Modernity, Islamic Tradition and Higher Education: Visions of Modern Muslim Selfhoods among Contemporary Students at Islamic Universities in Asia

This thesis explores the formation of modern Muslim subjectivities at the institutional and individual levels at two Islamic universities in India and Malaysia: the Jamia Millia Islamia in Delhi and the International Islamic University of Malaysia (IIUM) in Kuala Lumpur.

By applying a qualitative approach to ethnographic fieldwork material, the thesis investigates the role of religion in the organizational form and the educational program of the universities as well as in the everyday practices of the students. It analyzes how students at these universities construct their modern selfhoods and what role the universities play in these processes of identity formation. Furthermore, as this thesis is also a study of the global model of the modern university and its local/Islamic implementation, it also explores how (and if) the two Islamic universities draw upon the global template of the modern university while (possibly) incorporating Islamic traditions.

The study shows that both universities follow the dominant global discourse on higher education in their institutional form and educational programs. In other words, the Islamic universities of Jamia and the IIUM are modern universities participating in the global higher education system and thus function, in terms of the Stanford School of Sociological Institutionalism, as legitimate actors within modern society. However, when it comes to the role of religion the two universities differ. At the IIUM, there is a direct and comprehensive incorporation of religion at both the institutional and individual levels. This is a reflection of how the IIUM is also an institution of the Islamization of Knowledge movement, i.e. the ideology that all knowledge must be understood in relation to Islam and Islamic perspectives. Thus, religion plays a much more active and foreground role at the IIUM compared to the university of Jamia, where religion is at the background of the university and exists at a more secondary level. This difference in the role of religion is also discernable in the different student subjectivities, which the two universities aim to construct. Hence, at the IIUM we can observe at the institutional level an explicit incorporation of religion in the university’s formation of modern religious working subjects (good Muslim professionals), whereas in India, Jamia principally aims at the preservation of the students’ Muslim identity in the overall construction of good national Indian working subjects. This difference is arguably also a reflection of the larger political and national circumstances, in which the universities are situated and operate within, i.e. Muslims as a contested minority group in India vs. the Islamization politics and affirmative action programs for Malay-Muslims in Muslim majority Malaysia. Not only does this show how religious practices depend on the specific national and international contexts in which they take place, it also shows that an “Islamic university” is not a singular concept, but must be interpreted within its particular context and against the backdrop of its historical development. In terms of the students’ actual subjectivity formation, the study shows that students at both universities generally follow the global model of professionalization (i.e. construct themselves as working subjects) and consequently as actors in the modern world. However, the students also use university education to achieve many other objectives and in their construction of other subject positions, such as cultural capital for enhanced marriage options and increased independence. Likewise, the Islamic university also functions as a site for the construction of intimate relations and/or as a ‘marriage machine’ for the students. In these processes religion plays various and differentiating roles at the student levels of the IIUM and Jamia. At the IIUM religion generally held a very prominent role in the construction of the students’ individual identities, whereas it at Jamia existed as a dependent variable, which the students could draw upon in different degrees. Overall, the students’ subjectivity formations were aligned with the general subjectivity aims of the universities. Hence, the students are first of all constructed as working subjects, i.e. legitimate modern actors. However, they also use the sites of the universities to construct other important subject positions and to achieve other locally defined cultural and social goals.

In terms of contribution to the research literature on globalized higher education studies, Islamic education studies and Muslim subjectivity research, the study contributes to three overall areas. Firstly, the finding of Jamia and the IIUM as legitimate modern universities suggests that Islamic/religious universities in general should be studied within the context of globalized higher education. Secondly, as the study identified the Islamic university as a powerful site for the construction of meaningful modern Muslim subjectivities and, therefore, calls for more research within this area. Thirdly, the study indicates that religion is only one out of several variables, which Muslims idiosyncratically draw upon in their individual identity construction, thus supporting the argument within the existing literature that religion should not be applied as an allexplanatory scheme in studies on Muslims and Muslim societies.