Preface to Second Edition
Mind Maps:
http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/dimensions.htm
http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/true.htm
SCIENCE
Rejects “ideology-critique” of sociology of scientific knowledge
Focusing instead on “…the productive role of knowledges”
(p.xiii)
“…reconstructing the epistemological field that allows certain
things to be considered true at particular historical moments…”
(p.xiv)
Rose’s methods focus on:
Regimes of truth “Material and practical conditions under which
truths, facts, explanations come to be formulated and accepted”
(p.xiv), and
“…an epistemology of assemblage…” (p.xv)
Focus not on truth claims, but on ways which truths produced and
consequences of production
Not just disputes and arguments, but issues of prestige and
cultural intelligibility
SUBJECT
“My interest here links up with the growing interest in
questions of self and identity in contemporary sociology and
cultural studies” (p.xvi)
Self-society evident in seminal social science writers
Adam Smith – theory of moral sentiments
Karl Marx – economic and ideological individualism
Durkheim – mechanical and organic solidarity
Weber – protestant ethic
Simmel – modern life=mental life
Norbert Elias – civilization/civility
“How have persons been shaped by prevailing ways of thinking
about human beings and acting on them?” (p.xvii)
Genealogy of subjectivity “…confluence of a whole variety of
different shifts and practices with no single point of origin or
principle of unification…” (p.xvii)
Rejects Giddens/Beck’s epochalisation and sociological reduction
of subjectivity, BUT (very broadly speaking), epochs of the
English speaking (European?) concepts of self…
1st half 19th century – moral subject of habit
2nd half 19th century – normal subject of character/constitution
1st half 20th century – social subject of solidarity and
citizenship
2nd half 19th century – autonomous subject of choice and
realization
‘Making up’ people – Hacking (1986)
Argue that human beings actually live their lives as narratives
(Eric Berne?)
“Culture provides us with life narratives couched in
psychological terms” (p.xviii)
Subjectivities – ‘language games’
Hacking’s ‘human kinds’ that “…emerge and are transformed
simultaneously with the language that describes them” (p.xix)
Danizigen (1997) “…psychological properties … actually shape and
reshape the kinds of persons whom psychology has to deal”
(p.xix)
BUT
“The linguistic turn here can also be misleading and
restricting…” (p.xix)
“Language … is only one aspect of the ways in which the human
beings relation to itself is shaped and reshaped historically…”
(p.xix)
Techniques of the self
Ethics (in the Foucauldian sense) have been ‘psychologized’ but
not to the extent that we have become ‘psychological man’ (as
with Reiff, 1966)
POWER
Foucauldian concept of power – ‘governmentality’ – cf. Burchell
et al (1991)
Government “the conduct of conduct” (p.xxi)
Programmes/strategies/techniques “…for acting upon the actions
of others towards certain ends…” (p.xxi)
Multiple circuits of power
Diversity of authority and forces
(NB. Government at a distance)
Verdical discourses
“Advanced” liberalism – modern government
Citizenship “…there is a range of dispersed and non-totalizing
practices within which games of citizenship must be played”
(p.xxii)
‘Government through freedom’ which “…multiplies the points at
which the citizen has to play his or her part in the games that
govern them…” (p.xxiii)
CRITICAL APPROACH
Concerned about contemporary notions of selfhood, and the gains
made by the growth in the notion of individual autonomy are
matched by the losses concomitant on the decline of fraternity,
self-sacrifice and dependency.
The “ethical paucity” (p.xxiv) of the individualistic life
narrative!
