Being Young and Muslim New Cultural Politics in the Global South and North

This volume explores the ways in which the young, both in Muslim majority societies and Muslim communities in the West, negotiate their Muslim identity in relation to their youthful desires - their individuality, the search for autonomy and security for the future. Due to a combination of the shifting moral politics at home, the relentless process of cultural and economic globalization, the rise of a civilizational discourse in which "Islam" is positioned in opposition to the "West," sluggish economies and wide scale unemployment, youth cultures and politics are developing in novel yet little understood ways. Their interests, aspirations, and socioeconomic capacities appear to be producing a new cultural politics: the cultural behavior of Muslim youths, the authors say, must be understood as located in the political realm and representing a new arena of contestation for power. While often referred to as the "builders of the future" by the power elite, the young are also stigmatized and feared as disruptive agents who are prone to radicalism and deviation. The essays in this volume look at the strategies Muslim youths deploy to realize their interests and aspirations, including music and fashion, party politics, collective violence, gang activities, religious radicalism and other forms of expression.

Linda Herrera is Senior Lecturer in International Development Studies, is Convenor of the Children and Youth Studies M.A. specialization at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is co-editor of Cultures of Arab Schooling: Critical Ethnographies from Egypt (2006).

Asef Bayat is Professor of Sociology and Middle East Studies, holds the Chair of Society and Culture of the Middle East at Leiden University, The Netherlands. He is the author of Making Islam Democratic: Social Movements and the Post-Islamist Turn (2007) and Life as Politics: How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (2010).