Thinking critically,acting flexibly: Global forms of religiosity among millennial Muslim women in the UAE

Abstract

This article analyzes how liberal, American-curriculum universities and neoliberal entrepreneurship centers play a role in shaping the religious subjectivities of millennial Muslim women in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). It is grounded in 2 years of fieldwork and interviews conducted with middle-class, migrant Muslim women living in the UAE, a highly cosmopolitan urban setting shaped deeply by processes of globalization. Examining how ‘global forms’ materialize in local contexts, the article scrutinizes how the ‘assemblages’ emerging in educational and entrepreneurial contexts play a vital role in shaping women’s practices and sensibilities, conceptualizations of God, and relationships to others. Tracing one woman’s intellectual and religious trajectory through her self-narrative, the article intervenes in debates on the global reach and resonance of American educational ‘imperialism’; the entanglement of religious and entrepreneurial subjectivity; and the contemporary forms of Islamic religiosity in the Middle East.

Introduction

The audience is hushed, faces lit in hues of pink and purple. In the main hall of the 2019 Sharjah Entrepreneurship Festival (SEF) sit 2000 men, women, and youth who exemplify the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) ethnonational diversity. Men in crisp white robes and women in flowing black dresses are interspersed among people in chic business attire, others in ripped jeans and slogan-bearing t-shirts, and schoolchildren in their uniforms. Perched on white-leathered chairs, all eagerly await the festival’s most anticipated keynote speaker.

At the edge of the stage, I spott Faiza, a 26-year-old woman whom I had come to know well during my fieldwork. Like many of my interlocutors, Faiza was a middle-class, migrant Muslim woman raised within a family that took Islam as a guiding ethical framework. She had studied at the American University of Sharjah (AUS), a local institution which followed an American curriculum. The AUS campus housed Sheraa, the entrepreneurship center behind SEF, where Faiza began work following her graduation. I observe Faiza – with her sleek black trousers and blouse, a collection of papers and devices in hand, and an earpiece into which she mumbles instructions – ushering the event’s hosts to the stage.

The first, an Emirati woman, introduces the guest in Arabic. Following her, an Arab man repeats the introduction in English:

Ladies and gentlemen, we are very proud. We would like to invite on stage a Grammy award winning artist – he’s a philanthropist, he’s an entrepreneur, with projects such as Lighting Africa, The Confidence Foundation, and Akoin. He is constantly bringing and making positive changes on millions of lives, on millions of people. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming Akon.

The crowd cheers as the celebrity takes the stage in all white, but for a striking coral-colored blazer. ‘As-salāmu ʿalaykum – how are you guys doing?’ The crowd roars in response, elated not only by Akon’s presence, but this nod to his Muslim heritage. A Senegalese-American who made his mark through music and entrepreneurship, Akon tells the tale of his life and success, making space for faith in the conversation by highlighting how he ‘always puts the spiritual side first’.

The audience is enamored, laughing at Akon’s jokes and documenting his every word on social media, particularly when mentions of his Islamic commitment align with his entrepreneurial ethos. Akon remarks, for instance, that,

For me, real success is faith. If God is not smiling upon me I am not successful. I don’t care even if I have a billion dollars in the bank (…) what good am I if have that much money sitting in the bank in the first place? When you have all these kids starving? All these problems that need to be solved?

A successful business should deliver not just a financial profit, but a positive social impact and good deeds in the afterlife. Akon notes that investments, for him, are charity – ‘I may not make a million dollars off that transaction, but I know I get a few good credits towards paradise. I’m cool with that’. The audience erupts in applause. Later in his speech, in response to the common critique that performing music is Islamically impermissible, Akon asserts that

I never looked at the performing aspect of the music itself but on the intention (…) I am not in a position to judge any man and I don’t expect them to judge me as well, but no matter what decision you make just do right by it. Because, at the end of the day, Allah is watching and he knows what is in your heart.

As Akon speaks, I observe Faiza multitasking on the side, ensuring all is in order while sneaking in admiring peeks and laughs. From our earlier exchanges, which I detail below, I know that Faiza’s way of being Muslim is structured by the same principles Akon invokes: she privileges the socio-spiritual impact of entrepreneurship, the role of intentions in determining the value of actions, and a personal relationship with God. The alignment of these attitudes is no coincidence, but reflects the UAE’s investment in forms of Islam dedicated to producing flexible, tolerant, self-sufficient subjects who, rather than turn to the state for support, shoulder life’s risk and responsibilities on their own. The promotion of such entrepreneurialism has dramatically transformed how millennial Muslims in the UAE relate to the Islamic tradition. The following considers the narrative of Faiza, one such Muslim who came to embrace what I describe as a critical and flexible form of Islam shaped by her education at AUS and the UAE’s recent push toward entrepreneurialism.

