Respondents from Muslim countries also expressed this sense of ‘something missing’ and of feeling ‘lost’. However, they expressed their identity crisis more in terms of feeling the repercussions of “accelerated globalization” and rapid modernisation taking place within their countries, especially in relation to the erosion of Islamic cultural values (Robertson 1993:6). Ironically, unlike Muslims in Britain or Continental Europe, these respondents were actively discouraged from being too religious or cultural, exemplifying the dramatic tension between identity and non-Western modes of modernity, which Göle (2005) suggests must be resolved in case memories of the past are completely annihilated in the process (Göle, cited in Eisenstadt 2005:92). That is, the “reflexivity of modernity” made respondents sensitive to the loss of traditional culture, the symbols of which are usually honoured and “reinvented by each new generation as it takes over its cultural inheritance from those preceding it” (Giddens 1994/1990:36,37).
Nada, the eldest respondent (in her fifties), recalled how highly Westernised postcolonial Morocco was during her adolescence in the 1960s, highlighting the significance of socio-economic status and class in the whole process of religious conversion:
When I was 15, I used to hang around with friends in coffee shops. We were living in Morocco, but it was more like Europe—we wore jeans and smoked cigarettes. Everything was out in the open and nobody said anything to us.
Sumayyah also expressed the feeling that “something was not right” as she grew up in her native Malaysia, another rapidly modernising country. She linked this feeling to a deficiency in Malaysia’s school religious studies programme, which failed to explain Islam to its students. Because of this weak understanding of her Islamic heritage, Sumayyah felt she was unable to locate herself within Malaysia’s or Islam’s history (Weedon 2004:25).
In Malaysia, we start learning about Islam even before kindergarten, but the approach is very much shaped by the government. I’m 44 now, and after all those years of religious education, it wasn’t until 2004 that I realised there were key aspects I hadn’t learned—not knowing why I pray, why we are created, all that bit was left out. Tawheed was left out.
The same was true for Zaynab, also native to Malaysia, whose identity conflict as an adolescent was compounded by her parents’ mixed heritage, which resulted in her “withdraw[ing] from religious commitments altogether instead of choosing one parent’s religion over another” (Hunt 2007, cited in Roberts and Yamane 2016:105):
I come from a family that is very confused. My parents had a mixed marriage, and both were very much into their culture. That really put me off. I felt like I didn’t belong to anyone. I felt left out.
They didn’t explain the Qur’an to us, they just sent us to Masjid and told us to go and read.
The confusion Sumayyah and Zaynab experienced in relation to the different madhabs (canonical schools of thought) popular in Malaysian culture exemplifies the sort of reflexivity within “individually lived experiences” necessary in the “redefinition of the frontiers between modernity and identity” (Eisenstadt 2005:95-99).
I left both the Shafi’i and Hanafi imams and became a typical teenager not practising, just partying. I became a very social, modern, hardworking girl, travelling the world. I had no religion back then because I’d been put off by these two cultures. (Zaynab)
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