University of Cambridge

Graduate Student, Sociology

Girton College

Thesis Title: Inventing the Muslim Cool: Islamic Youth Culture in Western Europe

About

Hello there! Presumably you have clicked on my website because you are interested in my work, so I’ll tell you a little bit about it. Or you have just accidentally hit the link, in which case you are free to have a look around, too, or to hit another random link until you’ve reached the end of the internet [http://www.1112.net/lastpage.html] .

I have just completed my PhD in Sociology at the University of Cambridge, and with the delusion that comes with hindsight, I would claim that I thoroughly enjoyed it. I worked on Islamic youth culture in Western Europe, looking at a variety of youth cultural expressions in music, comedy, fashion and media that carry an Islamic message, and at the reasons and motivations of this trend. A summary is provided below.

Before coming to Cambridge, I graduated with an MA degree in both Sociology and Philosophy from the University of Freiburg, Germany, and got a Graduate Diploma in Middle East Studies from the American University in Cairo, where I spent one year during my graduate studies. While writing my MA thesis on the 2005 riots in French suburbs I lived in Paris for several months.

After my PhD, I have now moved on to work as a senior researcher at Deutsches Jugendinstitut (German Youth Institute). They do applied social research and policy research on anything related to young people. The job is located in Halle (Saale), which adds another city to my list, and I still wonder how it compares to the other ones…


Summary of PhD thesis
Inventing the Muslim Cool: Islamic Youth Culture in Western Europe

Investigating the development of an Islamic youth culture in France, Britain and Germany, my PhD thesis focuses on the fashionable ways in which young European Muslims express their faith. The study takes the form of an ethnography of the scene, which helps to shed light on the questions of what Islamic youth culture exactly is, how it manifests itself and what cultural references it puts into practice. Above all, it explores the reasons why people develop Islamic youth culture and what the biographical, (sub)cultural, religious or societal reasons for this engagement are. This takes both the individual viewpoint and the contextual setting into account. From a theoretical perspective, the phenomenon is studied through the lens of hybridity, youth culture and Islam in Europe.

The thesis is structured along methodological lines, as each stage of data collection and analysis contributes a different piece of knowledge to the investigation. Following an outline of the theory and methodology, the first substantive chapter gives a thick description of the youth cultural artefacts such as religious rap, street wear with Islamic slogans, morally impeccable comedy sketches and internet facilities for the exchange of young Muslims’ issues. In the subsequent chapter I present the findings from my participant observations among the young consumers of Islamic youth culture. The phenomenon appears as a way of having religiously permissible fun and as a youth-compatible form of worship. The observations from both chapters contribute to defining the phenomenon as a youth culture that incorporates Western and Islamic elements into both its substantial content and its form.

A major focus, then, is on the producers and their motivations for engaging in Islamic youth culture. I have conducted over 30 qualitative in-depth interviews with French, German and British producers from different subcultural fields. Applying a content analytic and hermeneutic analysis, I have developed a typology that distinguishes four types of motivation among the respondents. The first type, the Campaigners, want to reach out in a political way to wider society, of which they have a very positive perception. Second, the Improvers use their fashion or comedy, for instance, to establish a dialogue between Muslims and non-Muslims, a motivation arising from negative experiences they have had themselves. The third type, the Empowerers, cares about young Muslims and seeks to foster their self-esteem through encouraging a “cool” and self-confident culture of their own. Fourth, there are the Proselytisers, who use their music or other forms of expression to spread Islam, in most cases among young Muslims, and in some cases also among non-Muslims.

In the subsequent discussion, I go beyond the empirical findings and look at their implications for the situation of young European Muslims and for the literature. The results underline the development of a distinctly European Islam and a strong identification of the population under study both with their European home country and with Islam. For the study of youth cultures, the perspective of hybridity contributes the possibility of mixing two unalike elements such as deep piety and subculture in a seemingly improbable manner. Cultural encounters take place on many levels – the religious, subcultural, generational, the global and the local – and this study contributes to an integrated understanding of these theoretical perspectives.