Abstract
Drawing on narrative autobiographical interviews with three young Muslims who are actively engaged in religious as well as non-religious voluntary associations, this study delivers an analysis of the dialectics of volunteerism and identity formation. All three interviewees belong to the second generation of Muslim migrants in Switzerland. For its theoretical orientation, the study draws on Georg Simmel’s thesis of intersecting social circles and on the concept of social identity complexity proposed by Sonia Roccas and Marylinn Brewer. The study is part of a larger research project that explores Muslims’ engagement in different types of voluntary associations and examines the question whether this engagement has an impact on the social identities of the respective individuals and on their attitudes towards outgroups. The three case studies discussed in this study represent the three modes of impact of civic engagement on identity formation which emerged from the wider research project.
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Notes
- 1.
The turbulence was mainly triggered by the revolution in Iran in 1979 and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in late December 1979. Moreover, the oil crisis of 1973–1974 (and its positive impact on the revenue of the Saudi government) played a major role in the Islamic awakening.
- 2.
This transformation was accelerated in the 1970s, as new legislation, including rights to family reunification, gave Western European migrant workers a more stable status.
- 3.
An essentialising approach to identity is based on the understanding of the self ‘as a property of the individual, firmly located within the mind and abstracted from experience and interaction with others’ (de Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012: 156). A non-essentialising social constructionist approach to identity, in contrast, regards identity as ‘a process, not an entity, something that does not belong to individuals but rather emerges in interaction and within concrete social practices and is achieved through discursive and communicative work’ (de Fina and Georgakopoulou 2012: 158).
- 4.
The authors explain ‘distinctiveness threat’ as follows: ‘Situations in which a relevant outgroup is perceived as too similar to the ingroup may threaten one’s sense of distinctiveness and consequently lead to increased differentiation between groups and increased self-stereotyping’ (Schmid et al. 2009: 1087).
- 5.
Within the Schengen area in Europe, the 26 member countries have eliminated passport and immigration controls at their joint borders. The citizens of these countries ‘are free to travel in and out of this zone as one single country sharing equal international travel rights’ (Schengen Visa Countries List, http://www.schengenvisainfo.com/schengen-visa-countries-list/, accessed 5 December 2016).
- 6.
The research project had the title ‘Freiwillige Assoziationen, multiple Identitäten und Toleranz: Eine Rekonstruktion narrativer Identitäten von Assoziationsmitgliedern mit besonderer Berücksichtigung von MuslimInnen in der Schweiz (Voluntary Associations, Multiple Identities, and Tolerance: A Reconstruction of Narrative Identities of Members of Voluntary Associations, with Special Focus on Muslims in Switzerland)’. The project was carried out by the author, supervised by Michael Nollert at the University of Fribourg (CH), with the assistance of two MA students, and financed by the Swiss National Science Foundation (grant no. 100017_134841).
- 7.
As Michael Patton (2002: 293) remarks, ‘Records, documents, artifacts, and archives—what has traditionally been called “material culture” in anthropology—constitute a particularly rich source of information about many organizations and programs. […] In contemporary society, all kinds of entities leave a trail of paper and artifact, a kind of spoor that can be mined as part of fieldwork.’
- 8.
The sample selected for narrative autobiographical interviews consisted of 26 persons (16 men, 10 women). The interviews were carried out by either the author or one of the two MA students. The interviews were conducted in German, French, and Farsi and lasted up to 2 h. The three interviews presented in this chapter were translated from German into English by the author.
- 9.
- 10.
Selecting information-rich cases is one of the core principles of purposeful sampling: ‘The logic and power of purposeful sampling lie in selecting information-rich cases for study in depth. Information-rich cases are those from which one can learn a great deal about issues of central importance to the purpose of the inquiry, thus the term purposeful sampling.’ (Patton 2002: 230, emphasis in original)
- 11.
- 12.
This initiative was registered on 1 May 2007 by the populist right-wing Swiss People’s Party (Schweizerische Volkspartei SVP) and adopted on 29 November 2009 after a nation-wide ballot (the initiative is a bottom-up kind of referendum initiated by citizens).
- 13.
Class status is also mirrored in the educational path of the three interviewees. While Sara and Mahmut have chosen vocational education, which requires much less economic and cultural capital (Bourdieu 1986) than an academic discipline, Fahima has opted for higher education in the humanities and can afford to pursue her studies in Switzerland.
- 14.
Since the events of 9/11, concerns about radical Islam have been omnipresent in the public sphere of European countries. In Switzerland, this anxiety has intensified since the ‘Ban-on-Minarets’ campaign (2007–2009) and its radicalising impact on Muslims.
- 15.
This vision reminds one of the multiculturalist model of peaceful co-existence of internally autonomous communities proposed by Chandran Kukatas (2003).
- 16.
- 17.
For a well-documented review of the debate on post-secular society, see Wilson (2011).
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Sheikhzadegan, A. (2019). Civic Engagement and Identity Formation: Narrative Identities of Swiss Muslim Youth Actively Engaged in Voluntary Associations. In: Arweck, E., Shipley, H. (eds) Young People and the Diversity of (Non)Religious Identities in International Perspective. Boundaries of Religious Freedom: Regulating Religion in Diverse Societies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-16166-8_7
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