Introduction
“Subjective experiences and intimate relationships offer
themselves as the only place where we cannot locate our real
private selves...” but this is the belief which is “…profoundly
misleading” (p.1)
Our subjectivities are, “…intensely governed” (p.1)
"Thoughts, feelings and actions may appear as the very fabric
and constitution of the intimate self, but they are socially
organised and managed in a minute particulars” (p.1)
http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/trope1.htm
(Rose argues that these tropes are limited)
Management of Contemporary Self
Distinctive in that
1. All governments etc in policy, bureaucracy and action, seek
to “…regulate the conduct of citizens by acting upon their
mental capacities and propensities…” (p.2) eg education system
"The ` soul' of the citizen has entered directly into political
discourse and a practice of government" (p.1)
2. "The management of subjectivity has become a central task for
more than organisation" (p. 2) Eg aptitude, psychology in
Management Studies
3. Birth of a new form of expertise of subjectivities, Eg
psychologists, social workers
Instead, Foucault's concept of ‘governmentality’ "The ensemble
formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections,
the calculations and tactics, the to allow the exercise of this
very specific albeit complex form of power" (p.5)
Governmentality "...transformation of the rationalities and
technologies for the exercise of political rule" (p.5) bound up
with the extension of governments into knowledge and
understanding of its populations
http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/examination.htm
Two knowledges
1. Population as an isolated sector of reality
2. Latour’s concept of `inscription’ as if all of knowledge used
by governments
Inscription "...translates the World into Material traces:
written reports, drawings, maps, charts and, pre-eminently,
numbers" (p.6)
17th to 19th centuries
Numbers-statistics "the science of state" (p.6) Eg delinquency
rates "The capacities of subjects were becoming pertinent to and
available for governments in a new way" (p.7)
"The human psyche itself has become a possible domain for
systematic government... Educate, cure, reform, punish…" (p.7)
"... in rendering subjectivity calculable it makes persons
amenable to having things done to them -and doing things to
themselves - in the name of subjective capacities" (p.8)
"... human technologies... enable action from a centre of
calculation... upon the subjective lives of men, women and
children" (p.8)
But the actual technologies governing subjectivity have no
single origin, the top of consequence of ‘small histories' out
of which "...a larger pattern has taken shape in whose web we
all, men and women, have become entangled" (p.9)
The heterogeneity of psychology has enabled it to "...operate
within a diversity of contexts and strategies or the government
of subjectivity" (p.10)
Expertise "...provides essential distance between formal
apparatus of laws...and the shaping of the activities of
citizens..." (p.10)
Persuasion/attraction as strategies so that citizens of liberal
democracies "regulate themselves" (p.10) by self management,
alliances of personal and institutional goals
http://www.bayyinat.org.uk/rose/selfmanage.htm
1. The Psychology of War
"My concern [is with] how the experience of war has transformed
our ways of thinking about and intervening in the organisation
or human beings within military and non-military spheres alike”
(p.16)“…many of the major figures of post-war psychology were
involved in war work…” (p.7)
“The post-war transformations in the rationales and technologies
for the government of the human soul or impossible to understand
without recognising the ways in which the experience of warfare
transformed the conceptual apparatus, practical techniques and
professional aspirations of those involved”(p.17)
Experiences: two themes
Need to systematically utilize the human factor
The psychology of the group
World War One United States intelligence testing and specialised
Personal System, "both render the human individual into the
field of knowledge and the scope of management of institutional
life” (p.17)
Germany War Ministry until 1941
Shell-shock, which precipitated the Mental Hygiene Movement and
so, "Madness was now thought of in terms of social hygiene”
(p.21)
2. The Government of Morale
Edward Glover, birth of social psychiatry (Lancet, 1940)
"In the early decades of the 20th century, government was
extended to the petty details of personal life” (p.22)
New social medicine
" As the Royal Commission of 1926 put it the problem of insanity
was essentially a public health problem to be dealt with on
public health lines” (p.23)
Morale - prospect of air war
“The report [of 1938] … encapsulated the dominant expert view.
Psychiatric casualties of air-raids would, it seem, exceed
physical casualties by three to one… a complex organisation must
be set up… as Hugh Crichton Miller put it, 'There's a real
danger that the civilian ill seek, not security, but infantile
security'… these anxieties proved to be unfounded…” (p.24)
The main problem was bed-wetting among first children who had
been evacuated!
"But the anxiety about a possible epidemic of neurosis produced
its own consequences. A sustained effort was made to chop the
neurotic topography of the population." (p.25)
"The mental state of the population was beginning to be
translated into a calculable form: inscribed, documented, and
turned into statistics, graphs, charts, and tables that could be
pored over in political deliberations and administrative
initiatives." (p.25)
The British leadership went in for practical organisational
measures rather than scientific government.
"Additionally, some psychologists argued that the lack of panic
in neurosis be explained if one reversed the pre-war analysis
made by the experts … [s]ocial solidarity and psychological
relations were becoming the central terms in accounting for
mental health"(p.25)
Ministry of Information
Influence of psychologists and psychiatrists on the Ministry was
through terminology and concepts and direct influence was
uncommon.
