Religious Reflexivities among North American Muslims

Abstract With the dramatic increase of post–9/11 anti-Muslim sentiment, researchers are grappling with studying the impact of Islamophobia on Muslims within and outside Muslim-majority contexts. While diasporic Muslim public experiences have been documented extensively in extant research, the ways in which Islamophobia relates to private family life have received little attention. In addition to the lack of scholarship on diasporic Muslim family life, there is a need to better theorize engagement with Islamic beliefs and practices. Although researchers document the occurrence of Muslim “reflexivity,” or the critical engagement with religious identities, beliefs, and practices, they nevertheless unintentionally reify a uniform Muslim reflexivity. Using the diasporic Muslim household as a site of investigation, this study is the first to theorize and empirically demonstrate the social patterns of multiple forms of Muslim reflexivity. In this article, two patterns of reflexivities are highlighted that relate to different religious approaches: exclusivist and inclusivist. The analysis draws on theories of racialization and gender and utilizes a sample of Pakistani Canadian Muslims to parse differences between exclusivist and inclusivist reflexivities to explore how divergent approaches to religion coincide with contrary patterns in family life. In order to understand these divergent patterns, the concept of Muslim reflexivity is extended by incorporating religious approach. Exclusivist reflexive Muslim participants, who view only one approach as correct, are preoccupied with authority given their identification with a marginalized minority group. Thus, they perceive ethnic boundaries as bright and gender boundaries as rigid. The focus of their reflexivity is dawat, or teaching others about the “true” Islam. This contrasts with inclusivist reflexive Muslim participants, who view multiple approaches as correct. They do not perceive their minority group as being threatened and thus do not seek out authority to legitimize their identity. In turn, they perceive ethnic boundaries as blurred and maintain gender-fluid attitudes and practices. The focus of their reflexivity is akhlaq, or having polite manners and ensuring mutually satisfying intimate relations. By highlighting multiple forms of reflexivity, this article serves to remedy the ways in which researchers reify assumptions about Muslim engagement with Islam: rather than enacting reflexivity in a uniform way, diasporic Muslims engage in a plurality of reflexivities.

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