

Since 2004, media and public opinion in Assam (India) have focused on increasing instances of poaching of rhinoceros for their horns and presence of Bengali‐speaking Muslim peasants, especially in and around the iconic Kaziranga National Park. From hastily made digital films, to anti‐poaching motifs at Durga Puja pandals, the plight of the rhinoceros has occupied an important position in an acrimonious political discourse on Assamese culture. The innocence and dignity attributed to the animal stands in marked contrast to the lack of discussion on the large numbers of young men who have been killed in anti‐poaching campaigns by the state. This article looks at the interstices of class, culture and commerce in an attempt to understand the popular deification of the rhinoceros and implications of the developmental discourse that seeks to put people and rhino in their “rightful” place.     

Local Histories in Global Perspective: A Local Elite Fellowship in the Port City of Quanzhou in Seventeenth-Century China

The Great Mosque of Quanzhou, as a distinctive community center, bound its residents through religious, professional, and educational ties; it also linked the mosque community to other communities with bonds of shared Muslim identity and minority status. The Great Mosque was rebuilt in 1609 under the supervision of the Confucian scholar Li Guangjin. This significant event is evidence of a local elite fellowship in seventeenth-century Quanzhou consisting of three well-known Confucian scholars—Li Zhi, Li Guangjin, and He Qiaoyuan—who had close ties to their Muslim neighbors. They left meticulous records of merchants, particularly Muslim traders. This paper focuses on the fellowship among the three men in order to investigate Quanzhou’s connections to the broader world of global commercial and religious networks and to look more closely at local community life.     

Veiled Meanings: Young British Muslim women and the negotiation of differences [1]

This article draws upon in-depth discussions conducted with young British Muslim women to explore the ways in which embodied differences are negotiated in the construction and contestation of identity. The author argues that dress is an overdetermined signifier for Muslim women, illustrating the role of clothing, particularly the veil, in the discursive formation of 'Muslim women'. The author explores some of the possibilities for reworking dress to create alternative femininities within different spaces, focusing in particular on the construction of 'hybrid' identities and the articulation of 'new' Muslim identities.     

Embodying Islam and laïcité: young French Muslim women at work

In this article, I consider how the racialisation of Muslim identities in the French context affects the education and employment trajectories of six young French Muslim women with post-secondary education, living and working in Paris. I call attention to the pernicious effects of the intersection of three sets of governing discourses: laïcité, post-feminism and neoliberalism. These discourses obscure the way state-endorsed racialisation intersects with class and gender relations to erect barriers to Muslim women's employment opportunities. I examine the complex discursive and performative work Muslim women engage in, to inhabit, reproduce, reject or contest various interpretations of pious feminine Muslim and of French secular republican subjecthood. Work sites become important places where both pious and laïque subjectivities are often simultaneously produced and negotiated through performance and corporeality. In this way, the women's narratives challenge the discursive construction of the incompatibility of pious and secular subjectivities. Participants disrupted their racialisation as oppressed women who embody Muslimness by emphasising their individual and conscious choice to practise their religion. Yet, in doing so, and in the light of the challenges finding work for those wearing the headscarf, they were inadvertently rendered the agents of the discriminatory treatment that disadvantaged them in the labour market. The rational, free-choosing, neoliberal ‘self’ that they construct must then take individual responsibility for the negative consequences on their lives of broader collective racialising discourses.     

The Book of Marriage: Histories of Muslim Women in Twentieth‐Century Australia

From 1860 to the 1920s, Muslim merchants and workers from across British India and Afghanistan travelled to Australian shores to work in the extensive camel transportation network that underpinned the growth of capitalism in the Australian interior. Through marriage, South Asian women in addition to white women and Aboriginal women became part of families spanning the Indian Ocean. Yet, the life‐worlds of these women are absent from Australian historiography and the field of Indian Ocean studies alike. When women do appear in Australian histories of Muslim communities, the orientalist accounts work to condemn Muslim men rather than shed light on women's lives. Leading scholars of Indian Ocean mobilities on the other hand, have tended to equate masculinity with motion and femininity with stasis, omitting analyses of women's life‐trajectories across the Indian Ocean arena. In this article, I rethink the definitions of ‘motion’ that underpin Indian Ocean histories by reading marriage records as an archive of women's motion. Using family archives spanning from Australia to South Asia, this article examines five women's marriages to South Asian men in Australia. Challenging the racist accounts of gender relations that currently structure histories of Muslims in Australia, I turn to the intellectual traditions of colonised peoples in search of alternatives to orientalist narratives. Redeploying the Muslim narrative tradition of Kitab al‐Nikah (Book of Marriage) to write feminist history, this article proposes a new framework to house histories of Muslim women.     