Morale propaganda issue declined after 1941 after a change in
leadership.
This contrasted with the “…American enthusiasm or the scientific
study and regulation of morale….” (p.29)
UK and also elsewhere: "...The emergence of subjectivity as a
key concern of government of the problem to psychology that it
would later strive to claim for its own” (p.26)
United States Gallup poll
Earlier ideas about irrational mobs “…gave way to a notion of
the populace as an aggregate of individuals with views and
wishes to be investigated by precise techniques and communicate
is to govern by experts” (p.27)
"The new science and democracy also drew on a new ways of
thinking about individual will" (p.27)
Attitudes
"...bridged the internal world of the psyche and the external
world of conduct..." (p.27)Attitude survey or moral survey"
The public will could be turned into numbers and charts could be
used in formulating arguments and strategies … where individuals
were to be governed 'by consent'..." (p.28)
“…the programme for the management of consent through the
monitoring and channelling of opinion was greatly elaborated in
the conditions of war...” (p.28)
USA
“…American enthusiasm or the scientific study and regulation of
morale….” (p.29)
Rensis Likert – Likert scale
The success of administrative decisions came to be construed as
“…dependent upon information about the public mind" (p.30)
UK Wartime Social Survey
Slimmed down after 1941, becoming a "…more limited but precisely
targeted set of inquiries" (p.30) and after the war was
incorporated into the Office of Population Census and Surveys."
The survey provided the means for translating the psychological
state and well-being of the population into the calculations of
government agencies” (p.30)
"Information and happiness go together in the new science of
government as much as in the old Science of police” (p.31)
Propaganda: "Maclean suggests that, for the most part, the [UK]
Ministry studiously avoided consulting psychological experts"
(p.31)
Post-war, citizenship had acquired subjective form and the
citizen had become actively engaged in the social and political
process.
This involved the "…shaping of wills, consciences, and
aspirations, to forge social solidarity and individual
responsibilities in the name of citizenship and democracy"
(p.32)
"As citizenship became a psychological matter, the psyche of the
citizen was discovered as a new continent for psychological
knowledge and the deployment of the professional skills of the
technicians of subjectivity" (p.32)
Quick note: What has this got to do with Islamic masculinities?
Well, quite a lot. This text is about the way in which Western
governments and ‘governmentality’ has influenced our
self-understanding. This begs so many questions, including the
extent to which such pervasive and implicit understandings have
influenced Muslim discourse about the self in the West. To
understand how to be a 'Western' Muslim, we don't a history of
philosophy (as Tariq Ramadan seems to be implying, although I
admit I have only gleaned this from interviews), but genealogies
of culture. It's the deep stratas around the Muslim-European
borderland that interests me...
3. The SykeWarriors
WWII = ‘Black’ propaganda and ‘white’ propaganda
White propaganda eg UK dropped 2 billion leaflets on Continental
Europe!
Black propaganda eg ‘rumour’
Dicks and Shills study of German POW’s politics, enabling
propaganda to target specific populations
“The personal and interpersonal characteristics of population
were made thinkable and calculable; they could now enter into
the strategies of war and peace” (p.36)
"Indeed, as far as the United States is concerned, but the end
of 1942 the majority of social scientists in general the social
psychologists in particular were in government service, either
full-time or acting as consultants on particular projects"
(p.36-37)
"The investigation of morale, the analysis of attitudes,
interpretation of the dynamic relationships between individual
and group - these formed the matrix for a plethora of distinct
but interrelated investigations but blurred disciplinary
boundaries…” (p.37)
Kluckhohn and Leighton’s concluded that behaviour in times of
stress were related to deeply ingrained attitudes originating in
childhood and conceived of the morale of Japanese soldiers and
civilians in these terms. The notion of national character was
thus remodelled as a psychological conception, translated into
set of psychological technique useful for providing expert
advice in political calculations.
Studies drawing on psychoanalytic and anthropological notions in
the same vein influenced the character of later research into
Native American and Soviet cultures.
"The social importance of this psychologization of childhood and
personality was to go far beyond the military concerns that had
provoked it" (p.38)
The interdisciplinary nature of the studies carried out during
WWII was carried forward through the Department of Social
Relations at Harvard University (established 1946) and in
Parson’s general theory of action.
