Saggioro/Religious Super-diversity, 7. ‘Out-of-place’ Muslims: Public Islam and Youth Activism in Sites of Modernity

This chapter, based on ethnographic research among young people with Bangladeshi origins in the city of Rome, examines different expressions of religious activism in order to shed light on the relationship between the public sphere, Islam, and sites of modernity in migratory contexts. The analysis highlights two differing approaches to public expressions of religion: one that emphasises intertextuality between different ir-religious repertoires and follows a paradigm of interculturality; the other based on an idea of mutual untranslatabil- ity and reliant on values typically associated with multiculturalism. Both approaches mobilise the grammar of Islam within civic and political pathways with meanings drawn from the different positionalities of the people and organisations involved, and which stage a discourse on public Islam in theatrical and topological forms that highlight deep interconnections between Islam and “modernity”. They therefore challenge the monotheism of reason that tends to exclude Muslim actors from a normative, and ultimately biased, concept of the public sphere.