The politics of saving Muslim women in India: Gendered geolegality,security, and territorialization

In this paper, we critically approach the idea of “saving Muslim women” by examining two prominent judgments by the Supreme Court of India and their attendant debates: Mohammad Ahmed Khan vs. Shah Bano Begum and Others 1985 AIR 945, popularly known as the Shah Bano judgment and Shayara Bano vs. Union of India And Others WP(C) No.118 of 2016, popularly known as the Triple Talaq (divorce) judgment. Using the frameworks of feminist geopolitics, femonationalism, and feminist geolegality, we analyze the debates around the Shah Bano and Triple Talaq judgments, looking at how the state employs and often usurps the narrative of gender equality and women's rights for its own purposes. We highlight how laws ostensibly for the protection of Muslim women (and the discourses that surround them) have the effect of strengthening the Hindu nationalist state, and furthering masculinist state building and territory making. By focusing debates on the categories of Muslim men and women, the law becomes a means to resolve the “problem” of Muslims in India.     

Learning to Serve? Employment aspirations and attitudes of young working-class men in an era of labour market restructuring

Economic restructuring in cities in advanced industrial nations has, perhaps for the first time in more than a century, resulted in young working-class people facing poorer economic prospects than their parents did at the same age. For poorly educated and low-skilled young men, in particular, the decline in urban manufacturing employment means that their employment opportunities are limited and the possibilities of gaining and retaining relatively well-paid work have declined in the final decades of the twentieth century. As the socially-valued attributes of masculinity are so dependent upon economic participation, the loss of work for men is seen by many commentators as a crisis, and it has undoubtedly led to increases in poverty, as well as being associated with rises in suicide rates, especially among younger men. In this article, the author explores the ways in which young men on the verge of entering the labour market think about themselves and their employment opportunities. The article is based on interviews with low-achieving young men in Cambridge and Sheffield who were in the final year of compulsory schooling and beginning to think about their working lives.     

CLAIMING PLACE: THE PRODUCTION OF YOUNG MEN'S STREET MEETING PLACES IN ACCRA, GHANA

This article discusses the social significance of the street to young men through a case study of their street meeting places, 'the bases' in Accra, Ghana. Drawing on field research in a suburb of Accra, the paper explores how such meeting places are produced, claimed and defended. The aim is to contribute to discussions of the relationship between the marginalization of young men in Africa, the appropriation of street space and the production of youth identities. The article illuminates how bases are produced in an urban landscape characterized by rapid change, in which young men are excluded from meaningful work and influence, and tend to be represented as a problem. Describing how these meeting places are interpreted both from the outside and from within, the article illustrates the heterogeneous character of such places and the multiple meanings ascribed to them. While hordes of young men hanging out on the street tend to be viewed by the surrounding world as either potentially dangerous or as a sign of marginalization and immobility, the paper stresses that for the young men themselves, these places are also full of motion and serve to orient their lives socially and materially.     

The morality police are coming! Muslims in Norway's media discourses (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

In early 2010, a series of reports appeared in the influential liberal‐conservative Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten drawing attention to what appeared to reporters to be a self‐appointed, de facto Muslim ‘morality police’ attempting to use harassment to exert social control over non‐hijab‐wearing women of immigrant background and gay men in the district of Grønland in the inner city of Oslo. What came to be known in Norway as the ‘morality‐police debate’ demonstrated the extent to which the figure of the Muslim male as an embodied threat to Norway's presumed relative gender equality and lack of homophobia had come to be embedded in the country's media and political discourse. This article suggests that the debate can tell us much about why certain tropes central to Norway's anti‐Muslim discourses have gained such currency across the Norwegian political board in recent years.     

THE EFFECT OF URBANIZATION ON LABOR TURNOVER*

ABSTRACT The paper empirically examines labor market matching as a source of urban agglomeration economies. We work from the hypothesis that job turnover leads to tighter labor matches and estimate the relationship between urbanization and the job mobility of young men. Using a panel from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, we find evidence that young men change jobs more frequently in their early career if they live in larger or in more educated urban areas. The sensitivity of the results to whether the young men were “movers” or “stayers” suggests the possible endogeneity of location.     

