Reflecting on faith and feminism

Abstract

As we hear news of yet another Western hostage being beheaded at the hands of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) jihadists, the USA and European TV studios are increasingly filled with politicians, sociologists and psychiatrists trying to answer a question: how come so many young Muslim men who grew up in the West are leaving everything behind to join ISIS? A number of arguments are put forward. Proponents of right-wing, essentialist politics have a simple answer: those men are Muslim immigrants who never adopted Western democratic values anyway, simply because Islam as faith is foreign to such values, it is a pre-modern religion whose very scriptures inspire and support barbarous and murderous practices. The fact of age - the youth of those men - is often left out and the focus is on how barbarous religion produces barbarous men. Liberal, non-essentialist views evoke a set of push and pull factors: a feeling of exclusion from the Western societies in which those young Muslim men grew up, and a romantic, idealist search for inclusion into a more welcoming community. The stories of transformation of the young men from nice guys to hardened fundamentalist abound, pointing the finger at Islamist preachers in neighbourhood mosques who prey on the middle-class immigrant kids, the governments that lost control over security issues, and the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. Yet other experts bring into discussion the racism and Islamophobia of the West more explicitly, debating the ways these are manifested in education, housing, or job markets and the ways they affect young Muslim men in particular. Here, the young men who travel from the West to join ISIS appear as naive youth, victims of indifferent or outright inimical Western societies. Some of those debates seem to share a concern that has less to do with the fact that young Muslim men from the West are going 'over-there' to kill other Muslims (or, even, the Westerners) than with the fear that those young men will come back to the West and start killing 'us', 'over-here'.... Language: en