How do young Muslims envision the future of the society they are living in? What role do they allocate to religion in these utopian visions? Where do they position their own dreams and aspirations in these scenarios? How are utopian visions among Muslim youths negotiated, both among group members themselves and with other actors, such as members of religious communities or the state? In this special section, we seek answers to these questions. Based on articles originating from in-depth research in different contexts, we seek to unravel the ways in which young people construct visions of an ideal society. In contrast with most existing scholarly works, which focus on a normative and homogeneous concept of ‘Islamic utopia’, we are interested in understanding how Islam-inspired utopian visions come into being in particular contexts, how they might change as dominant societal themes and debates change, and how they are configured by young people.
The three articles that follow are grounded in considerably different scenarios. While Barnita Bagchi takes a thorough look at Bengal in the first decades of the twentieth century, Giovanni Cordova focuses on Tunisia post-Ben Ali, and Andrea Priori finds himself among the Bangladeshi diaspora in Italy. Despite the different time spans and geographies, as well as diverse disciplinary foundations, these contributions share an unconventional approach to investigating concepts of an ideal society among Muslim youths. They present different forms of utopian visions, from exhaustively detailed and architecturally perfect occurrences, such as those represented in literary/textual works, including the religious corpus of the Islamic Sunnah, to more opaque or transient ones, conveyed through discourses often constructed on the fly or embodied through practices (and orthopraxes). Rather than simply translating utopian visions into texts, the latter option shows their more concrete aspects and illustrates a tendency to anticipate the elements of an ideal society in the present time. By calling into question restrictive interpretations of both ‘Islam’ and ‘utopia’, these articles allow us to develop a plural and non-normative concept of utopia envisioned by young Muslims. We contend that the visions of the youths often question, or dismiss altogether, the political and religious categories of previous generations, and it is for this reason that youth represents a particularly fertile terrain for studying the relationship between Islam and utopia, with a view to broadening the perspectives constructed by researchers in previous decades. Our attempt is principally grounded in the Sunni world, although strong parallels exist with the utopian tendencies in the Shi‘a, especially with regard to Mahdist messianism.
While refraining from illustrating the entire gamut of articulations between Islam and utopia, the contributions account for specific variations of this relationship, constructed in well-defined spatio-temporal, socio-cultural, and political positionalities. The rationale behind this approach is to avoid proposing a detailed definition of Islam-inspired utopias with, so to speak, an accompanying panoptic description of their various occurrences. When one considers the three research perspectives presented here and compounds them with further findings from scholarly literature, it becomes clear that there is little point in attempting to ascribe an exhaustive definition to Islam-inspired utopianism or to construct a typological series that would ‘explain’ it in various expressions. Different positionalities and historical contingencies result in different, and perhaps countless, ways of appropriating the religious repertoire, and this selection of articles is meant to suggest the breadth of a relatively unexplored research territory, not to provide a detailed cartography.
We address utopia not only as an object of study, but also and above all as a method for interpreting social and cultural dynamics (cf. Jameson 2010; Levitas 2013). This allows us to approach the relationship between Islam and social change with a gaze different from that which has characterized most scholarly research to date, in order to identify the role played by social and political positionalities in determining the ways in which people disconnect from, or connect to, religion while envisioning an ideal society.
Desecularizing Utopia
Before focusing more closely on the relationship between Islam and utopia, we need to clarify our view of the concept of utopia and introduce the rationalistic critique—the main argument employed by scholars to deny the possibility of connecting utopia to religion. We will show how both classical definitions of utopia and the rationalistic critique epitomize a secular Western point of view, which tends to ignore some aspects of a connection between utopia and religion, dedicating little attention to phenomena related to social change. Our non-exhaustive consideration of the relationship between Islam and utopia is intended to suggest that scholars too often reserve a definition of utopia only for phenomena that match their own political or intellectual tastes. By contrast, we assume that both the humanities and social sciences aspire to account for the different manifestations that a given phenomenon might take on at different latitudes and in different historical contexts, and therefore should employ categories capable of including cultural products originating in environments other than those in which knowledge is produced.
In order to redress the shortsightedness that characterizes a substantial part of the academic literature, we negotiate the challenge of encompassing non-compliant articulations of the relationship between Islam and utopia by embracing the invitation posed by Ruth Levitas (1979) in her seminal article “Sociology and Utopia.” Levitas suggests moving beyond the normative definitions of utopia employed by various classical authors because such definitions determine the admissibility of a narrative based on criteria such as rationality, historicity, or the capacity to mobilize people, and refuse to consider visions of ideal societies inspired by religion as utopias. We thus adopt an open, non-normative formulation of utopia as “that state of society ultimately aspired to by an individual or group” (ibid.: 23).
As for the rationalistic argument against religious utopias, we argue that it is not enough to simply dismiss it by saying that a non-normative definition makes such an argument irrelevant, or through a naive relativism that posits the existence of various forms of rationality. Clarifying this point is essential because it allows us to appropriately frame the relationship between Islam and rationality, and to clarify that secular thought, which has historically entertained an exclusive relationship with the concept of utopia, does not have to abandon its structuring principles to be able to conceive of ideal societies inspired by religion.
