Taking Muslim Experiences with Social Exclusion and Inclusion Seriously

From Islamophobia and Racialization towards Lived Misrecognition, Non-recognition, and Recognition

Sammendrag

This thesis addresses the following overarching research question: What constitutes Norwegian Muslim experiences with social exclusion and inclusion? It consists of a synopsis and three research articles. The first article is a literature review, whereas the other two articles are based on focus groups and interviews with Muslims across Norway. The synopsis can be summarized as doing three distinct things. First, it criticizes contemporary scholarship concerned with Muslim experiences with exclusion in the West for failing to adequately account for Muslim experiences with exclusion and inclusion. Second, it demonstrates how this thesis attempts to overcome such inadequacies by means of a constructivist grounded theory approach. And third, it develops a conceptual and theoretical framework that can be used to explore, and understand, Muslim experiences with social exclusion and inclusion in Western contexts. Whereas the synopsis is an overall account of the project, the three articles address separate research questions that, in different ways, are related to the thesis’ overarching research question. Article 1 demonstrates how empirical findings from the qualitative research on the social exclusion of Muslims in the West challenge established grand theory approaches in Islamophobia scholarship. Article 2 shows how religiosity plays a role in Muslim experiences with social exclusion, and argues that such experiences require separate conceptual attention. Article 3 demonstrates the local conditionalities of Muslim interpretations of Quran burnings, and suggests that localities carry the means of mitigating manifestations Islamophobia and racialization. In sum, this thesis makes a theoretical intervention in the field by arguing that contemporary approaches have a series of blind spots that have lead to a failure of properly accounting for the different types of exclusion experienced by Muslims, as well as their experiences of inclusion altogether. The intervention is backed up empirically throughout the three articles, which, simultaneously, provide new knowledge about how Muslims experience exclusion, and inclusion, in Norway.