In this article, I analyze how entrepreneurialism acts as one global form which mediates religion among young people, considering how this global form takes shape within local assemblages (Ong and Collier, 2005). I focus on Faiza and her experience at Sheraa to explore how entrepreneurial discourses manifest in the lives of the UAE’s young Muslim women. Importantly, the foundation for this entrepreneurial ethos is laid before these individuals enter the workforce, during their university years. Insofar as Sheraa is located at a university campus, it is important to understand how the institution’s liberal American curriculum serves as another global form which mediates religion. Considering how these global forms shape the life and religiosity of Faiza, I show how the iterations of Islam popular in the UAE today emerge within educational and entrepreneurial contexts that craft new kinds of global Muslim subjects – ones who take thinking critically and acting flexibly as essential qualities of being a good Muslim.

In describing her religious transformation, Faiza identifies her American university education as a pivotal site of self-reflection, underscoring how the ‘critical thinking’ skills developed during this time inspired her to interrogate the Islam of her upbringing. At the same time, Faiza remarks that the ethos of entrepreneurialism she acquired at Sheraa allowed her to translate this critical thinking into a flexibility in her Islamic practice. Faiza’s experience echoes that of other UAE-based millennials I met, illustrating how these young Muslims rethink and rework the Islam they were raised with in ways distinctly shaped by two global discourses: a liberal university education and neoliberal entrepreneurialism.

After explicating the methodology used to gather my data and underscoring the theoretical intervention of my analysis, I describe how the liberal education instilled at AUS enshrined in Faiza the practice of critical thinking. I then detail how this critical thinking was supplemented by an ethos of entrepreneurialism Faiza picked up at Sheraa. Finally, I demonstrate how the local assemblages of these global forms figure into Faiza’s religious practice and relationship to God.

Methodology

This article draws on data collected during 2 years of broader ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2016 and 2021 in the UAE, mostly in Dubai and Sharjah. My interlocutors consisted of non-Emirati Muslim women residing in the UAE. Of mixed Arab, South Asian, and Euro-American backgrounds, women were middle-class, educated professionals in their twenties, thirties, and forties. Those in Faiza’s generation, born between 1981 and 1996, are commonly described as ‘millennials’ (and are also known as Generation Y). In the Middle East, millennials were raised in a time when forms of Islam popularized during the so-called ‘Islamic Revival’ (al-Saḥwa al-Islāmiyya) no longer were ‘counterpublics’ (Hirschkind, 2006) challenging the secular, liberal more of a previous era, but constituted mainstream public manifestations of Muslim piety. Raised in families which made piety a driving feature of everyday life, my interlocutors found their sense of religious and moral certainty unsettled by their university experience and subsequent employment in the years following.

To give deeper insight into this broader picture, I combined my participant observation with life story interviews. Between 2017 and 2018, I interviewed one hundred women, conducting follow-up interviews with key interlocutors until 2021. Interviews were semi-structured, whereby I directed a chronological discussion of select themes. I started an interview by telling my interlocutor that I was interested in understanding how she became the Muslim she was today, before loosely guiding our conversation from her family background and early years, to her religious and secular education throughout school, to her adult experiences of university, work, and family relations.

From this wealth of data, I draw out Faiza’s story as representative of a larger process of religious (self-)transformation among the UAE’s youth. Like others, Faiza comes from a middle-class, migrant family committed to Islam. She attended educational institutions which followed international curriculums and hosted multinational student bodies. Faiza’s inclination toward entrepreneurialism was also ubiquitous among her peers; even those employed in more conventional jobs often engaged in entrepreneurial side ventures, and always exhibited an entrepreneurial attitude in their self-presentation. Unique among my interlocutors, however, was Faiza’s work at a center dedicated to entrepreneurialism. This compelled Faiza, a committed Muslim, to hone an acute sense of self-awareness and reflexivity in thinking about Islam, entrepreneurialism, and their confluence at an American university she frequented long after graduation. In her articulation of the resonances and contradictions between these global forms, then, Faiza offers an invaluable window into the experiences of the UAE’s millennial Muslims at large.

Conceptualizing neoliberalism and Islam as global forms and local assemblages

Many recent ethnographies of Islamic piety and the Arabian Gulf have highlighted neoliberalism as a key theme. In my own research, I found that presuming ‘the infiltration of market-driven truths and calculations into the domain of politics’ (Ong, 1999: 4) not only overdetermined how neoliberalism operated in peoples’ lifeworlds, but also required me to distinguish between the ‘neoliberal’ and ‘Islamic’ origins of the practices, ethics, and sensibilities my interlocutors embodied – a distinction constantly elided in their lives. To avoid such a priori assumptions, this article examines how neoliberal principles and practices are adapted to the context in which they become embedded.