“…psychologization of the polity, of its attitudes,
solidarities, and oppositions, its interpersonal transactions,
was to establish the platform for the most significant
developments of psychological expertise... In the post war
years” (p.39)
4. Groups as War
"The birth of the group constituted the most profound effect the
experience of war upon the government of subjectivity” (p.40)
“…procedures of selection, allocation, and promotion
increasingly deployed psychological and psychiatric criteria…”
(p.40)
A project directed by Eli Ginzberg on the war, published work in
the 1950s, concluded that "...organisational policy could
improve the performance of large organisations by taking account
of personality and motivation” (p.41)
Stouffer’s surveys, of the attitudes of American troops,
published in four volumes in 1949 and 1950, incorporated the
concept of attitude as a link between the efficiency of an
organisation and individual morale as a subjective relationship
comprehendible in terms of the small number of dimensions.
Fundamental to this calculable measure was the scale: Renis
Likert and Louis Guttman. Attitudes could therefore be
"…investigated, measured, inscribed, reported, and calculated,
and administrative decisions made in that light" (p.44)
Stouffer’s work also highlighted how crucial the maintenance of
morale and efficiency was to the group. The upshot was that the
management of the army (and factory) was seen as achievable
through "…acting upon the bonds that or regroup and aligning
individuals through this mechanism with the objectives of the
organisation” (p.45)
"At a more mundane and immediate level, psychological
investigation could inform very detailed military decisions. For
motivation and contentment appeared to be a product of the
issues and exigencies of everyday existence … psychological
expertise had become the key to organisational harmony" (p.45)
Officer recruitment: “….the United States provided the
techniques for the standardisation of personality … Britain
innovated in the use of real life situations for the assessment
of capacity - the observation of candidates while they performed
the various tasks set them…” (p.47)
Britain – field theory of Lewin and Moreno: traits “… were not
constant qualities of the individual were all successful
officers possessed, which existed independent of context” (p.47)
"From the wartime years onward, social and institutional life
was increasingly to be conceived as intersubjective emotional
relations, the interplay between social solidarity is an
individual personality dynamics” (p.48)
Emphasis on psychological bonds and group solidarity
There was a similar impetus towards group based understandings
from the work done with soldiers with psychoneurotic symptoms
and returning POWs, with the development of the therapeutic
community alongside parallel developments which led to the birth
of group psychotherapy.
"The relational life of the group had become both the field of
the illness and the domain of the cure" (p.51)
"In the years immediately following the end of the war, the
problems of economic reconstruction would insert these issues of
the group into the art of economic debate, managerial practice
and psychological innovation … Solidarity and morale could be
produced by administrative means. The group had become a crucial
means of conceptualising the social behaviours of the
individual, or analysing the efficiency of all manner of social
practices, of promoting individual contentment and
organisational efficiency, and of conducting the business of the
cure" (p.52)
Afterthought: Is the Islamic ummah sometimes represented in
terms of the 'sick group'?
5. The Subject of Work
Marxist critique of work :“Workers work because they have to,
they work at the behest of others in a process they do not
control, to produce goods or services which they do not enjoy…”
(p.55)
Obedience, self-denial and deferred self-gratification,
“…entails an essential subordination of subjectivity” (p.56)
But workplace reforms, with the help of numerous agencies,
including psychology
"these different attempts to transform work see the subjectivity
of the worker not only as a value to be respected rather than
subjugated, but also as a central determinant to the success of
the company” (p.56)
Success of company comes from, “…engaging the employee with the
goals of the company at the level of his or her subjectivity”
(p.56)
Worker’s subjectivity viewed as “…a complex territory to
explored, understood and regulated” (p.56)
Also numerous private organisations, eg management consultancies
Humanizers of work “…have represented themselves as liberal,