There are in fact phenomena that exhibit clear tendencies where religious thought intersects with secular rationality. The rationalistic argument, which asserts that religion-inspired ideal societies are counter-rational and consequently non-utopian, cuts across the work of many influential scholars in the West, that is, in geographies where utopia constitutes an emic category (cf. Bloch [1959] 1986; Mannheim [1929] 1991). The genealogy of this category, which emerged ante litteram in Greek philosophy and enhanced its primal rationalistic vocation in subsequent elaborations by humanist and Enlightenment intellectuals, was then further shaped by the historical experience of the censorship exerted by the Catholic Church in Europe. We do not deny that religion is often pitted against secular rationality in other geographical and historical latitudes; nevertheless, such an assumption neglects constellations in which religion seeks to connect with a secular and scientific rationality, in some cases even subordinating to it. The literary utopias produced in the Middle Ages by Islamic scholars such as Ibn Ṭufayl or Ibn al-Nafīs are prominent examples of the subordination of the religious to a secular rationality (Lauri 2013). For Shahab Ahmed (2015: 97), it is an epistemology that characterizes the entire Islamic philosophy: “Islamic philosophy subordinates the Qur’ān to the supremacy of reason—which is to say not merely that the text of the Qur’ān is read rationally; rather, the concept of the Qur’ān as the text of divine revelation is constructed and read subject to the demands of a total Truth-matrix elaborated by reason in which reason/philosophy is the higher truth and the text of revelation the lower.” The incorporation of the Islamic corpus within a regime of truth governed by an enlightened rationality not only represents a philosopher's finesse; it is also present in appropriations of the religious repertoire at the vernacular level. The rationality of Islam is summoned in everyday contexts by youths to justify their adherence to its orthopraxis (cf. Priori 2021), and it is significant that one of the articulations of this discursivenes—the narrative of scientific miracles in the Qur'an (cf. Unsworth 2019)–uses supposed anticipations of scientific discoveries to legitimize the book of revelation in the eyes of secular knowledge.
The articles included here present attempts to harmonize Islam and rationality in different scenarios. The utopias that the writer Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain imagines, both in her books and realized in her school for young women, entail refined attempts to embed the religious in an enlightened society—that is, a society organized according to principles of reasonableness and tolerance (Bagchi, this volume). And it is from a basis of principles of political rationality that both young Tunisians who seek social justice and political freedom in post-Ben Ali Tunisia (Cordova, this volume) and young Italian-Bangladeshis who face an overtly Islamophobic society (Priori, this volume) conceive of a better world in which religion serves as a moral compass.
We have developed a counter-argument to an assumed irrationality of Islamic religion-inspired utopias as it is relevant to the content of this special section, but similar examples can be found in other religious contexts, in both the academic and vernacular realms. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, legitimized his own theological vision with the help of Aristotelian philosophy, while in today's India, Hindu people employ genetic testing, and not traditional genealogical narratives, to legitimize their religious and caste affiliations.
De-Islamizing Utopia
Even if Levitas's non-normative definition overcomes some of the theoretical shortcomings that muddy the relationship between utopianism and religion in general, Islam is still bestowed with some peculiar controversies. We attempt to show how the relationship between Islam and social change is improperly reduced to a retrotopia, that is, a restoration of early Muslim society, and how said reduction means sacrificing possibilities for studying potentially important phenomena. For this reason, we believe it is fruitful to abandon a normative, prejudicial, and singular concept of an ‘Islamic utopia’ in favor of a pluralistic conception that focuses on studying the utopias imagined by Muslim people without attempting to shrink them to a single matrix, nor do we employ any form of religious reductionism.
In the social sciences and humanities, the relationship between the Muslim world and utopia has been depicted along three main strands (cf. Bahrawi 2017). The first strand focuses on textual utopias, that is, books written by novelists and philosophers describing ideal societies. These fictional works, the best-known example of which is al-Fārābī’s Virtuous City, a Platonic-inspired utopia, have been recognized by scholars as ‘utopias’ because they convey narratives on ideal societies through a traditional medium, and because they are imbued with literary tropes that refer to models of philosophical rationality compatible with those of the Western tradition (cf. Campanini 2011). The fact that Islam often does not play a prominent role in these ideal societies also contributes to making these utopias more palatable to a secular rationality. The second strand of reflections on utopia and Islam is based upon a narrative in which Islam plays an important role. This narrative, which has been labeled by scholars as the ‘Islamic’ (Behdad 1997), ‘Islamicist’ (Addi 1992), or ‘Islamist’ utopia (Tibi 2012), posits that an ideal society should reference the society of early Muslims, that is, as it is described in or interpreted from the Islamic corpus. The Islamic utopia is a society where Sharia law is finally and perfectly (re)applied, through political (or military) action.
Moreover, the possibility of realizing the Islamic utopia through non-political means gives rise to the third strand investigated by scholars, that of messianism. In fact, based on the narrative of Islamic eschatology, early Muslim society can also be restored by an extramundane agency, the so-called Hidden Imam. According to several scholars, this poses an inescapable choice for Muslim people: to mobilize politically to achieve this ideal state of society, or to await its inevitable and perfect realization at the hands of an extramundane agency (cf. Mura 2019).
It seems to be widely agreed among scholars that from these three different strands of utopianism, the two retrotopian strands (the political and the messianic) have prevailed in the Muslim world (cf. Campanini 2018). This would mean that Islamic thinkers no longer work from a blank piece of paper when they envisage an ideal society, but already have in mind an Islamic utopia that suppresses all others and, for this reason, Western scholars consider literary utopias to be a dead branch (ibid.). This conclusion appears quite astonishing when one considers the range of literature from Muslim writers with a utopian/dystopian character from the twentieth century and in more recent years, many of which were inspired by Islam (cf. Nar 1988; Tawfik 2011), or when reading Bagchi's article in this special section, in which she analyzes the utopian production of a Muslim writer active in the first half of the twentieth century. In many cases, scholars continue to think that the Islamic utopia was the only form of imagining social change for Muslims because, as noted by Shahab Ahmed (2015: 46), most scholars assume that “literary works of fiction and imagination are an expression not of Islam, but of culture—at best of ‘Islamic culture’—and thus, unlike works of law or theology or Qur’ānic exegesis, are not to be taken as constitutive elements in conceptualizing Islam.” In this sense, to account for the scholarly preconceptions about the intersection between Islam and utopia, one must also account for a Western prejudice that identifies a ‘true Islam’ with its more orthodox, irrational, and constraining versions.
