Islamic socialisation: Transmission and incorporation of religious knowledge in a minority context – ISLAMSOC

How do the six million people who self-identify as Muslims in France come to believe and, for some, to practice their religion?

The topic of religious learning, which is key for understanding contemporary reconfigurations of religion and the Islamic revival, remains largely understudied. Moreover, at a time when "Muslim identities" are increasingly essentialized and presented as immutable and totalizing, studying the conditions of (non) reproduction of religious belonging seems urgent. To this end, the ISLAMSOC project proposes to elaborate the concept of Islamic socializations, provisionally defined as the process of transmission and active incorporation of practical and theoretical knowledge related to the Islamic tradition.

Taking a much-needed step aside from the public agenda issues that saturate the sociology of Islam, studying Islamic socializations allows to make five contributions to the literature:
1) broadening socialization theory towards religious socializations
2) bringing a dispositional approach into the sociology of religion
3) bypassing miserabilist biases in the sociology of Islam
4) examining the achieved rather than ascribed status of minority belonging
5) building bridges between Islamic studies and sociology.

Concretely, ISLAMSOC will study the processes of religious affiliation at three levels: family learning, institutional transmissions, and knowledge content. To carry out this program, ISLAMSOC intends to draw on the team members’ unique resources: access to hard-to-reach population in a context of security pressures surrounding Islam, linguistic skills in Arabic, and training in both Islamic studies and sociology. In terms of operationalization, the project uses a mixed method approach, which is rare in the literature on Islam in France despite its demonstrated value in socialization theory, and combines four empirical entry points:
- family ethnographies
- monographs of institutions involved in the transmission of religious knowledge
- a biographical dictionary of Muslim intellectuals involved in the production of Islamic knowledge
- the statistical analysis of the two records (2009 and 2020) of the Trajectoires and Origines survey (Ined, Insee).

By drawing on socialization theory and an ambitious methodological apparatus, ISLAMSOC results will shed light on the plurality of Islamic identifications while stressing the processual and contextual nature of religious affiliations, in contrast to the reifying tropes that saturate public debates.