Submitting to God, submitting to the Self

Posted on October 31st, 2008 by martijn.
Categories: Important Publications, Young Muslims.

Doctoraatsverdediging
Submitting to God, submitting to the Self. Secular and religious trajectories of second generation Maghrebi in Belgium, is based upon a PhD research by Nadia Fadil.

The central hypothesis developed in this dissertation is that in a secular context religious and/or secular subjectivities are primarily disciplined and regulated through a liberal agency model, while non-liberal ways of relating to the religious self are problematised. This hypothesis draws on a different reading of the religious individualization narrative than is generally understood within social theory. Following Foucault and Rose’s (1999) work, the process of (religious) individualisation is understood as a specific mode of goverance which draws on the language of ‘freedom’, ‘autonomy’ or ‘authenticity’ in the regulation and disciplining of religious (and secular) bodies and subjectivities. Religious individualisation is thus not viewed as a structural development wherein the individual’s potential to recompose his or her religious practice is enhanced, but rather as a particular mode of (religious) subjectivation (and governance) that is primarily grounded on liberal scripts and sensibilities.

The first purpose of this dissertation is thus theoretical as it aims to reconceptualise certain facets of the secularisation paradigm, i.c. religious individualisation, from a post-structuralist angle. Yet it does so in an empirical manner: by examining how second generation Maghrebi in Belgium (Brussels and Antwerp) make sense of their religious and/or secular selves, i.c. which discursive registers underpin their self-fashioning process. Interviews with second generation Maghrebi linked to Islamic and socio-cultural organizations have been conducted in the course of a fieldwork between 2003 and 2005 in Brussels and Antwerp.

English Summary: (Dutch summary can be found on the website of KU Leuven) (more…)

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