It is perhaps less astonishing that scholars who employ normative definitions of utopia do not consider a further strand of utopian imagination, what we call ‘concrete’ utopias. We use this multifaceted formulation from Ernst Bloch ([1959] 1986) to denote utopias that are not described by a text or by a pre-established discursiveness, but rather flow in various directions as an answer to the question: “What should an ideal society look like?” These utopias without a blueprint are tentatively expressed both in discourses and in practices, and often unfold in a restricted space-time. The prayer tents erected in the streets of Tunis by Salafist youths, which represent a local occurrence of a transnationally spreading practice that has characterized not only the Arab Springs but also manifestations of piety at other latitudes, constitute a conspicuous example of micro-utopias, where the idea of an ideal society is both discussed and practiced (Cordova, this volume; cf. Bagchi, this volume; see also Telmissany 2014). The articles in this section deal with concrete utopias insofar as they focus on the link between utopian imagination and practices, and present ideal societies without blueprints. In Bagchi's article, the concrete utopia of an educational center is a reflection of more fixed literary utopias, while in the articles by Cordova and Priori we are confronted with scenarios where utopia is still clearly under construction.
More comprehensively, the three articles show that the ‘Islamic utopia’ and Islam in general are not necessarily fundamental to young people's imaginings of an ideal society. Bagchi's contribution analyzes the literary works and feminist activism of a “believing and practicing Muslim” who does not plan her ideal society around Islam: on the contrary, she conceives of a non-denominational utopia in which a more general idea of religion plays a part, without any distinction between different denominations or sects. We also find this aspect in Priori's article, whose ethnography shows that, at first glance, the ideal society conceived by Italian-Bangladeshi youths does not take religion into consideration at all. It is necessary to ask specific questions in order to bring out the role of Islam, as his interlocutors structure their utopian visions not on the basis of religion but on a secular rationality that, in their perception, does not contradict the teachings of religion. Giuseppe Cordova's contribution, on the other hand, presents utopian visions that are to some extent counter-examples to those presented by Bagchi and Priori. In Cordova's article, the ideal society is a denominational one, and the young men who envisage it have identified or still identify as Salafist, that is, people who have adopted Islam as a structuring principle of their lifestyles—an Islam based on the model of early Muslims (the Salaf). Yet even in this case, references to early Muslim society represent more of an imaginary prism through which young people can interpret their attempts to improve Tunisian society rather than a rigid model to be applied to the present day. Similarly, the strong investment they have made in Islam does not prevent young people from referring to other grand narratives, since even when it appears to be made up of opposites, the relationship between Islamic and secular thought is full of overlaps.
The message we intend to convey with these perspectives is that there is considerable multi-vocality in the utopian visions of Muslim people and, consequently, in their views on social change: these views are profoundly diverse and can be to a greater or lesser extent radical, progressive, or traditionalist. Some of these utopias attempt to ground themselves in orthodoxy, while others choose to follow a path of freethinking. Some are architectural utopias, in which everything is preordained by a blueprint, and some are concrete utopias, as the people promoting them still do not have a clear idea of what an ideal society should be. Finally, the utopias are communicated in different ways. Some are conveyed through ‘traditional’ media forms, such as books when viewed from the perspective of utopian studies, as is the case in Bagchi's analysis of the literary work of Hossain in this special section. Other conceptions of ideal society can be grasped by watching films or by attending a mosque or a political gathering, and are expressed in conversations and ethnographic interviews, as in the case of the studies by Cordova and Priori.
The Arguments against Islam-Inspired Utopias
Before taking a closer look at the articles, it seems appropriate to deal with three scholarly arguments that, quite oxymoronically, describe the Islamic utopia as a ‘counter-utopia’. As with the argument against rationalism, disregarding the normative definition of ‘Islamic utopia’ in favor of a pluralistic concept may seem sufficient to dismiss such criticisms. But since they can also be easily applied to any idea of social change that references the teachings of Islam, it is worthwhile to address them and show how they do not apply to the articles in this section.
Unlike with the idea of the literary utopias of Muslim thinkers, several scholars have contested the status of ‘utopia’ with regard to the retrotopias that constitute the two sides of the coin of the Islamic utopia—the political and the messianic. One argument against Islam-inspired utopias posits that such a model is counter-utopian because it is not inventive (cf. Roy 1987), that is, it proposes a reproduction of a given blueprint. A second argument assumes that an ideal society inspired by a religious past is inevitably illiberal (cf. Addi 1992), that is, it will automatically give rise to theocratic regimes. A third argument suggests that the retrotopian model is anti-historical (cf. Bloul 2005), that is, it rejects the progressive linear time model that characterizes enlightened utopias, proving that it is incapable of conceiving of societal change. These objections have already been relativized in scholarly literature. The idea of non-inventiveness has been challenged by scholars who note that in Islam a “return to the past” always involves a “subversion” and a “reinvention of tradition,” even in its most restrictive applications (Benraad 2016: 76). The assumption that the model of origins automatically results in authoritarian forms of power has recently been challenged by a series of articles on the so-called Arab Revolutions that show how it can ultimately also convey progressive ideals (cf. van de Sande 2013). Finally, the claim that the retrotopian model is anti-historical because it refutes linear time has been relativized by scholars who have noted how forms of utopianism commonly recognized as such by Western secular thought, such as Marxism, similarly rest on a religiously inspired temporality (cf. Levitas 1979).