Much like how iterations of Islam emerge not only from the tradition’s texts, but the ways Muslims engage them in particular moments (Asad, 1986), so too does the ‘global form’ of neoliberalism materialize in ways specific to each setting (Ong and Collier, 2005: 11). As opposed to ‘local’ or ‘cultural’ forms, which make sense only within a particular milieu, global forms are defined by their ‘capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability and movement, across diverse social and cultural situations and spheres of life’ (Ong and Collier, 2005: 11). A global form is not isolated from local contexts, however, but is always ‘territorialized’ as an ‘assemblage’ (Ong and Collier, 2005: 4), the ‘product of multiple determinations that are not reducible to a single logic’ (Ong and Collier, 2005: 12). This theory of assemblages cautions against presuming the vulnerability of local settings to global projections of power and underscores how the modes by which global forms materialize on the ground are always emergent, contested, and in flux.

When the global forms of neoliberalism and Islam are encountered in the contemporary UAE context, they manifest as assemblages unique to that place and time. Scrutinizing these assemblages offers insight into ‘actually existing neoliberalism’ (Brenner and Theodore, 2002), as well as actually existing Islam. In this article, I am concerned with the ethical reflection sparked during the process of ‘assembly’. To this end, I contribute to conversations which examine the entanglements of Islam and neoliberalism (Atia, 2013; Rudnyckyj, 2010; Savcı, 2021). I also broaden ethnographic accounts of the UAE which primarily relate the mechanisms of neoliberalism to the city’s urban infrastructure, financialization, and migration patterns (Hanieh, 2011; Mahdavi, 2011; Vora, 2013).

Such a corrective can be particularly valuable to ethnographies of Muslim women, whose subjectivities have oft been utilized as a site by which to upend secular-liberal accounts of freedom and agency (Fadil, 2009, 2011; Fernando, 2014; Jouili, 2015). While productive, such approaches can at times reify a binary between the ‘Islamic’ and ‘liberal’ tradition, insofar as naming them as such renders them distinct. This dichotomy, which deems certain practices Islamic and other liberal, can occlude how multiple traditions exist, sometimes seamlessly, in the same person. In what follows, I embark from Saba Mahmood’s (2005) assertion that ‘the relationship between Islamism and liberal secularity is one of proximity and co-imbrication rather than of simple opposition or, for that matter, accommodation’, responding to her call to investigate this entanglement (or assemblage) ‘in terms of the historically shifting, ambiguous, and unpredictable encounters that this proximity has generated’ (p. 25).

As the following shows, whether in relation to the Islamic piety she grew up with, the liberal education she receives at AUS, or the neoliberal principles driving her entrepreneurialism at Sheraa, Faiza draws on practices, logics, and sensibilities from an array of ‘traditions’ that undermine a stringent divide between the Islamic, the liberal, and the neoliberal. It is near impossible to pinpoint where one tradition ends and the other begins, or even to speak of them as such. Highlighting this blurring offers insight into the subjectivities of millennial Muslim women in the UAE, an appreciation of how global forms structure their lifeworlds, and an impetus to reconsider the categories by which we analyze such experiences.

Thinking critically at AUS

Born in Kenya and holding Kenyan citizenship, Faiza was of Yemeni, Pakistani, Sudanese, and Somali ethnic heritage. When Faiza was six, her family moved to the UAE, settling first in Abu Dhabi, then Sharjah. Faiza’s Islamic identity was cultivated at home and in school. Her mother’s family was particularly devout; women dressed in ‘abāyas (long cloaks) and ḥijābs (headscarves) and practices like voluntary prayers and fasting were engrained in the family’s culture. Faiza learned how to pray from her parents, participated in Ramadan and Eid festivities, and tuned in to televised religious sermons with her grandmother. At her British school, Faiza studied the UAE’s government-mandated Islamic Studies curriculum. She accepted the information presented to her then without much question because she trusted its origin – her family, school, and the textual sources they cited. For most of her life, Faiza said she took Islam for granted – surrounded by it, ‘like a fish in water’, she never gave it much thought. When she occasionally felt an inkling of disbelief, Faiza brushed it away, continuing to pray and wear ḥijāb, two practices she felt central to her faith. When Faiza started attending university, however, her quiet doubts began appearing too frequently to ignore.

Like many women I conducted fieldwork with, Faiza attended the AUS, a prominent university in the UAE and region at large. AUS was established in 1997 by Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, the Ruler of Sharjah. It was promoted as a university that embraced American-styled education while remaining rooted in its local context. Doing so, the university adopted and reworked a host of global forms, whether a liberal American education curriculum or the techniques of critical thinking, both of which left a profound impact on Faiza and her peers.

In the 25 years since its founding, the university has become a major center for higher education. In Fall 2020, for instance, AUS hosted 47 nationalities among 300 full-time faculty, and 86 nationalities between its roughly 5000 students. The AUS mission is to deliver ‘an American-style liberal arts based undergraduate education in the context of UAE culture and society’, producing graduates who are ‘well-rounded, versatile, critical thinkers with the ability to compete on a global scale’ (AUS, 2021). AUS describes ‘a culture of personal development, critical thought and societal responsibility’ as its core values and asserts that ‘the AUS experience is exacting, rewarding, transformative and lifelong’ (AUS, 2020). Such ‘lifelong’ consequences can be seen as a rite of passage central to the American university experience, and liberal education more generally (Axelrod, 2002; Cronon, 1998), as my fieldwork evidenced.

