Discussions about Islam and gender on campus have generally focused on Muslim women’s dress and status in Islam. However, the processes that make Muslim women’s dress on campus so salient have received little attention. This chapter explores gender and Islam on campus, contextualizing it within the politics of dress, with a particular focus on Muslim women’s negotiations of how to dress. We argue that gendered stereotypes about the headscarf or niqab contribute to the construction of Muslim women as extremists or oppressed. We show that Muslims sometimes faced scrutiny or hostility from students and lecturers who read particular dress choices as symbolic threats. Taking an intersectional perspective, the chapter illuminates how some Muslims modify their dress in different contexts to increase a sense of belonging or reduce stigma. We also explore how some Muslims challenge misconceptions about Islam and gender.
This book explores how Islam is represented, perceived and lived within higher education in Britain. It is a book about the changing nature of university life, and the place of religion within it. Even while many universities maintain ambiguous or affirming orientations to religious institutions for reasons to do with history and ethos, much western scholarship has presumed higher education to be a strongly secularizing force. This framing has resulted in religion often being marginalized or ignored as a cultural irrelevance by the university sector. However, recent times have seen higher education increasingly drawn into political discourses that problematize religion in general, and Islam in particular, as an object of risk. Using the largest data set yet collected in the UK (2015–18) this book explores university life and the ways in which ideas about Islam and Muslim identities are produced, experienced, perceived, appropriated, and objectified. We ask what role universities and Muslim higher education institutions play in the production, reinforcement and contestation of emerging narratives about religious difference. This is a culturally nuanced treatment of universities as sites of knowledge production, and contexts for the negotiation of perspectives on culture and religion among an emerging generation. We demonstrate the urgent need to release Islam from its official role as the othered, the feared. When universities achieve this we will be able to help students of all affiliations and of none to be citizens of the campus in preparation for being citizens of the world.
The specific social, intellectual and historical trajectories that produce knowledge about Islam are complex and may be problematic. They are caught up in patterns of cultural othering and stereotyping that distort the ways in which Islam and Muslims are represented, patterns shaped by a narrative of securitization that stoke fear and prejudice rather than dispassionate awareness. University courses are surprisingly fertile as an occasional source of knowledge about religion, but only a small minority draw on them a great deal. Students find more knowledge outside degree programmes, in friendships, and in sacred texts. Both Shi’i and Sunni Muslims want to identify both differences and similarities between academic and spiritual needs. We identify the need to increase conversations about systems of knowledge and they need to be cross-cultural and collaborative to serve humanity at large.
The higher education sector must facilitate discussions around inter-religious co-existence on campus and beyond. In our research, participants used different words to describe their relationships with others beyond their faith, often using ‘inter-cultural’ and ‘inter-religious’ interchangeably. For some religious people their religion may be a matter of cultural or habitual identity rather than a conviction—such as those who describe themselves as marginally, culturally, or nominally religious. Our focus on inter-religious relations repositions Islam and Muslims as equally valued collaborators in the cause of promoting ‘good’ inter-religious relations. We identified three modes of prejudice. Firstly, we identified subtle forms of discrimination and unfair treatment; secondly, a climate of prejudice against Muslims; thirdly, evidenced discrimination, where it is possible to legally prove an act of discrimination. Personal encounters are crucial. Four types of diversity can be found on campus: pluralist, incumbent, fragmented, and indifferent, of which the first two are more harmonious. We recommend that the higher education sector aim for the plural diversity model and that it learns from the incumbent diversity of the Muslim colleges.
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