This special section attempts to illustrate how these criticisms of Islamic utopias, while retaining value in analyses of more obscurantist or reactionary articulations between Islam and social change, can be extended neither to all Muslims nor to all utopias in which religion plays an important role. The cases analyzed by Bagchi and Priori clearly show how Islam's exemplary past does not constitute a burden that prevents people from acting and thinking historically, but instead is creatively appropriated and mobilized in different positionalities in order to create a tolerant society. In Priori's article, for example, a utopia based on progressive historical time, which the author refers to as a ‘realistic utopia’, is haunted by the phantom of messianism, an ideal that captures the imagination of some of his interlocutors. But although messianism constructs its idea of an ideal society according to the cyclical time of Mahdism, this leads not to the imagining of an illibertarian society but to one that supports ideas of social justice and equality, with outcomes of a certain inventiveness. Even in Cordova's article, where young Tunisians assume a demarcation between ‘true Islam’ and ‘the rest’ as a prerequisite for the creation of a better society, defining a ‘true Islam’ is described as an open-ended interpretive process that feeds off various media: the ideal society that is aspired to is a democratic one, conceived within historical time.
The Articles
Barnita Bagchi's article illustrates how representations of an ideal world can be conveyed by a plurality of media and articulated in different ways. Based on an analysis of the writings and feminist engagement of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, Bagchi dissects a ‘multi-layered’ utopia that is expressed both in fiction and in social practices where utopia is prefigured and incorporated. In this way, Bagchi offers us both examples of architectural utopias, expressed through a traditional medium, and of concrete utopias, articulated and incorporated through the organization of schools for marginalized young women. The rhizomes of ideal society that are cultivated in these educational ‘micro-utopias’ resonate powerfully with the literary portrayals of ideal societies in Hossain's work, in which female oppression is contested and parodied. Bagchi shows us how, in the writer's utopian visions, patriarchy “cuts across” and “can appropriate” all religions. This is embedded in a religious discourse that is defined in its utopian valence as something that is appropriated by power “from the outside.” As a consequence, the same repertoire of Islam can be mobilized from below in discourses and practices that aim to overthrow the patriarchy and liberate the oppressed in general.
The utopias that Hossain conceives of, in both her literary work and social engagement, not only represent a reaction to various forms of gendered violence, but also are interreligious, interracial, intercaste, and interclass in character. In contextualizing the life and works of Hossain within the broader scenario of feminist authors and activists in South Asia, Bagchi reveals how her view of mobilization of a religious discourse within a political-literary project with an ultimately intersectional ante litteram character is far from unique; rather, it is part of a cross-religious character that was quite widespread in late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Bengal. In the moral economy described in Bagchi's article, the very possibility of reappropriating Islam in utopian thought and employing its ethical tension in opposition to various forms of domination seems to rest on a conception of religion that is non-exclusionary and connecting, where it has a capacity to ensure that diversity does not turn into inequality.
Giovanni Cordova's article describes fragmented utopias based on ethnographic research among young Tunisian men. These utopias do not have transparent formulations, that is, they are not illustrated in the form of a didactic description of an ideal society, but emerge in a dense fabric that the author weaves together using data from interviews, observations of practices, and excerpts of conversations with his interlocutors—all against the backdrop of a society desperately continuing to search for a political alternative in a time of post-Ben Ali disappointment, especially among its youthful segments. The complex of practices and discursiveness organized under the label of Salafism, insofar as it presents itself as a gateway to the true religion, offers a legitimized utopian repertoire that its young interlocutors draw on in order to envision a way out of the current social and political stagnation.
An important feature of Cordova's article is that the work of complexifying the researcher's view on the relationship between religion and utopia is taken over by the interlocutors. Indeed, the author describes the didactic efforts made by the young people to set him on the right track so that he might understand the meaning that Salafism has for them. They warn the researcher about the risk of internalizing one-dimensional or criminal representations, and urge him to read Salafism as an ethical tension oriented toward change and the future. Salafism, from an emic perspective, is thus specified as an orthopraxy rather than a political project, and as a utopian narrative that finds its ultimate meaning in the context in which it is produced. Indeed, the author pays specific attention to reconstructing the form that the “historical nexus” of capitalism, religious revivalism, and neoliberalism takes in Tunisia at that point in time, highlighting how his young interlocutors, despite the fact that they come from middle-class origins and adhere to the religion of the majority, find themselves at the social peripheries of modernity. In contrast to Bagchi's article, the link between utopia and Islam is not created by emphasizing openness and outward connectivity; on the contrary, religious segments are mobilized in utopian discourses with a disjunctive purpose, to draw boundaries between morality and immorality, devotion and corruption, dictatorship and freedom, and ultimately between the dystopia of the status quo and an ideal society.
Andrea Priori's article directly addresses the question of how much significance a retro-utopia of the origins has in the visions of young cis men (men who identify with their biological sex) and adolescent boys, who were born to Bangladeshi migrant families and live in Italy. He comes to the conclusion that the container of the Islamic utopia is inadequate to describe the visions of the interlocutors, and highlights its Orientalist nature. Like Bagchi, he shows that for most of his interlocutors the possibility of mobilizing Islam in utopian visions relies on its capacity to create outward connections, that is, to create a dialogue with other beliefs and with secularism. Based on ethnographic interviews, Priori also identifies a multi-layered utopia: it is through the directed questions he poses to the youths that the researcher shifts from a first layer, in which Islam does not play any apparent role, to further layers where religion assumes greater importance. By navigating this constellation of utopian visions, the author identifies a dialectic between ‘realistic utopias’, which problematize the status quo but take on many of its structuring elements, and messianic tendencies that, in contrast, cherish the prospect of radical changes in society.