democratic and egalitarian…” but these representations have been
criticized for being “…disingenuous or politically naive…”
(p.58)
Focus on theories/techniques of appeal to managers,
“…psychological expertise has inevitably adopted a managerial
perspective” (p.58)
eg F W Taylor (1913) = “Taylorism”
However, by defining the expertise as an ideological tool, the
implication is that it is false and the result of single social
process of worker exploitation…
Rose sees the development of this expertise as “…part of a wider
family of political Programmes to use scientific knowledge to
advance national efficiency through making the most productive
use of material and human resources…” (p.59)
Programmes incorporated pressures of democracy and demands for
rational legitimization of managerial role in promoting
efficiency
6. The contented worker
Early 20th century – most employers/employees in the UK bound by
statutory requirements/constraints “Work became a key element in
the social economy” (p.61)Socialization of work:
“In the interwar years … psychological factors were to become
the basis of a new matrix of relations between economic
regulation,
management of the enterprise and psychological expertise…”
(p.65)
Charles Myers – National Institute for Industrial Psychology
Myers: “…his pupils included virtually all the central figures
in British psychology in the Interwar period” (p.66)
Myers – opposed behaviourism, subject matter of psychology
consciousness not conduct
Personality assessment, aptitude testing, vocational guidance,
personnel training, etc…
Bad manager = poor psychodynamics
Key notions:
Individual difference – individuals with complex subjective life
(the maladjusted worker);
Mental hygiene;
Productivity/efficiency/contentment understood in terms of:
attitudes of workers to work; workers feeling of control over
pace/environment; sense of cohesion within small working groups;
beliefs about bosses views of their work and personal concerns
“The minutiae of the human soul – human interactions, feelings
and thoughts, the psychological relations of the individual to
the group – had emerged as a new domain for Management” (p.72)
Management = expert = neutral, adopting humanitarian concepts
within a sensibility articulated by Sidney Webb, ‘Under any
social order from now to Utopia, management is indispensable and
all enduring’ (Webb, 1917, cited p.74)
Welfare Workers Association (1913)
Became – Institute of Labour Management (1931)
Became – Institute of Personnel Management (1940s)
7. The Worker at war
“…new political contact between opened between government and
citizen during World War II…” (p.76)
…Corporatism? (…vs. the illusion of constitutionalism)
Efficiency, rationality, productivity
But the corporatism analysis obscures some of the positive
outcomes from this contract, such as “…the elaboration of a new
rationale of government, a new way of formulating the task of
public authorities, a new way of conceiving and regulating the
links between citizen and his or her productive activity” (p.76)
8. Democracy at Work
“Through work, the worker obtained psychological and social
benefits: fulfilment and a feeling of belonging” (p.81)
Not soft-soaping – although perhaps development of consensus
towards the hegemony of capitalist organisation of labour.
More significant for the values they perpetuated and also for
their impact on productivity
Writings influential, eg J. A. C. Brown
Unit of observation = social relationships, thus developing the
idea of group over mob
Working group with common purpose viewed as source of personal
satisfaction for worker
The management of the enterprise “…was becoming an exercise in
the management of opinion” (pg 86) rather than autocratic
Communication and leadership as vital to effective management –
foremen
Style of leadership crucial to morale
“The internal world of the factory was becoming mapped in
psychological terms … inner feelings of the workers were being
transmuted into measurements … [t]he enterprise thus became a
microcosm of democracy” (p.88)
Mental hygiene…
Spectrum of views
Psycho-physiological science of work (ergonomics)
…to…
“…psychoanalysis of the organisation” (p.89) Tavistock, ‘Human
relations’, the socio-technical system
9. The Expertise of Management
“The link between democracy and productivity, between justice
and contentment, began to be displaced in the Britain of the
1960s … what was necessary for economic health, it appeared, was
the reconstruction of the rational relations between pay and
production, and the reconstitution of proper relations of
authority and responsibility in the life of the workplace.”
