‘ISIS is not Islam’: Epistemic Injustice, Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance

Sveinung Sandberg,Sarah Colvin

doi:10.1093/bjc/azaa035

Sveinung Sandberg, Sarah Colvin

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azaa035

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Abstract

AbstractPowerful narratives that invoke religious concepts—jihad, Sharia, shahid, Caliphate, kuffar, and al-Qiyāmah—have accompanied jihadi violence but also inspired robust counter-narratives from Muslims. Taking a narrative criminological approach, we explore the rejection of religious extremism that emerges in everyday interactions in a religious community under intense pressure in Western societies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway, we argue that young Muslims suffer epistemic injustice in their narrative exclusion from the mainstream and assess the narrative credibility they try to maintain in the face of marginalization. We suggest that young Muslims’ religious narratives reject a mainstream characterization of Islam as essentially a religion of aggression and simultaneously join forces with that mainstream in seeking the narrative exclusion of the jihadi extremists.

Highlights

True to its name, criminology has focused on people with experience of the criminal justice system rather than on the general population
Emphasizing the everyday religious character of counternarratives, we examine how young Muslims in Norway construct a ‘storied rejection’ (Joosse et al 2015: 827) of Islamic extremism, potentially constraining harm perpetrated by Muslims
The underlying aim is to understand how storytelling can resist stigma and harm: here, both by constraining violent jihadism and by addressing prejudices about Muslims and Islam that can lead to violence against Muslims

Summary

Introduction

Criminology has focused on people with experience of the criminal justice system rather than on the general population. In that study, Joosse et al (2015: 827) recommend a turn to everyday narratives: rather than focusing on the handful of Muslims who radicalize, researchers ‘should choose instead to focus on understanding the worldviews of the vast majority who do not’. Van Es (2019: 157, 2018) has begun to model a shift in focus to that ‘vast majority’ who reject extremism. We follow their lead but focus more explicitly on the everyday religious narratives of Muslims who repudiate extremist violence. Religious narratives have been seen as a key to understanding violent extremism

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