In Priori's article these two utopian visions, which are structured according to relationships of mutual opposition but also of mutual entanglement, are contextualized according to the situational meaning that the relationship between Islam and social change has for these children of migrants in Rome, where Muslim youths represent a minority under siege. The author examines the internal differences within the groups to understand why it is that although everyone shares the idea of an ideal multi-religious and tendential secular society, some detail an additional utopian layer where the perfect Islamic society is realized by the Hidden Imam. This leads the author to highlight the roles that different power relations between the groups or with mainstream society play in the production of utopian visions. Based on Jacques Derrida's reflections, Priori points out how in situations where instances of change are stifled by a widespread sense of powerlessness, religious messianism can epitomize a “powerless power.”
Utopias from Below: The Intersection of Youth and Other Disadvantageous Positionalities
This special section aims at contextualizing visions of an ideal society within the positionalities in which they are produced, rather than proposing itineraries through the multi-vocality of the utopian visions of Muslim people in order to merely convey the idea of the proliferative and inventive nature of cultural processes. In this way, we want to suggest that the concepts of utopia and Islam should be read in their specific articulations because they represent open signifiers, that is, they can be accommodated within different situations and aspirations, and that it is in these concrete articulations that an analysis of the relationship between social change and the religious, through the lens of utopia, may reach its potential. This involves taking into consideration positionalities related to gender, social status, ethnicity, and ir-religiosity, as well as geographical and historical positionalities, with a focus on youth—an age-related positionality that constitutes the common ground for these articles. Therefore, and because the way in which young Muslims tend to appropriate the religious repertoire has peculiarities that have recently sparked the production of a body of literature in the social sciences, we believe this aspect deserves more detailed attention.
With regard to the relationship between Islam and societal change, young people have very often been regarded as passive recipients of ideas imbued with religious radicalism (cf. Malik 2008; Marks 2013). The special section offers a different picture by showing that studies involving youth represent a particularly suitable terrain for observing trends that cannot be reduced to ‘religious radicalization’ (cf. Hasan 2017), and can be linked to more general trends that have been defined variously as ‘public Islam’ (Esposito and Burgat 2003), ‘civic Islam’ (Brown 2019), ‘public piety’ (Stille 2020), or ‘post-Islamism’ (Bayat 1996). The aforementioned Arab Springs have provided concrete examples of how, building on a conception of the political use of religion that intends to reform society by keeping existing structures in place, young Muslims are envisioning a better society by appropriating codes and organizational modalities derived from the world of social movements and civil society (cf. Mittermaier 2014). These youthful interrelations between Islam and democratic civicism are often conceived in opposition to previous generations’ acceptance of religion, not only because they entail cross-fertilization with formally uncommon repertoires, but also because in some cases they mobilize the idea of a ‘pure’ Islam within a generational critique (cf. Rozario 2011).
This aspect is developed further in Cordova's contribution, in which the author highlights how the social conflict underlying the Tunisian political and economic impasse often overlaps with a generational conflict originating within families. In this way, young people redefine a public role for Islam, discarding the paradigms of a Tunisian Islam inherited from previous generations in favor of an Arab-centric Islam. In Priori's article, the refusal to inherit is expressed in the rejection of the cultural Islam of the former generations, together with a rejection of the sectarian identifications suggested by terms such as ‘Salafism’ or ‘reformism’. His interlocutors construct a public Islam based on a desire to shape their religiosity in accordance with the tenets of Italian liberal democracy. Bagchi's article places the historical specificity of public Islam in a broader temporal perspective. While it is true that current developments in public Islam must be analyzed in their peculiar historical context, that is, as the result of the disappointment generated by two successive historical phases, Arab socialism and later a revivalist Islam rejecting modernity, this does not prevent us from singling out attempts to assert the mutual compatibility of Islam and democratic civism which occurred in earlier historical phases. In Bagchi's article we learn about such an attempt in Bengal in the first half of the twentieth century, but it is also possible to find antecedents in other geographies, such as the Tunisian reform movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mentioned in Cordova's article.
In the specific case of the Islamic utopia, how the young people featured in the articles here conceive of the relation between Islam and social change shows that even when they look to apply Sharia, such an application is not based on a rigid idea of law but instead takes its historical dimension as a problem, highlighting that Sharia is an ultimately human product, a “context-bound moral code” (Tayob 2008: 588) with multiple meanings defined by worshipers’ interpretations of the religious corpus. The degree of freedom of interpretation is the subject of discussion in various media and is a conversation in which today's Muslim youths take part, as reflected in the articles by Cordova and Priori. It should be noted that some young people, although relatively few, do propose more restrictive or more literal interpretations of Sharia, especially in Tunisia. However, since no one person is held to be the ultimate repository of correct interpretation, most youths in the articles presented here do not propose using Sharia as the law of the state, but rather as a code of conduct for the individual. Indeed, all three articles emphasize that it is the individual who is called upon to determine and incorporate the meaning of the textual utopia contained in the religious corpus, and to act morally by applying it in everyday life (cf. Hillewaert 2020).
In Bagchi's article, a distinction between “ethical Muslims” and “non-ethical” or “corrupt Muslims” is the only distinction inspired by religion that has relevance in determining the possibility of wresting young women from the effects of domination of a patriarchal social order. In Cordova's contribution we encounter the category of the “good Muslim” as a structural element for the “moral refoundation of social life,” an alternative to what is perceived as a surrender to the values of neoliberalism and foreign interests. In Priori's article, a conception of societal change as the cumulative product of individual agency emphasizes the individual's ability to “imitate” the behavior of the Prophet.
