This study explores some major themes in relation to marriage among contemporary Western Muslims. These themes include gendered ideals and expectations of the potential spouse, generational differences, inter-religious marriages for Muslim women, and individual choice and parental authority in mate selection. It re-evaluates the Islamic notion of marital compatibility (kafa’a) and shows how this notion is understood and can be applied to contemporary Western Muslims. Due to little academic research on the problem particularly of unavailable spouses, the study relies primarily on blogs, online discussions of marriage among Muslims, and internet articles on Western Muslim marriages. The dilemma faced by Western Muslims, particularly females, is that there is a lack of compatible available husbands for them. The study finds that, according to marriage-minded women, this unavailability is largely due to traditional expectations of gender roles from potential husbands contrasted against the women’s unconventionally older ages, focus on education and career, and overall understanding of power dynamics in marriage. The study also explores changing methods of mate selection among Western Muslims, which include services offered by Islamic centers, Internet matchmaking, and marriage events—where the average male participant is younger than the average female participant. As the age of marriage-minded females increases, their individual choice is more recognized in their marriage while their options of suitable men decreases significantly. Many of them therefore turn to interfaith marriages, which are not recognized by Islamic law, although some religious authorities across the West them on the basis of necessity. Western Muslim women are in a unique but complicated space where they are struggling to maintain their personal ideals of education and careers and are seeking partners who share these ideals; yet, with the tension between men’s expectations of women and women’s of men during courtship, and the role of family in mate selection, the problem of marriage becomes more complex with the various axes contributing to it. / text

Religion has a spiritual message embedded, as its purpose is to establish a relationship between the seen and the unseen worlds. However, to allow people to understand its spiritual message, it uses symbolism in such a way that the physical person would try to comprehend the inner meanings of the spiritual message that lies therein. This study is not about ‘how' the Hajj rituals are to be performed, because the answer to that question is trivial and have been thoroughly studied throughout centuries. This study is an attempt to answer the question ‘why.' Why is the Hajj to be performed in a certain way? This study delves into what must be a deeper meaning. Its methodology is through the etymological usage of the terminologies textually and intertextually between Scriptures, including the Qur'an and the Bible. It attempts to explore the polysemous nature of the root words and to resurrect the inner meanings that can be ascertained from the root. This study introduces a new methodology for Scriptural hermeneutics, while comparing the methods used by Biblical and Qur'anic scholars. Once the methodology is established, it is applied to increase understanding of the inner meanings of the Hajj rituals portraying the journey of a dead soul from death, sacrifice of the ego, resurrection into life, and spreading the seeds and Water of Life to other dead souls trying to fight their egos and, likewise, resurrect them into life.

The veil is a historically constructed site, a fixed sign used in Euro-America to conveniently and clearly dress the borders between east and west. Recent disciplines like visual and cultural studies, Third World feminism, and postcolonialism have challenged this assumption positing instead the veil's polysemy and its different sometimes multiple meanings according to the individual, and the historical and geographical context. Representations of the veil in contemporary art have appeared quite frequently in Euro-America in the last couple of decades, and in the thesis I set out to demonstrate that many of these visual texts also propose significant reinscriptions of the sign capable of displacing dominant discourse. However, because of the veil's metonymy in Euro-American mainstream culture and 'collective gaze,' the thesis first charts the topography of the trope in history, discourse and visual culture as its entrenchment obviously complicates any use of the sign by artists of Muslim origin exhibiting within the western art apparatus. It then traces three alternative narratives of the veil evident in contemporary practice underscoring their critical importance with regards to gender, politics, representation and the conception of self. I must however concede that the major impetus behind the analyses of the contextualized veil, the postcolonial veil and the subject-ive veil is a belief in the radical power of visual texts to facilitate transnational literacy and translation. The study therefore focuses on the relationship between the location -territorial or ideological- of the gaze and the image. It demonstrates that this relationship or space is protean, plural and full of promise both individually and collectively.