Women attributed their (self-)transformations to two features of the AUS experience: first, meeting people from ethnonational and religious backgrounds they had not encountered growing up, and second, taking courses in the humanities and social sciences as mandated by the university’s general education requirements. Both tasks involved the development of ‘critical’ or ‘reflective’ thinking skills, a modern pedagogical imperative attributed to John Dewey, an early twentieth-century American philosopher, psychologist, and education reformer. Dewey presumed the inherent value of critical thinking along with its universal appeal. Indeed, the alleged universality of Western forms of knowledge has been used to justify the expansion of Euro-American power globally, where education operates as a ‘new imperialism’ that entrenches global power hierarchies (Tikly, 2004). Implicated in these inequities, American liberal education and the critical thinking skills it promotes are thus global forms incorporated into local settings in uneven ways.

Dewey defined reflective thinking as the ‘active, persistent, and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends’ (Dewey, 1910: 6). Reflective (later called critical) thinking thus entails skeptically scrutinizing one’s beliefs in order to make more conscious decisions about how to be and act in the world. This mode of reflection ‘is a systematic, rigorous, disciplined way of thinking with its roots in scientific inquiry’ which happens ‘in interactions with others’ and ‘requires attitudes that value the personal and intellectual growth of oneself and of others’ (Rodgers, 2002: 845). Embracing the importance of critical thinking taught at AUS, amid a diverse community of students educated similarly, my interlocutors began thinking critically in ways that unsettled the Islamic certainty they had embraced growing up.

Because schools in the region focus primarily on the hard sciences, AUS was usually the first setting where students encountered other disciplines in which critical thinking was central. Women cited classes in history, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology as particularly provocative. Even classes in writing and communication pushed students to appraise styles of argumentation and evidence in new ways. Faiza’s journalism courses, for example, taught her to critically assess media narratives and to inspect how the same event was so differently portrayed across sources. Recognizing how power was implicated in knowledge production inspired Faiza to rethink how this took place throughout the development of Islam.

It was not only the content of the education which mattered but also the context in which learning occurred. For many, doubts arose during exchanges with friends committed to other faiths. For a woman called Layla, AUS was the first setting in which she befriended a devout Evangelical Christian. Seeing someone she knew closely, whose intelligence she respected, deeply invested in another religious tradition gave Layla pause. Her previous conviction that anyone who learned about Islam would see the religion’s appeal was rattled. Other women were unsettled by meeting fellow Muslims who held no qualms about engaging in premarital sex or drinking alcohol, or who confidently described themselves as atheists despite their Muslim heritage. Such encounters normalized a sense of relativism and left women reflective about their own upbringing.

Women were also unsettled in the classroom, through the critical thinking instilled by professors whose worldviews inspired students to question their own. Women struggled to understand the irreligiosity of professors they admired; they were confused by how intelligent individuals failed to find or worship God. That these same professors treated religion as a collection of cultural assumptions rather than a truth premised upon a spiritual reality further perturbed women’s conceptions of Islam.

Perceiving themselves ‘as carriers of Western or liberal values’ (Koch and Vora, 2019: 559), such Western-trained professors often understood their mission as pushing students outside the naïve comforts of culture and religion. On the first day of a psychology class, for instance, one professor proclaimed that ‘everyone is born an atheist; the only reason you guys [Muslim students] follow Islam is because you’re brainwashed’. Yasmine, a committed Muslim in the classroom, was offended, incredulous, and critical – ‘If atheism is denying the existence of God, and you don’t have a concept of God when you’re born, then how can you be born denying him?!’ She described how this provocation by the professor, a White American man in a position of authority, was commonplace. Such expressions of ‘liberal piety’, as Neha Vora (2019) terms an unreflective global faith in liberalism, produces ‘subjects who believe themselves to be liberal, cosmopolitan, and inclusive rather than parochial and complicit in ongoing forms of imperialism, Orientalism, exclusion, and American exceptionalism’ (p. 9). In this way, promoting critical thinking as drawn from a secular, liberal American tradition universalizes certain forms of knowledge, belief, and ethical practice while discounting others.

Such modes of critical thinking, and the encounters women had with diverse others at AUS, are globalizing discourses which play a crucial role in shaping their relationship to Islam. These transformations, however, coincide with the influence of another global form: entrepreneurialism. Buttressing one another, the skeptical imperatives of critical thinking and the flexibility of entrepreneurialism pushed young women like Faiza toward certain forms of Islam, and away from others.

