Composer avec l’interdit religieux

jeunes musulmans, sexualités préconjugales et arrangements normatifs

Abstract

How do religious norms shape sexual lives and couple relationships? How do the researcher interpret the impact of these norms on the interviewees’ accounts and conducts? This text will try to give an answer to these questions by analysing the results of a sociological qualitative research led in France and Italy with a group of 68 young Moroccan immigrant men, who are Muslim between the ages of 20 and 30, and coming from different social backgrounds. The article will analyse how religious and sexual individualisation strategies are privileged points of view to interpret social relationships and interactions. In particular, we will focus our attention on (heterosexual) couple relationships and intergenerational relationships (between parents and sons). The text will discuss the cases of two young men, Rachid and Hamza, in order to show how religious and sexual individualisation paths produce collective normative arrangements of Muslim precepts, through which different kind of social relationships are built, organised and negotiated.