Thinking critically, acting flexibly: Global forms of religiosity among millennial Muslim women in the UAE

Abstract

This article analyzes how liberal, American-curriculum universities and neoliberal entrepreneurship centers play a role in shaping the religious subjectivities of millennial Muslim women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is grounded in 2 years of fieldwork and interviews conducted with middle-class, migrant Muslim women living in the UAE, a highly cosmopolitan urban setting shaped deeply by processes of globalization. Examining how ‘global forms’ materialize in local contexts, the article scrutinizes how the ‘assemblages’ emerging in educational and entrepreneurial contexts play a vital role in shaping women’s practices and sensibilities, conceptualizations of God, and relationships to others. Tracing one woman’s intellectual and religious trajectory through her self-narrative, the article intervenes in debates on the global reach and resonance of American educational ‘imperialism’; the entanglement of religious and entrepreneurial subjectivity; and the contemporary forms of Islamic religiosity in the Middle East.