From one Islam to another: A paradoxical agency of the entry into female students’ careers

Abstract

The European continent appears as a new transcultural environment at the heart of globalization in which religious subjectivities are developed. I observe this more specifically in the socioreligious trajectories of the descendants of Muslim migrants. This paper focuses on the mobilization of Islam in its social manifestations among female Muslim teachers in Muslim private schools, in comparison with the Islam of young female students at university. Research with the professors allows us to question the religious activity of the interviewees and how they develop a long-term lifestyle, including in a context marked by stigmatization, against the backdrop of the results of our previous work on the emancipation pattern of the “sisters in Islam”. This analysis is based on a comparative approach that aims to capture a new way of being in the French society, in a religious frame of reference that is being reinvented.