In the case of Tunisian and Italian-Bangladeshi youths living in the present day, their emphasis on the individual dimension should not be contextualized simply from a perspective of social aging, but more specifically in terms of generational cohorts. Indeed, the youthful generation has internalized the defeats of the great political narratives of social change in the twentieth century and developed a distrust of collective identifications, delegating much of the work of enacting social change to the individual—an ethos that, as Priori remarks in his article, characterizes not only the moral economy of public Islam, but also that of neoliberalism (cf. Cordova, this volume). And it is precisely because of this powerful nexus between the individual and the collective dimension of social change that Clifford Geertz's (1971) prophecy, which predicted that the appropriation of Islam on an individual scale would sanction its retreat from the public sphere, remains unfulfilled. On the contrary, it has enabled new articulations between the public sphere and religion, and between instances of self-government of the individual and social change.
Despite the fact that the young people featured in these articles nurture and are involved in projects that challenge the status quo and promote social change, this does not mean that young people are necessarily inclined to dismiss the narratives inherited from former generations. Blatantly conservative youths do of course exist in the Muslim world, as elsewhere, and the reason why the young interlocutors of Cordova and Priori in this section dismiss old narratives is not because they are young, but because they have experienced the consequences of the mistakes of their former generations. This generational positionality, intersecting other disadvantageous social and political positionalities, drives these young people to think about alternative models of sociality and politics in order to cope with, or challenge the effects of, the domination to which they are subjected (cf. Salemink et al. 2018). Similarly, Bagchi relates that the vehemence of the critique of a world inherited from previous generations, expressed in the micro-utopias and literary works created by Hossain, resonates with the writer's own biographical experience: as a woman and as a widow, Hossain was often “socially vilified.”
By considering age- and generation-related positionalities with respect to their intersection with other positionalities, we intend to convey a fine-grained picture of the complex fabric of power relations in which instances of social change informed by religion often take shape. The inhabiting of uncomfortable intersections, albeit with different gradations, constitutes a common element among the protagonists of these articles; it is an important trigger that pushes people to imagine a better society and to critique current social and political arrangements. In the following, we examine four positional dimensions—gender, class/caste, space, and time—which we see as particularly relevant in structuring the intersections underlying the utopian visions that are examined in this special section. The reader may of course note other dimensions worthy of attention.
Gender
While Bagchi analyzes gender in relation to “female-led utopias,” masculine perspectives tend to be naturalized as a gender-neutral perspective on social change in Cordova's and Priori's articles. In the critique of the status quo of Tunisian and Italian-Bangladesh youths, gender issues are not considered at all, which is not surprising since gender is not experienced as a form of subjugation by cis male interlocutors.
In the analysis of Hossain's multi-layered utopia conducted by Bagchi, not only the utopia but also the “real-life dystopia” against which it is opposed are gendered. A world that may appear to be fundamentally good to men, especially those with affluent status, takes on opposite connotations under a female gaze. An important particularity of Hossain's utopian views is that they show how a feminist critique of society can be articulated in opposition to Islam and also through Islam. This conception is accompanied by the idea that the purdah system does not contradict feminism and a more general idea of progress, foreshadowing similar positions that characterize Islamic feminism in the present day, which challenge Western assumptions on the relationship between gender, Islam, and instances of social change. In Bagchi's article, however, gender takes on a fundamental importance in its intersection with other positionalities, first and foremost those of class/caste, and with biographical events that cause women to lose their social status, such as being repudiated by one's husband or becoming a widow. These instances highlight minute intersections where the weight of gendered oppression might become unbearable, and where utopian action becomes an urgent matter.
Class/Caste
The utopian visions considered in these articles show how the religious can be appropriated in envisioning social change in different ways, depending on people's positionality along social hierarchies. Class positionality is very important in Cordova's article; it shows how the gradual economic deterioration in post-independence Tunisia eroded the expectations of upward social mobility of an extended segment of the population, leading to the formation of a vulnerable middle class to which his young interlocutors belong. In such a scenario, it is not surprising that the idea of utopia as a partial return to the past—as implied by Salafism—finds an audience. The condition of the vulnerable middle class makes the transition to adulthood problematic and informs utopian visions characterized by a certain ambiguity, in which the moral economy of neoliberal capitalism is desired yet challenged by referencing the moral order suggested by Islam.
The theme of the loss of a relatively advantageous social positionality is also present in Bagchi's contribution, in which the experience of being widowed or repudiated results in the loss of any positive attribution related to family status. In the micro-utopias represented by the schools organized by Hossain, and in those of other feminist activists in Bengal in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the paths of these cis women who (even in the present day) are pushed outside the caste system meet with those of young women who have lived on the margins of social hierarchies from the very beginning of their lives. In this way, Hossain and other writers/activists envision a society that is at the same time gender-equal and casteless.
As for the Italian-Bangladeshi youths addressed in Priori's article, the middle-class status once enjoyed by their families in Bangladesh has been reduced to the marginal category of ‘migrant’. In this case, the risk of social destitution is experienced by young people who might not be able to emancipate themselves from this status. However, the author finds fine-grained differences in terms of social positioning among his interlocutors, which are fed not so much by social differences between their families as by the divide between those who have launched successful careers and have utopian visions that do not challenge the existing social class structures, on the one hand, and those who do not have such optimistic prospects and indulge in moments of messianic expectation that envision a classless society, on the other.
