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Muslim youth as global citizens

ABSTRACT Dominant understandings of global or cosmopolitanism citizenship align it with the ‘modern’ and the ‘secular’, in ways that construct religious belongings as irrational, or indeed ‘pre-modern’. Assumptions of superiority embedded in claims to cosmopolitanism are all the more powerful for being constructed as a ‘universal’, in ways that erase and occlude the local social relations and particularities of the spaces and positions from which these very claims emanate. Resisting such understandings, this paper engages with research into Muslim youth identities with respect to nation, religion and gender in four nation-states of the Global South. It explores how Muslim youth’s strong affective commitments to the religious community of the ‘global Ummah’ can be understood as a distinctive form of global, cosmopolitan citizenship, in ways that are similar to, but also sharply differentiated from modern (secular) understandings of cosmopolitanism. We suggest that appeals to any ‘universal’ cosmopolitan project can work to silence local social relations (such as ethnic, gender, religious or class differentiations), and how all claims to cosmopolitanism are intrinsically sutured to youth’s struggles for positioning within their nation. We stress therefore the importance of attending to local social dynamics throughout our analysis of youth identity constructions and their constitutive others, and take this up throughout the following papers of this special edition.