The relationship between Islam and modernity has remained a central question in Islamic studies. Thereby, the life of Muslim minorities in the “West” has turned into an expanding field of research. But while the study of modern Muslim life has left the “Orient”, it remains restricted by its focus on metropolitan areas such as Berlin, Detroit, London, Oslo, Paris, Sydney, or the greater Toronto area. Moreover, contemporary research tends to focus on pietistic and/or Salafi milieus whereby the idea of a fundamental alterity between “Islam and the West” is stressed. This applies even more to studies on the transnational nature of contemporary Islam often emphasizing the nexus of migration, Islamist politics, and ideological antagonisms to ”Western culture”. Often Muslims are not represented as an intrinsic part of global modernity, but rather as “conscripts of Western modernity”, engaging with modernity as an “external force”.

This project wants to challenge this entrenched notion of alterity that has characterized scholarly discussions about the relationship between Islam and modernity from a novel perspective. Theoretically, we combine theories of modern subjectivity formation with current approaches to “lived religion” as everyday practices. Empirically, we take the study of Islam in the West in new directions, in terms of geography, religious tendency, and social context. Instead of looking at pietistic milieus and Islamist politics in metropolitan areas, we explore the role of Islamic traditions in the subjectivity formation of contemporary Muslims in the socially and ecologically distinct environment of Arctic towns in Norway and Canada.

The Arctic serves us as an analytical prism for addressing the relationship of Islam and modernity in an innovative way. However, the locus of our study, the Arctic, is not its core subject. Instead, our cases promise original answers to more general questions: How do Muslims make sense of Islam in contemporary subjectivity formation? In which ways do they refer to Islamic traditions as a means to gain authenticity in modern life? What kind of religious transformations take place thereby? Looking for answers to these questions, we aim at generating new insights to central theoretical and empirical debates in both Islamic and Religious Studies. It is our hypothesis that the exploration of Muslim everyday life in the Arctic will add significant and unique insights into the reinterpretation of Islamic tradition in contemporary Muslim identity construction.