Publication

Secular-religious self-improvement

Jasmijn Rana demonstrates in the article 'Secular-religious self-improvement: Muslim women’s kickboxing in the Netherlands' in American Ethnologist that young Muslim women who kickbox develop agentive selves by challenging gender norms and living out their religious subjectivities.

Author

Jasmijn Rana

Date

23 March 2022

Links

Secular-religious self-improvement

Young Muslim women in the Netherlands are increasingly joining women-only kickboxing gyms. The Dutch public discourse has taken notice, describing this phenomenon as an unexpected development. In the Netherlands and throughout Western Europe, the general assumption is that women's sport is a form of secular, feminist empowerment; Muslim women's participation thus exemplifies Islam's incongruence with the modern, secular nation-state.

Rana demonstrates how young Muslim women who kickbox develop agentive selves by challenging gender norms and living out their religious subjectivities. Furthermore, they challenge Western European secular and religious boundaries. Their cloistered athletic activity is liberating, but not in the way that mainstream public opinion expects or understands. They see their sport as a way to combine religious and secular forms of self-improvement, rather than as a means of cultural integration or emancipation from their Muslim communities.

American Ethnologist, Volume 49, Issue 2.

Read the Open Access article 'Secular-religious self-improvement: Muslim women’s kickboxing in the Netherlands' in American Ethnologist, Volume 49, Issue 2.