Space and Time
The geographic spaces in which young people's utopian visions are rooted and their intersection with the axis of historical temporality are important for interpreting how they articulate the nexus between religion, youth, and social change. Conceiving of an ideal society in the Dār al-Islam (abode of Islam), that is, in geographies where Islam is the religion of the majority, as in the case of Tunisia, or in the Dār al-’Ahd (abode of truce), that is, in territories where Islam is simply (and often barely) tolerated, such as Italy, results in differences with respect to the centrality that Islam holds in utopian visions. For Tunisian youths it is easier to envisage incorporating their religion into an ideal society, while for Italians it is more reasonable to think of a society based on religious tolerance. The historical juncture experienced by young Tunisians—characterized by the resurgence of an ambiguous secularism that is perceived to be responsible for rampant corruption and an endless political and economic crisis—plays a decisive role in making religious revivalism appear to be the only possibility of generating positive social change by rejecting a Tunisian Islam that is ultimately seen as colluding with established powers. In the case of Italy, an important aspect of the historical-geographical juncture that endows meaning to the utopian visions of young Italian-Bangladeshis of a multi-religious and tolerant society is the Islamophobia fueled in recent decades by the rhetoric of the populist and neo-fascist right wing. The writer Hossain's location in geographical space and historical time also seems to endow her utopias with meaning. The cross-religious sensitivity she voices is contextualized by Bagchi against the backdrop of a multi-religious Bengal in which encroachments between different doctrinal repertoires were the norm. This is illustrated by a female character in one of Hossain's early works who, in response to a question about the religion of a local family, replies: “It is enough to say they are Bengalis.”
Finally, temporality is also relevant to the utopian visions insofar as different representations of time are implied within them. If in fact the vast majority of utopian visions reviewed in this section are accommodated within a linear historical temporality, the messianic conceptions expressed by some of the Italian-Bangladeshi youths in Priori's article are grounded in a temporality whereby the time of history, and of production, is suspended and reabsorbed into a cyclical temporality. As a result, the transformative action of human beings is interrupted for the benefit of an extramundane agency, while commodities circulate freely, without having to be produced or purchased by anyone. The fact that this temporality comes from young people who are more vulnerable to the effects of the domination of power and the forces of the neoliberal economy than other interlocutors, and who additionally feel that they are unable to change things themselves, suggests the possibility that different positionalities inform not only different utopian tendencies but also different concepts of time where social change is represented.
Conclusion: A Brief Note on Epistemic Politics
The perspective we have presented in this special section suggests that a utopian yearning can indeed find an expressive outlet in Islam. The way in which religiously informed demands for social change are accommodated in the world of youths redefines and refreshes many ethnocentric and biased scholarly assumptions about the relationships between Islam and politics, making them less absolute and more capable of describing/interpreting complex and multi-sited dynamics.
Such findings are not intended to propose a political agenda, that is, to promote the idea that this era needs more religion to generate social change. They are simply meant as an invitation to scholars to take into account the fact that in other geographies, or in other social and political positionalities, utopia and its relation to the religious can take forms that contradict the emic categories of Western academics, and that within Islam itself there are various ways of incorporating religion into the utopian scenario of youths—or even disregarding it completely—with different political outcomes.
Our appeal is to practice an inductive approach and to adopt an anthropological and nominalist sensitivity by which things do not possess meaning in themselves, but have the meaning that people assign to them, specifically in certain historical-political and power relations constellations. This entails some theoretical risks, such as unshackling the grounding points associated with the concept of utopia, but we believe that in intellectual work, as in the processes of self-determination of populations, there are always risks that if not taken lead to negating the very principles one intends to defend. In this particular case, the principle we intend to defend is intrinsic to secular culture, namely, the obligation to ensure that our intellectual constructs and our interpretations are as unbiased as possible and are responsive to the realities that emerge in empirical research. The consequences in terms of the impact on society of such epistemic politics could be described, borrowing a thought from Agata Bielik-Robson (2018) inspired by Theodor Adorno, as saving a secular modernity from itself, that is, preventing it from feeding on incomplete representations of our world and producing effects of domination, but only provided that we can also save religion from itself.
Acknowledgments
This special section is the result of a four-year intellectual journey that began in 2018 with the multi-sited ethnographic project, “(Un-)typical Utopias—Visions of the Future from Adolescents at Islamic Schools in Bangladesh and Italy,” generously supported by the Gerda Henkel Foundation. It continued with the organization, as part of the activities of the same project, of three workshops in which the intersection between Islam, utopia, and youth—the main focus of our ethnography—was expanded to include various forms of ir-religiosity, other age groups, and geographies that exceed the boundaries of Bangladesh and its diaspora. In this section we present three contributions that were hosted in the second workshop, which was entitled “Time for Utopia: Youths and Islam between Past and Future,” devoting our attention in particular to how the cultural repertoire of Islam is appropriated or rejected in utopian visions of, and for, the young.
References
Addi, Lahouari. 1992. “Islamicist Utopia and Democracy.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 524: 120–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0002716292524001010.
Ahmed, Shahab, 2015. What Is Islam? The Importance of Being Islamic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Bahrawi, Nazry. 2017. “Islamic Utopianism.” Critical Muslim 22: 85–92.
Bayat, Asef. 1996. “The Coming of a Post-Islamist Society.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 5 (9): 43–52. https://doi.org/10.1080/10669929608720091
Behdad, Sohrab. 1997. “Islamic Utopia in Pre-revolutionary Iran: Navvab Safavi and the Fada'ian-e Eslam.” Middle Eastern Studies 33 (1): 40–65. https://doi.org/10.1080/00263209708701141
Benraad, Myriam. 2016. “L’État islamique, entre tradition réinventée et utopie politico-religieuse” [The Islamic State, between reinvented tradition and political-religious utopia]. Religions 2: 74–81. https://doi.org/10.5339/rels.2016.peace.9.
