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This article offers a comparative study of everyday sexual ethics among Dutch Sunni Muslim and evangelical Christian young adults, both those born into religious families and those converted later in life. In European public debates, the sexual values of observant Christians and – especially – observant Muslims, are commonly understood to deviate from progressive norms. Particularly for Muslims, this has become a ground for questioning their belonging to the moral nation. Our ethnographic analysis complicates these conventional representations, which are partly reflected in quantitative survey research. We argue that the sexual ethics of the young Muslims and Christians we studied are multi-layered, situational, and dialogical. Discussing the convergences and divergences between these groups, we point to a paradox: while Muslims tend to be set apart as sexually ‘other’, the young Christians we worked with – and to a lesser extent the converted Muslims – put strikingly more effort into distinguishing themselves from, and criticising, dominant sexual norms.

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In this article, I examine the discursive as well as embodied and sensorial forms of persuasion that undergird the formation of religious authority, Islamic authority in the Netherlands more specifically. I argue that particular momentary occasions can play important roles in facilitating the mobilization of these discursive and non-discursive forms of persuasion. Based on a close reading of an event I participated in during my fieldwork among young Muslims in the Netherlands, the analysis focuses on such a key moment of persuasion, paradoxically characterised by a preacher's apparently failed attempt at conversion. Despite this failure, this preacher can be seen to have succeeded in offering his young Muslim audience a model of how to be a Muslim and of how to represent Islam to non-Muslims. Apart from contributing to anthropological debates on Islamic authority in Europe and religious persuasion more generally, I discuss an important new type of Islamic leaders -referred to here as 'travelling preachers' -and the new kinds of youth-centred settings of religious learning in which they operate.

This volume investigates the dialectical relationship between pursuits of religious coherence and experiences of moral fragmentation by focusing on self-perceived senses of failure. Our premise is that senses of failure offer an important and productive entry point for the study of lived religion in today's world, where religious commitments are often volatile, believers are regularly confronted by alternative lifestyles, worldviews or desires, and religious subjects tend to be self-reflexive. While the experience of failure in religious life has always been a central theme in theology and religious thought, it has long received little attention in the study of lived religion by anthropologists and others. In recent years, however, there has been a growing interest in various modes and moments of (self-perceived) failure, including feelings of incoherence and imperfection in religious life (Lechkar 2012; De Koning 2013; Jouili 2015; Strhan 2015), uncertainty about one's religious identity and the risk of falling back on pre-conversion relationships or habits (Marshall 2009; Pype 2011), doubt about religious truth claims (Luhrmann 2012; Liberatore 2013), ambivalent moral commitments (Schielke 2015), suspension or lack of religious meaning (Engelke and Tomlinson 2006), and unsuccessful careers of aspiring religious leaders (Lauterbach 2008).We focus on Islam and Christianity, not only because these are the main religious traditions in terms of adherents, but also because the anthropology of