Becoming entrepreneurial at Sheraa

It was late 2018 when I met Faiza in the foyer of the AUS library, adjacent to Sheraa’s headquarters. Faiza’s involvement with Sheraa began when she profiled the newly established center in AUS’ student-run newspaper and became active in its earliest community. Since Faiza’s enthusiasm, critical mind, and enterprising spirit were precisely the features Sheraa sought in its employees, its management offered Faiza a full-time job upon her graduation in 2016. Faiza witnessed Sheraa grow and immersed herself in the center’s culture. ‘You pick up on it as you live in it and work in it’, she told me, emphasizing Sheraa was more than just a workplace; ‘it’s a whole culture, with its own set of terms, lingo, protocols and policies’. Although relatively new to the ‘entrepreneurship ecosystem’, as she called it, Faiza had learned fast; ‘they throw you in and you have to learn how to float’.

Sheraa’s core mandate, Faiza explained, was ‘teaching people how to be adaptable, flexible, think critically, and then go out and launch their own business or, at the very least, become capable of taking on different kinds of work anywhere’. These individual skills work toward a larger social goal; CEO Najla al-Midfa details how Sheraa holds

faith in humanity’s ability to generate positive change, and we are on a mission to unleash a generation of entrepreneurs who will build a better future for our societies and beyond (…) by fostering a culture of experimentation and critical thought. (Sheraa, 2022)

Al-Midfa positions these global forms squarely within the local context, noting that ‘Sharjah has long been known for its enterprising spirit’, a fact illustrated by Al Qasimi’s imagining of ‘this desert city as a center for education’ over 20 years earlier, thus making it ‘home to an ocean of young, innovative talent’ today (Sheraa, 2022).

Since its launch, Sheraa has offered entrepreneurs of all ages and levels of expertise the chance to develop their entrepreneurial talents. Sheraa spreads awareness about the possibilities of entrepreneurship and provides spaces and events aimed at encouraging individuals to start imagining entrepreneurial initiatives. Such activities ‘plant the seed of entrepreneurship in peoples’ minds’, as Faiza put it, a seed which is nourished by large-scale events like the SEF described above. This 2-day festival features motivational speeches, practical workshops, mindfulness sessions, and networking opportunities for an international crowd.

Becoming entrepreneurial does not simply entail developing a product or service, but, more centrally, becoming a particular kind of person. For example, Faiza explains how, in assessing applications for a mentorship program, Sheraa executives assess not just how viable a project is, but ‘how passionate and capable the entrepreneur is, their attitude, ability to accept feedback, learn, and take things to the final product’. The production of such an ‘entrepreneurial subject’ is Sheraa’s ultimate goal, an endeavor consonant with the UAE’s initiative to produce a self-sufficient population under its regimes of neoliberal governance.

Describing entrepreneurial subjectivity, Carla Freeman (2014) details how ‘the contemporary entrepreneur represents neoliberalism’s heroic actor: supple, flexible, and keenly responsive to market fluctuations, always prepared to retool and retrain to advance in uncharted directions’ (p. 17). Being flexible is critical to surviving in a precarious and competitive labor market which consistently demands more skills and greater efficiency from its workers. Those with the ability to adapt and exploit such circumstances to their benefit have been deemed ‘flexible citizens’ (Ong, 1999).

Ahmad Kanna (2010) considers how Dubai’s young, professional ‘flexible citizens’ envision ‘their city and themselves as a genuinely progressive force in the Arab world’, taking on the responsibility of ‘[localizing the] global discourses of neoliberalism’ (pp. 109–110). To be a flexible citizen in Dubai is to see oneself ‘as a sort of creative artist of identity, extracting useful and (allegedly) progressive aspects of ascriptive identity and reframing them through neoliberal values of entrepreneurialism, individualism, and cultural flexibility’ (p. 114). Our focus here is not on how the global discourses of neoliberalism are localized by flexible citizens seeking to harmonize them with the UAE’s cultural identity, but on how flexible Muslims like Faiza synthesize neoliberalism and Islam, to the extent that any boundaries between the two blur.

At AUS and later at Sheraa, Faiza embraced the merit of flexibility in thinking and practice. She said that being flexible was about cultivating

the ability to learn and continuously explore new fields and advancements, not to get stuck in a mind frame of ‘I do something this way, it’s the only way it’s ever been done, and it’s the only way I’ll ever do it’.

This attitude was vital, Faiza asserted, ‘because one day someone will come along and do your work better and faster and then you’ll be out of a job. Be flexible. Think critically. Learn to see problems and then go solve them. Most importantly: be adaptable’. To Faiza, then, thinking critically and acting flexibly are key components not just of work, but of being in the world more fundamentally. As we see below, the praxes of entrepreneurialism and critical thinking come to infuse Faiza’s sense of self, Islam, and God in fundamental ways.