Syftet med detta examensarbete är att få kunskap om hur ett antal idrottslärare arbetar vid simundervisning med muslimska flickor och detta för att på så sätt hjälpa mina eventuella framtida muslimska elever att bli simkunniga. Detta eftersom forskning visar att en stor del av eleverna i skolan som inte kan simma är elever med föräldrar från ett annat land eller elever som själva har invandrat. Intervjuerna har genomförts med fem lärare där alla undervisar i idrott och hälsa på mångkulturella skolor i en mellansvensk stad. Samtliga lärare anser att simundervisningen är ett mycket viktigt moment att arbeta med, men ingen av dessa lärare ägnar någon större tid åt att undervisa i simning. Undersökningen visade att simundervisning går bra att utföra även om eleverna är muslimska flickor. Forskningen bekräftar att invandrarelever behöver simundervisning i skolan.

This thesis explores how Muslim youths’ lifeworlds are depicted and narrated in the following two studies on Muslim youth in Sweden and Denmark: Muslima (2007) and Samtidsislam (2010). The aim of this thesis is to answer the following question: In what ways do these works treat the aspects of the lifeworlds that are being highlighted in their studies of Muslim youth in contemporary Sweden and Denmark? An underlying aim is to analyse the results within the framework of theories of socialisation, cultural emancipation and rituals and traditions. With a hermeneutic approach I analyse the texts and operationalize the research question into four themes: the effects of socialization, cultural emancipation, rituals and traditions and secularization. The texts are treated in the analysis with textual analysis and hermeneutic method. The theoretical frame assumes socialization theory, the theory of cultural emancipation, a theoretical statement about traditions and rituals. Pia Karlsson Mingantis’s study Muslima (2007) focuses on nine young women, who are engaged in the Islamic revival. The description of the young women’s life situation is quite complex and the encounter with the Swedish context induces negotiations between Islamic traditions and the secular culture in the majority society. In Jonas Otterbeck & Peter Hallin’s study Samtidsislam (2010) nine Muslim youths’ situations are described. The informants view themselves as Muslims, but do not exercise Islam with quite much engagement. There are a lot of conflicts between the Islamic tradition and the Danish and Swedish majority culture. The youth are being in a uncertain position in the search of an identity. The conflicts and religious questions that are raised in the encounter with the Swedish and Danish context is not interpreted differently by the informants than other questions connected to youths’ identity construction and other questions related to the transition into adulthood. The conclusion that is being made in relation to the study of the texts is that the narratives produced by both the authors are different. The differences in the narratives depend on different samples and different aims of the two studies.

The population of 2nd generation Canadian-Muslim women who choose to veil, or wear the hijab, is steadily increasing. Rather than inquire why these women choose to do so, this study explores how Muslim youth use the veil as a fashion accessory. Guided by research questions that focus on the representation of the veil in popular culture, this study explores the veil as a sign as the women negotiate ‘being Muslim’ and ‘being Canadian’. Informed by a cultural studies conceptual framework, veiling in fashionable ways, or, ‘voguing the veil’, is explored as a form of ‘public pedagogy’ (Giroux, 2004). Using an Advocacy and Participatory methodology, the four women and myself engage in a collaborative inquiry examining meanings behind how we vogue the veil. Through a series of interviews, focus groups and journal entries accompanied by personal photographs (photovoice), the women and I co-construct narratives around their identity as women who veil in ways that contest dominant discourse. Together we explore the impact of constructs such as beauty, femininity and sexuality on our identities as Muslim women who veil in Canada. Co-constructing participant case studies permits readers “access to the world from the view-point of individuals who have not traditionally held control over the means of imaging the world” (Berg, 2007, p. 233), at many times surprising and contradicting what is ‘known’ about the veiled Muslim woman. The findings reveal themes that deeply impact how the women choose to veil. These themes include the strategies the women use to employ their veils as a means of agency and how, within and through different pedagogical spaces, the women’s performances and performativity of the veil shifts. The women in the study demonstrate that by ‘voguing the veil’, they are in fact attempting to transform the meaning of the veil as a marker of Canadian Identity. Using the voices, photos and narratives of the four women I argue that through ‘voguing the veil’ these young Muslim women are actively entering into and creating spaces so to be seen as an integral part of Canadian society and as such can be recognized as an emerging subculture.

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Thesis (M.A.)--International School of Theology, 1987. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 66-[77]).