Paper short abstract:

University students are particularly apt at demonstrating how different identities are brought together in everyday life. The opposition between secularism and Islam becomes much less unsolvable if we take a closer look at how these students represent themselves and at their discourses and practices.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the variety of ways in which young women and men, students at the University of Jordan (or having recently obtained a degree from it), represent themselves and their sense of belonging in religious and social terms. Through ethnographic biographies (gathered during a year-and-half fieldwork in Amman) I show in which ways their different "technologies of the self" (as Foucault defined it) combine and overlap in their daily lives.

Their self-representations are proposed in the context of a strongly felt competition with the "West" and with what this term is taken to imply, secularism. This contrast is more practical than theoretical. The king's perceived Westernised lifestyle (and the developmental rhetoric he brings forth) is compared to the lives of many Jordanians, and in this way the "West" comes to represent economic exclusion of a majority of the population. At the same time many students (themselves a privileged category) see the "West" as a space that allows personal freedom (in contrast with the political and social control they experience at home).

I argue that youth is a category particularly apt to demonstrate how different identities are brought together in everyday life, regardless of their apparent contradictions. The embodiments and the discourses of the students show a certain mixture of elements of different "traditions". Some aspects of the secular project, that is assumed to be rejected by an overwhelmingly Muslim society due to its characteristics of the separation of domains (quite unconceivable in the framework of the discursive tradition of Islam) are actually integral part of the daily lives of many young men and women who claim to be "true Muslims", and hence opponents to the "West" and its secularising projects. They subsume this apparent unsolvable opposition (secular vs. non-secular) in their everyday practices. An individual able, and willing, to take an active role in the shaping of his/her own self and in his/her own life (while on campus or in the choice of a job, a place to live, and so forth) is part of the project of secularism. Yet students that claim a belonging to very different "traditions", namely the discursive tradition of Islam, quite often show a precise desire to act to emancipate themselves from the perceived immobility of their society. Thus subjectification, intended here as the desire for an emancipation of the self (sexual, familiar, societal, economical emancipation, as I will show in this paper) is quite present in Jordan today, at least among university students. But this doesn't imply a reject of traditions that may appear, to a "liberal" eye, contrary to the project of secularism.

In conclusion, what seems to be integral to the project of secularisation, the desire of self-realization, might as well be, and often is, present also in non-secular traditions. Being Muslim today doesn't in any way mean to be ipso facto outside of the framework of secularism - at least in one of its core point, the aim of emancipating the individual wherever in the world may he/she be. To adhere to the project of secularism or not is often a matter of political engagement, whose practical consequences have to be understood in local contexts.