Thinking critically and acting flexibly as global forms of religiosity

Faiza identifies her university years as the time she began rethinking her religiosity. Having been taught the importance of critically evaluating her everyday practices and beliefs, Faiza concluded that she had been carrying out her religious duties unreflexively. ‘I realized I had been taking a religion I still believe in, and a God I still love, for granted’, she remarked. Rather than reject Islam altogether, Faiza began reacquainting herself with her religion as if it were brand new, guided by the concept of niyya (intention). Since childhood, Faiza had been taught that maintaining a sincere intention for any good deed she undertook was critical for its acceptance. Faiza understood niyya as ‘the core motivation behind the things you do’, and thinking more closely about her Islamic practices led Faiza to realize she had undertaken many without the correct intention, or any intention at all. ‘I didn’t think about the reasons behind what I was doing, and so if I wasn’t making a conscious decision for how or why I was doing certain things, then why do them at all?’ she said. This insight invited ‘a period of re-exploration’ during which Faiza ‘refused to take Islam for granted any longer’. She began closely analyzing the rationale underlying her actions and beliefs, methodical about her mission; ‘I went back and peeled away the things I do as a Muslim and said, “ok where do I stand on this, or that?”’

In this way, Faiza’s formerly benign practices were now perceived as the source of a grating cognitive dissonance. To regain a sense of coherence, Faiza endeavored to better align her exterior practices and interior ideals. As with many of my interlocutors, the first practice Faiza interrogated was wearing a ḥijāb (veil). Faiza understood veiling not as an ethical practice dedicated to cultivating pious dispositions (Mahmood, 2005), but as marking an already devout Muslim self with which she no longer identified. While some women also doubted the status of veiling as a religious obligation, Faiza unveiled because she believed her lack of a solid intention made her practice meaningless.

Although Faiza’s parents never explicitly asked her to veil, their expectations had been ‘heavily implied’ – she said that ‘ḥijāb was so indoctrinated and conditioned in me that, on the first day I got my period, I put it on’. Insofar as the impetus for veiling came externally, Faiza concluded, it did not reflect an active and sincere intent on her part, rendering her practice void. Faiza was open to returning to the ḥijāb one day but wanted to do so ‘with eyes wide open’. In fact, this was now Faiza’s philosophy for practicing Islam more generally: ‘With eyes wide open, explore, and make those decisions for yourself’. Through this method, Faiza made moral sense of the world around her: by opening her eyes and mind through the lens of critical thinking; flexibly engaging different ideas and inhabiting multiple ways of being in the world with the goal of experiential learning; and independently making the choices she felt were right for herself. I unpack each of these techniques in turn.

In opening her eyes, the first step of this method, Faiza utilized research techniques and evaluative criteria she discovered at university to read the Quran and hadiths she had been taught growing up. While reading, Faiza asked herself ‘what makes sense and what doesn’t, in terms of my own understanding of Islam, and in terms of what can help me do good in the world?’ In this process, Faiza turned to academic texts on Islam, rather than theological ones, because she felt ‘jaded by the shaykhs [Islamic scholars] of the world’, whose conservative attitudes contradicted the principles of flexibility and innovation which characterized the second step of her method: explore.

Faiza felt that, in their overemphasis on the time of the Prophet and tradition, Islamic scholars often exhibited an unyielding ‘you learn it this way and never change what you do ever again’ mentality. To Faiza, this focus on the past indicated a stagnation and disconnect from the issues animating the modern world. Faiza’s critiques of tradition echo the UAE’s call to an ethos of entrepreneurialism and the innovation it demands, as embodied by Sheraa.

This final step of Faiza’s method – making decisions for yourself – stemmed from her contention that Islam was premised upon a relationship ‘between you and your own God, a God who gave people freedom so they could make their own choices’. Faiza insisted on autonomy and a personal connection to God as preconditions to proper pious conduct, an emphasis hearkening back to Faiza’s attention to niyya. Insofar as a correct niyya was a necessary prerequisite for any ethical act, and insofar as Faiza understood her niyya as emerging through a private deliberation with God and the ability to choose free from coercion, she refused to undertake acts of worship ‘to satisfy an external pressure’. Doing so corroded the sincerity of her act. Instead, Faiza held that if something were truly willed by God and intended for her – for instance, the ḥijāb – she would come to accept it internally over time and choose to do it of her own volition. Faiza thus held that a shift in her interior subjectivity, when instigated by God, would spontaneously inspire an exterior change.

Faiza told me her parents dismissed the notion that people should suspend their religious obligations until they ascertained the purity of their niyya; instead, Muslims should embrace the struggle to clarify their intention as part of the deed itself. This perspective is comparable to that Mahmood’s (2001) interlocutors hold, whereby embodied, ritual practices act as ‘a key site for purposefully molding their intentions, emotions, and desires in accord with orthodox standards of Islamic piety’ (p. 828). Such Muslims also hold the view that, in order to be accepted by God, actions must not only be performed with a correct intention, but in ways that align with established and authorized practices, which the act of unveiling did not. Finally, Faiza told me her parents believed that, even after all Faiza’s attempts to cleanse her niyya, she was not actually making her own choices, but inevitably being swayed by external forces, such as peer pressure or her education at AUS.

