This panel examines how Islamic practices and identities are formed in relation to multiple forms of social authority. Through case studies from Europe, North America, and South Asia, we examine how Muslims navigate diversity and competing authorities (both religious and secular), as well as how various forms of Islamic authority are enacted, experienced, and contested.
My paper reflects on the question of who can legitimately preach Islam. Is preaching the reserve of the madrasa-trained ‘ulama, or can ordinary believers lacking any formal religious training also lay claim to it? The Tablighi Jama‘at, an early-twentieth-century Indian pietist movement of faith renewal, offers a productive vantage point for addressing this question. Founded by Ilyas Kandhlawi, an ‘alim from Delhi, the Jama‘at encouraged ordinary believers to preach Islamic ideals. The paper discusses the competing forms of religious authority where Tablighi leaders, despite being scholars, could not endorse exclusive religious authority for ‘ulama as traditionally the rightful preachers. They also espoused ordinary believers as legitimate preachers, albeit with a perplexing anxiety to control this authority by exhorting them to avoid complex Islamic thought and always seek the guidance of ‘ulama. I argue this recalibration of religious authority was the product of the anxiety of the Muslim scholarly elite to safeguard Islam in modernity.
Classical Islamic jurisprudence prohibits Muslim women from marrying non-Muslims while permitting Muslim men to marry Christians and Jews. Yet in contemporary Western contexts, many Muslim women enter interfaith marriages, raising questions about the limits of juridical authority and the dynamics of lived Islam. This paper draws on qualitative interviews with over fifty Muslim women in interfaith relationships and 10-12 American Muslim religious leaders, examining how women’s experiences engage with religious guidance. My findings show that women challenge inherited norms—e.g., managing family opposition, creating their own ethical approaches, and raising children inclusively—while navigating conflicts and reconciliation. I propose that a woman’s choice to intermarry speaks to the importance of experiential knowledge: women’s experiences with injustice, often justified through scripture, can generate new, ethically grounded engagements with the Qur’an. This study demonstrates that interfaith marriage is a site where Islamic legal norms, gendered authority, and ethical practice are contested.
This paper examines Islamic religious education in public schools in German-speaking countries as it undergoes a “stress test” amid overlapping crises: events such as October 7, the current war in Iran, refugee movements, rising right-wing populism, diversity conflicts, and discourses on radicalization shape a precarious setting. It analyzes tensions between the constitutional educational mandate, political expectations (integration, prevention, democracy education), identity-political and theological-pedagogical expectations of Islamic communities, and the intra-Islamic diversity of Muslim students (linking to Ibrahim Kocyigit’s paper on multiple understandings of religion among Muslim youth).
Key questions are: What significance does Islamic religious education have for public negotiations of belonging and for articulating Muslim horizons of the future? In what institutional and discursive settings does it take place, and with what diversity? Which structural and discursive challenges limit its potential, and what future scenarios—from dismantling to a professionalized, reflexive-theological subject—emerge?
In European diversity discourses, it is negotiated both as a social reality and as a normative value. This gives rise to hierarchies between “good” and “bad” diversity. Religious affiliation, especially Muslim visibility, functions as a marker around which recognition, normality, and security are negotiated. This paper examines how such distinctions are translated into institutional expectations and what they mean for Muslim youth’s multiple understandings of religion. “Orientation” is understood as a situational competence that arises from the interplay of agency, recognition orders and institutional frameworks. It focuses on how Muslim youth interpret religious content, reinterpret traditions and negotiate questions of belonging, normativity, and lived practice within Islam. Orientation is also a process of theological and religious self-positioning. This paper is linked to Ulvi Karagedik's presentation on Islamic religious education, while extending it through a focus on youth orientation processes and intra-Islamic negotiations of religion.