Bielik-Robson, Agata. 2018. “The Messiah and the Great Architect: On the Difference between the Messianic and the Utopian.” Utopian Studies 29 (2): 133–158. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.29.2.0133
Bloch, Ernst. (1959) 1986. The Principle of Hope. Vol. 3. Trans. Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, and Paul Knight. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Bloul, Rachel. 2005. “From Utopia to Terrorism: The Case of Radical Islam.” Paper presented at the conference “Imagining the Future,” Melbourne. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/284713813_From_utopia_to_terrorism_the_case_of_radical_Islam.
Brown, Gustav. 2019. “Civic Islam: Muhammadiyah, NU and the Organisational Logic of Consensus-Making in Indonesia.” Asian Studies Review 43 (3): 397–414. https://doi.org/10.1080/10357823.2019.1626802
Campanini, Massimo. 2011. “Alfarabi and the Foundation of Political Theology in Islam.” In Islam, the State, and Political Authority: Medieval Issues and Modern Concerns, ed. Asma Afsaruddin, 35–52. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Campanini, Massimo. 2018. “The Utopian Dimension of a (Possible) Islamic Philosophy of History.” In Utopia in the Present: Cultural Politics and Change, ed. Claudia Gualtieri, 43–56. Berlin: Peter Lang.
Esposito, John L., and François Burgat, eds. 2003. Modernizing Islam: Religion in the Public Sphere in the Middle East and Europe. London: Hurst.
Geertz, Clifford. 1971. Islam Observed: Religious Development in Morocco and Indonesia. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hasan, Mubashar. 2017. The Language of Youth Politics in Bangladesh: Beyond the Secular-Religious Binary. Washington, DC: RESOLVE Network. https://doi.org/10.37805/bgd2017.5.
Hillewaert, Sarah. 2020. Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya. New York: Fordham University Press.
Jameson, Fredric. 2010. “Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future.” In Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility, ed. Michael D. Gordin, Helen Tilley, and Gyan Prakash, 21–44. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Lauri, Marco. 2013. “Utopias in the Islamic Middle Ages: Ibn Ṭufayl and Ibn al-Nafīs.” Utopian Studies 24 (1): 23–40. https://doi.org/10.5325/utopianstudies.24.1.0023
Levitas, Ruth. 1979. “Sociology and Utopia.” Sociology 13 (1): 19–33. https://doi.org/10.1177/003803857901300102
Levitas, Ruth. 2013. Utopia as Method: The Imaginary Reconstitution of Society. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Malik, Jamal, ed. 2008. Madrasas in South Asia: Teaching Terror? London: Routledge.
Mannheim, Karl. (1929) 1991. Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge. Trans. Louis Wirth and Edward Shils. London: Routledge.
Marks, Monica. 2013. “Youth Politics and Tunisian Salafism: Understanding the Jihadi Current.” Mediterranean Politics 18 (1): 104–111. https://doi.org/10.1080/13629395.2013.764657
Mittermaier, Amira. 2014. “Beyond Compassion: Islamic Voluntarism in Egypt.” American Ethnologist 41 (3): 518–531. https://doi.org/10.1111/amet.12092
Mura, Andrea. 2019. “Teologia politica e islamismo: Tra universalismo e caduta apocalittica nel pensiero di Sayyid Qutb” [Political theology and Islamism: Universalism and apocalyptic fall in the thinking of Sayyid Qutb]. In Teologie e politica: Genealogie e attualità [Theologies and politics: Genealogies and contemporary issues], ed. Elettra Stimilli, 277–298. Macerata: Quodlibet.
Nar, Ali. 1988. Uzay Çiftçileri [The Space Farmers]. Istanbul: Elif Yayinlari.
Priori, Andrea. 2021. “Young People First! The Multiple Inscriptions of a Generational Discourse of Muslimness among Italian-Bangladeshi Youths.” Migration Letters 18 (1): 97–108. https://doi.org/10.33182/ml.v18i1.1058
Roy, Olivier. 1987. “Bricoleurs de la culture en monde musulman” [Cultural bricoleurs in the Muslim world]. Esprit 129/130 (8/9): 44–54. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24271473.
Rozario, Santi. 2011. “Islamic Piety against the Family: From ‘Traditional’ to ‘Pure’ Islam.” Contemporary Islam 5: 285–308. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11562-011-0166-7.
Salemink, Oscar, Susanne Bregnbæk, and Dan Vesalainen Hirslund. 2018. “Introduction: Youth, Subjectivity and Utopia—Ethnographic Perspectives from the Global South.” Identities 25 (2): 125–139. https://doi.org/10.1080/1070289X.2017.1400280
Stille, Max. 2020. Islamic Sermons and Public Piety in Bangladesh: The Poetics of Popular Preaching. London: I.B. Tauris.
Tawfik, Ahmed Khaled. 2011. Utopia. Trans. Chip Rossetti. London: Bloomsbury.
Tayob, Abdulkader. 2008. “Islamic Politics in South Africa between Identity and Utopia.” South African Historical Journal 60 (4): 583–599. https://doi:10.1080/02582470802622602
Telmissany, May. 2014. “The Utopian and Dystopian Functions of Tahrir Square.” Postcolonial Studies 17 (1): 36–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688790.2014.912194
Tibi, Bassam. 2012. Islamism and Islam. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Unsworth, Amy. 2019. “Discourses on Science and Islam: A View from Britain.” In Science, Belief and Society: International Perspectives on Religion, Non-Religion and the Public Understanding of Science, ed. Stephen H. Jones, Tom Kaden, and Rebecca Catto, 263–288. Bristol: Bristol University Press.
van de Sande, Mathijs. 2013. “The Prefigurative Politics of Tahrir Square—An Alternative Perspective on the 2011 Revolutions.” Res Publica 19: 223–239. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11158-013-9215-9.