Abstract
This paper focuses on the move towards “academization” of Islamic religious education in private institutes belonging to the reform movement in Brussels. An attempt is made to think through this move in terms of the sacred knowledge concerned, and the alleged implications for teachers and students of Islam. Some of the crucial elements that go with this shift are the aspiration for “distantiation” in teaching and knowing aspects of internal diversity, as well as the aspired changes in the professor–student (instead of shaykh–disciple) relationship. By focusing on ethnographic examples, the aim is to contribute to our understanding of the importance of the internal debates instigated by an attempt towards academization, the search for coherence that goes with it, its repercussions on people’s daily life and personal sensibilities, as well as on Islamic expert authority formation.
Highlights
This contribution is based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2015 in three mosques and three private Islamic institutes from a Moroccan background in the region of Brussels (Belgium)
People of Moroccan descent account for the largest minority group in Brussels, while they make up the majority of the 200,000–300,000 (17–25%) inhabitants of Brussels who self-identify as “Muslim” (Willaert and Deboosere 2005, pp. 73–77; Bousetta 2008, p. 398; Dassetto 2011, p. 23)
In four of the six places where I have worked, the explicit aim of their courses was a pious personal and communal reform through a re-engagement with one’s own Islamic tradition by acquiring additional discursive and practical knowledge about it. This meant that Islamic religious knowledge gathering was not merely aimed at the correct performance of Islamic rituals, and at the acquisition of a specific ethical conduct
Summary
This contribution is based on ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2015 in three mosques and three private Islamic institutes from a Moroccan background in the region of Brussels (Belgium). In four of the six places where I have worked (which included the mosque courses and a women-only Islamic institute), the explicit aim of their courses was a pious personal and communal reform through a re-engagement with one’s own Islamic tradition by acquiring additional discursive and practical knowledge about it. Fatma’s personal struggles and changed sensibilities show how this process of “academization” and distantiation between the object and subject of knowledge was never completely fulfilled; or in other words, how nuances in the semiotic ideology had repercussions on humans’ relation to the Texts, and on what that meant for acting as a rational agentive subject per se (Keane 2007) As will be shown in the paragraphs, it had repercussions both for their self-understanding in a context of tawhıd (understood here as the Oneness of God as the sole Creator of everything seen and unseen, human and non-human, actualized and potential), as well as for conceptualizations of what it means, and requires, to teach sacred knowledge. Fatma’s personal struggles and changed sensibilities show how this process of “academization” and distantiation between the object and subject of knowledge was never completely fulfilled; or in other words, how nuances in the semiotic ideology had repercussions on humans’ relation to the Texts, and on what that meant for acting as a rational agentive subject per se (Keane 2007)
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