Through interviews with 18 Muslim youth (aged 13–24), as well as observations from four different mosques, Anne Grethe Kjelling explores how mosque-active Muslim youth experience the teaching they receive there, and how they experience religious education in public school.
– The thesis shows that these young people are not just passive recipients of knowledge in the mosque, but also active participants who negotiate space, belonging and room for expression, Kjelling explains.
Good relationships with their teachers appear to play an important role in whether they engage, discuss and express disagreement.
– When the young people move into the school classroom, the knowledge they bring from the mosque tends to be given little academic value. Nevertheless, they use this knowledge to negotiate what Islam means – both in encounters with secular classmates and with other Muslim students, says Anne Grethe Kjelling.
In this way, she notes, they can challenge and argue against stereotypical ideas about Islam – but only up to a certain point, as some topics are difficult to discuss.
The thesis also takes a deep dive into close relationships between two young women and their Qur’an teacher, providing a critical perspective on power relations both inside and outside the mosque.
The title of the thesis is «Agency and Affective Layers in and outside the Mosque. An exploration of Muslim youths’ experiences».
Main findings of the doctoral thesis:
- The dissertation shows that the mosque and mosque education are important places for the young Muslims: they are safe spaces where there is room to be religious, and the youth highlight the mosque as an important place for acquiring knowledge. Some mosques are shaped by the fact that their teachers—many of them young women—have attended Norwegian schools and have brought methods and values from those schools into their teaching. For example, students are encouraged to speak up and take part in debates outside the mosque. At the same time, conservative values are communicated that not all informants are able, or wish, to live up to, and the young people negotiate these expectations in different ways.
- The young Muslims feel that knowledge gained at the mosque is valued only to a limited extent in public schools, but they use it in social relationships: to negotiate and argue against stereotypical notions of Islam—not only in encounters with non-Muslims, but also when they meet Muslim youth with more “radical” ideas about Islam. Nevertheless, some classroom discussions are experienced as challenging to participate in when they have religious reasons for their views, and when the values they advocate do not align with the norms of the classroom.
- The dissertation contributes a critical perspective on power relations and structures. The ways in which the young people exercise agency in both the mosque and the classroom bring to light and clarify the power relations that shape these spaces.