Prayer and pedagogy: Redefining education among Salafist Muslim women in France

Abstract

Abstract This article draws on participant observation in a working-class Salafist women’s mosque community outside of Lyon. A decade after the headscarf ban in public schools, public hostility and aggression against Salafist women is rampant. As they remain estranged from the secular educational system, prayer and Islamic education have come to serve as an important substitute. Prayer is defined expansively as recitation, supplication, and the effort to strengthen one’s attachment to God. I argue that Salafist women are developing their own pedagogy and learning to question the meaning and purpose of knowledge itself. They do this through their study circles in which they share prayers and have conversations about doubt, forgiveness, and wisdom. The struggles and reflection their study requires are in contrast to depictions of Islamic education as merely mechanical and stifling. Further, their education shares similarities with critical pedagogy in its religious critique of capitalist culture. The paper asserts that France’s political crisis over laïcité has also become a crisis of public education. This, in turn, has facilitated the deepening of prayer as part of the new pedagogy among marginalized and stigmatized Muslim women.