Shrugging as she described her parent’s accusations, Faiza admitted that, like her peers, she certainly had been influenced by the West through its globalized media and her liberal education, not to mention her time at Sheraa – but the admission did not faze her. She perceived these disparate sources – and others, with non-Western origins – as opportunities for exploration which could help her lead a better life.

In her free time, for instance, Faiza read Laozi’s (1974) Tao Te Ching, a text foundational in Taoism and influential to Confucianism and Buddhism. Through the Tao Te Ching’s teachings, Faiza found a means to challenge legalistic binaries of halal/haram (permissible/impermissible), positing ‘that things are not inherently black or white, good or bad’. To Faiza, embracing this truth was crucial ‘in order to truly live a peaceful life’ unattainable when ‘in a constant tension of “this is right, that is wrong”’. Faiza took a more flexible and relativistic approach to moral practice which did not contradict Islamic teachings, she said, but embodied them; ‘If you read the Quran, it’s in Islam, if you read the Bible, it’s in Christianity. It’s the perennial wisdom of acceptance, love, tolerance, kindness, doing good, and spreading that – that is what Islam is for me’. Indeed, it was through the Tao Te Ching that Faiza came to terms with Islam in a way that made sense to her. ‘I came to accept that I probably know nothing, and that I will learn what I need to, take in what I feel is right for me, and be open to that being wrong and learning from it later’, she explained, welcoming the open-ended uncertainty of this process.

All the same, this journey was ‘an exhausting task’ sustained and made meaningful through Faiza’s intimate connection to God. Faiza asserted that, unlike the Islam she grew up with, her acts of worship were driven not by an obligation to be obedient, but by her love for God. ‘I very much love God, and so I pray five times a day, not because I have to, not because Islam says I should, but because it’s the most basic thing I can do to connect to God and be thankful to him’, she remarked, ‘To show him that yes, my life is busy, and yes, sometimes I will miss a prayer, but that I will make it up because I love and appreciate you and I want to show that’. Faiza approached her ritual acts of fasting and Quranic recitation with her niyya structured in the same way, ensuring she acted solely out of love and gratitude to God. Even when she performed deeds of kindness for others, Faiza did so not awaiting words of thanks, ‘but to see a smile on their faces that came through God’.

Despite the confidence she exemplified during our conversations, Faiza struggled to express her ideals at home. She described the challenge of embracing a worldview in which ‘there is no black and white, only a whole bunch of different grays’ in a family which reduced many aspects of life to ‘good or evil’. The uneasy existence of such divergent attitudes within a household created constant conflict between Faiza and her parents, causing her to seek places of refuge elsewhere. ‘When I’m at Sheraa, or in my philosophy classes, I’m at peace with myself, because I realize that this is my life and I will live it as best I can’, Faiza said, ‘I am open to learning lessons, and I trust that God will guide me wherever he needs me to go’. Many of Faiza’s friends shared the same challenges she does. Faiza described one Emirati friend who, despite being an atheist, wore a ḥijāb and ‘abāya out of a sense of duty towards her family and nation. As Faiza noted, ‘she finds her way around it’, illustrating the ‘pragmatic aspect of morality’ and the fact that people operate on multiple ‘normative registers’ simultaneously (Schielke, 2015: 53–57).

Faiza described this ability to flexibly maneuver through worlds inimical to one’s own as typical of the UAE’s young Muslims, insofar as women in situations like hers have ‘learned to navigate different spaces in different ways’. She provided an example: ‘My dad still doesn’t know that I no longer wear the scarf, and so when I’m out with my family, I’ll wear it, and I don’t mind – I don’t feel this huge oppressive pressure over me, it’s just something I do because I have to do it’. In those moments, Faiza veiled not as a religious act, seeking a reward from God, but simply to keep her father happy; it was a pragmatic move commanded by the situation. Similarly, Faiza did not mind ‘wearing the scarf to a mosque or to pray’, two other instances where veiling exemplified a ‘situational logic’ (Schielke, 2015: 57).

Thus, while Faiza’s unveiling reconciled the incoherence of her intentions and actions, her flexibility also offered a rationale for navigating this contradiction in other ways – through pragmatism, in this case. This approach, popular among Faiza’s peers and countless individuals I met in the field, allows women to work toward a pure niyya in religious deeds while preserving relations with others in moments demanding social pragmatism. ‘We’ve learned to find pockets of space where we can be ourselves as much as possible, and it lets off the pressure just enough to where we can go back into it’, she told me. In this way, women like Faiza nurtured a flexibility which made it possible to comfortably inhabit the ethical ambivalence they faced in settings hostile to their sensibilities and ways of life.