The Misinterpretation of Women's Status in the Muslim World

Spiritual equality, responsibility, and accountability for both men and women are well‐developed themes in the Qur'an. Spiritual equality between men and women in the sight of God is not limited purely to religious issues, but is the basis for equality in all aspects of human endeavor. This article's main interest is in the woman's status, and her role within the Arab countries. Islam is the main religion—its principles, values, and practices are dominant in the region. Therefore, this article introduces and discusses the misinterpretation of women in Islam, with special consideration of Muslim women's rights and their roles within the Muslim society. This will help to enhance future discussions of social behavior, values, and attitudes toward women in Islam. In the last few decades there has been a great misunderstanding in many aspects of public consciousness about the role of women in Arabic society. There is a significant gap between the status of males and females. However, this gap is more evident in rural areas. The level of women's rights and roles in many Arabic countries prevents women from improving their economic growth and development. This gender gap is the result of social, religious, cultural, and gender inequality. More specifically, it results from structural constraints faced by women. Gender inequality is not a new issue, nor is it only Muslim women who are suffering from this inequality. There is gender discrimination almost everywhere. The Qur'an is the basis of Islam, and encompasses rules, legislation, examples, advice, history, and system of the universe. It draws a picture of the earth and describes the roles of human beings. The Qur'an is the answer to the spiritual and material needs of the Islamic society, and is an exposition and an explanation of all aspects of life.     

Flexible topographies: Muslim spaces in a German cityscape

This paper examines transient and semi-permanent Muslim spaces, their social construction, use, and relevance for diverse pious Muslims in Stuttgart, Germany. I describe the location, creation, negotiation, and maintenance of such spaces and analyze their position and contribution to a larger urban Muslim social geography. Based on several years of ethnographic fieldwork in Stuttgart, Germany, I illustrate how individuals mark or inhabit spaces momentarily or more permanently as Muslim spaces. I illustrate how at least for the length of a particular encounter, spaces are used in manners that reflect Islamic sensitivities and normativities. These spaces are ever more inseparably and irreversibly woven into the urban fabric. Over time they become and indeed some already have become integral parts of the cityscape. Some spaces in the process of recurrent islamically inspired uses become semi-permanent or even permanent Muslim spatialities, especially in contexts with considerable Muslim interaction or movement. The density of transient encounters and spaces over time contributes to the consolidation of an increasingly well-known and shared urban Muslim social geography. Within this spatiality, pious Muslims know that planned or unplanned encounters will be framed by Muslim beliefs and practices. Paying attention to the ‘elusive evidence of the ordinary’ [Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York. New York: Basic Books, p. 10], I demonstrate how increasingly visible Muslim spaces and practices slowly become part of the urban fabric and every day culture.     

Permission to Stay in “Enemy” Territory?

Muslim scholars writing about the legal situation of Muslims living under non‐Muslim rule during the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries were primarily concerned with whether Muslims should be allowed to live under non‐Muslim rule or whether they should emigrate (or go on hijra) from it. Two ?anbalī legists, Ibn Qudāma (d. 620/1223) and Ibn Mufli? (d. 763/1362), both of whom lived and wrote in Damascus (Ayyūbid and Mamlūk, respectively), address this issue in their legal works (fiqh). Their scholarship, when compared with that of the ?anbalī scholar Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), is instructive, particularly when one considers differences between these scholars’ experiences of non‐Muslim rule. A guiding question is how experience may shape (or fail to shape) a jurist's position on hijra, since the events of the time (the Crusades and, later, the Mongol invasions) forced Muslims living under non‐Muslim control to decide whether they must leave such lands. Loyalty to one's school (taqlīd) appears to have influenced the jurists most in their thinking, but experience shaped how they justified their positions on whether a Muslim must emigrate from lands under non‐Muslim control.     

Planting Roots,Making Place: Urban Autochthony in Port Vila Vanuatu

A contentious issue for Pacific Islanders, as well as researchers of the Pacific Islands, is ni-Vanuatu notions of ‘belonging’ to urban centres. Previous research in Vanuatu has shown that despite generations of people born and raised in Port Vila, the nation's capital, the urban centre is not generally perceived as a ‘place’ to which urban migrants can say they are from. For many, exclaiming that one is ‘from’ town is tantamount to admitting one has ‘no place’. This paper, based on fieldwork among a group of urban young men in Freswota, a residential community of Port Vila, argues that in contrast to this, Freswota young men are generating a new locative identity. Their urban community rather than their parents' home island places is emerging as their primary location of belonging and the source of their sense of self, personhood and social identification. As such, these young men are the urban autochthones of the country.