(p.93)
Decline of human relations in psychology of work; resurrection
of ‘economic man’
Human relations translated into skills-based management
approaches, along with notion of tools for developing ‘human
potential’ (in the quasi-religious sense) whereby managers could
“…transform their own modes of personal existence in order to be
adequate to wield responsibility and to lead effectively”
(p.102)
Problems ensuing on the rise of the shop steward movement –
over-manning, irrational demarcation, etc… Response - rise of a
‘new economic calculability’
10. The Production of the Self
“The primary economic image offered to the modern citizen is not
that of producer but that of consumer” (p.103)
‘…purchasing power…’
‘…lifestyle choices…’
“The image of the citizen as a choosing self entails a new image
of the productive subject” (p.103)
“The worker is an individual in search of meaning,
responsibility, a sense of personal achievement, a maximized
‘quality of life’ and hence of work” (p.103/4)
“The individual is … fulfilled in work, now construed as an
activity through which we produce, discover and experience
ourselves” (p.104)
“…production takes as central the values of adaptability,
innovation, flexibility, excellence, sensitivity to consumer
pressures and the demands of the market” (p.104)
‘…humanization of work…’
‘…the management of excellence…’ (Peters and Waterman – USA)
‘…Quality of Working Life (QWL)…’ (UK)
Source of new vision of work: Europe, links between
socio-technical expertise at Tavistock and Scandinavian
corporatism
QWL still minority concern in UK – ideas “…reabsorbed into a
managerial technology for promoting worker commitment and
contentment” (p.107)
UK – influence of Japan, etc ‘…self esteem of employees…’
In USA, reaffirmation of protestant ethic as a ‘social ethic’
William H. Whyte’s 'The Organisation Man'
Management of worker based on conceptions of human nature
derived from Maslow, Rogers, Frankl, Fromm, etc
Peters and Waterman 'In Search of Excellence'
Model II learning, where the stress is on “…striving for
information, collaboration, facilitation, openness, trust,
risked taking, shared responsibility, choice learning, open
competition – in other words a Model II organisation can learn
and change” (p.114)
‘…intrinsic motivation…’
“The citizen, at work as much as outside it, is engaged in a
product to shape his or her life as an autonomous individual
driven by motives of self-fulfilment” (p.116)
‘…psychological consultants to the organisation…’
Both in the USA and UK, realignment of human relations theory
“…sought to reshape the internal world of the organisation so as
to release the autonomous subjectivity of the worker in such a
way that it aligned it with the aspirations of the enterprise,
now construed in terms of innovation, flexibility and
enterprise” (p.112)
Work as part of a path to self-fulfillment
“There is no longer any barrier between the economic, the
psychological, and the social. The antithesis between managing
adaptation to work and struggling for rewards from work is
transcended” (p.109)
Final thoughts
I had done a fair amount of close reading of Rose, and the only
remaining details I want to draw attention to are the link made
by Rose between behaviourism, social skills training and
performative (consumer ) culture (chapter 17) and Wendy Brown's
thesis on the way political identity is linked to suffering and
social exclusion. The latter is interesting, in the light of how
Islamophobia has proved more of a uniting point for British
Muslims than Allah himself, or so it seems.
In reading the final sections of this book, however, what has
become clear to me was the significance of its presiding theme -
which is the way that a whole range of institutions, quite
unconspiritorially, have sought to align political, social and
institutional goals with the way people think about themselves.
Rose demonstrates this governmentality through exploring (in
detail) the way psychological sciences have created 'psy spaces'
in each of us, and the consequent tangible, far reaching and
profound impact this has had on our lives, from work to
mothering to how we socially interact with one another.
There are several important issues raised within this thesis
that have pertinence to TGP.
First is the moral contradictions which have arisen from this
pervading governmentality - especially between freedom and
choice and self-regulation. Freedom and choice, in this context,
is the freedom and choice of the consumer. What Rose is
suggesting, and I think quite rightly, is that corporate
consumerism is the defining theme of contemporary culture.
This raises the question as to what extent Islam can ever be
'integrated' into such a culture, or indeed, whether one of the
defining ethics of Islam should be rejection of this ethic. The
core morality common to all governmental discourses -
consensuality and excess, as well as the ethic of authenticity
versus hypocrisy, further highlights this question.
Rose's work presses one to ask of any idea not, 'What are its
origins?' but rather 'How has it been shaped by evolving
historical understandings of the self?' But what about the self,
anyway? If it is such a historical entity, if it is so patently
socially constructed, how do TGP (and should TGP) seek to
'Islamize it'? Is this what is at the heart of becoming a Muslim
man? Similarly, how to avoid imposing consumerist
conceptualisations of self onto, say, a reading of the Qur'an?
These are all notes of caution, but there are also some clear
directions forward. One is the idea that action, rather than
person, is what is crucial. Becoming a Muslim (man) is about
what one does, not who one is - ie. praxis. I would assert
knowledge is also praxis, if it leads to action. And the kind of
praxis knowledge I am seeking to develop is one that
deconstructs the whole idea of Muslim identity, and reconstructs
the idea of a Muslim as an agent.
That would seem to be the way forward, and at this juncture, I
think the focus of my studies should turn from social sciences
to Islamic Studies, in order to build a foundation upon which
this new praxis can be built, insha Allah
In the Name of Allah...