Conclusion

Although Faiza could not fully assert herself at home, thinking critically and acting flexibly has become increasingly welcome in her wider surroundings. Not only at Sheraa or in her philosophy classes were these imperatives valued, but in the UAE’s state discourses and institutions. We can think back to the excitement surrounding Akon’s self-proclaimed ‘Muslimness’ at SEF. Covering the event, The National, the UAE’s leading English-language daily, headlined its piece: ‘Akon says his Muslim faith is key to his success’ (Saeed, 2019). Underlying Akon’s promotion of the connection between entrepreneurship and faith, however, is also a certain conceptualization of correct Islamic belief and practice which the UAE consciously promotes.

Recall Akon’s response to critiques of his musical performance by stating that

I never looked at the performing aspect of the music itself but on the intention (…) I am not in a position to judge any man and I don’t expect them to judge me as well, but no matter what decision you make just do right by it. Because, at the end of the day, Allah is watching and he knows what is in your heart.

Akon privileges here the significance of a good intention – niyya, as Faiza referred to it – in determining the value of actions while also invoking the centrality of a personal relationship with God. As an invited keynote speaker to a prominent, state-funded event, Akon proclaims a message agreeable to his hosts. To engage God and Islam ‘directly’, without outside influence, are commendable acts in the present-day UAE. Such a modern drive toward authenticity involves attempting to free oneself from any external coercion that inhibits the ability to live in coherence with one’s ‘authentic’ inner self (Taylor, 1991), a state both Akon and Faiza aspire toward.

As the above has shown, whether at educational institutions like AUS, or in entrepreneurial settings like Sheraa, young UAE-based Muslims like Faiza are encouraged to approach Islamic dictums critically and to undertake religious practices flexibly. Doing so, women repurpose elements of the Islamic tradition to new ends – as evidenced by Faiza’s engagement of the concept of niyya. When Faiza cannot ascertain a pure intention for veiling, for instance, she removes her ḥijāb; even though she still feels compelled to veil before her father, it is enough for Faiza to be true to herself. This act, and its discursive justification, deviates from the ‘rehearsed spontaneity’ (Mahmood, 2001) of iterations of Islam which flourished during the Islamic Revival, and which the UAE seeks to quell. It implies a different normative relationship between interiority and exteriority, and another conception of how one’s practices and beliefs ought to align. This individual and state-sponsored (re)working of Islam takes place alongside, and in relation to, a reworking of parallel global forms like liberalism, and its requirement of critical thinking, and neoliberalism, with its command to act flexibly.

Such a transformation in youth religiosity is not unique to the UAE, nor to Muslims. A study of young Muslims and Christians in the Netherlands, for example, shows a move toward ‘a highly personal, experiential and emotional religious orientation, over the, at least in their eyes, more objective, cognitive and intellectualist religious practice of previous generations’ (Beekers, 2014: 90). These young believers uphold ‘a strong emphasis on inner conviction and on practising religion in a “conscious” rather than a “taken for granted” way’; ‘the incentive to study the scriptures oneself (…) and to critically assess one’s everyday practice of Islam and the quality of one’s faith in God (iman)’; and an ‘emphasis on being “critical” about the assumptions that one has adopted from home and on scrutinizing one’s personal relationship with God’ (Beekers, 2014: 90). This account resonates closely with Faiza’s descriptions of what it means to be a good Muslim. What is compelling about her experience, however, is the role played by local institutions in promoting this mode of Islam over others.

As is clear through Faiza’s example, an Islam which deems critical thinking and flexibility key features is endorsed by the UAE state in secular sites of work and learning, like Sheraa and AUS. Importantly, this Islam is embraced on the ground, particularly by millennial Muslims, as Faiza’s account has demonstrated. Notably absent in her narrative and that of her peers is the desire for material success through education or entrepreneurship, an otherwise a common aspiration for rising middle-class professionals. Rather than working toward a more materially comfortable lifestyle, women were primarily invested in learning how to be better Muslims in light of their newly embraced ideals.

In this case, responding to the initial uncertainty and ambivalence her AUS experience inspired, Faiza learns to embrace change and adaptability. Instead of trying to attain certainty in a single tradition or system of thought that addresses her current and future needs, Faiza cultivates an openness to her beliefs and practices changing over time. Faiza’s flexibility rests on a key Islamic concept – niyya. Insofar as she keeps the intention underlying her niyya sincere, Faiza maintains, so too do the acts she undertakes become good as well.

Faiza’s repurposing the concept of niyya to new ends continues an engagement with the Islamic tradition – albeit one undertaken in a context shaped by global forms like an American liberal education and neoliberal discourses of entrepreneurialism. Faiza reworks these global forms and the Islam she grew up with into assemblages unique to her milieu. Her experience offers one example of how global forms and forces find their way into the religious practices of the UAE’s millennial Muslim women, and millennial Muslims at large.