9 - Conclusion

Summary

This conclusion gathers the various threads of the core arguments presented in the book, bringing together key themes as a way of connecting the chapters and providing some final thoughts. The book has built on a substantial, multi-disciplinary body of scholarship to provide an original, wide-ranging analysis of Muslim family life. It has applied major conceptual and theoretical arguments to empirical research, both my own and that of many others. A core aim of the book has been to make connections between two distinct bodies of scholarship: family and relationship studies and ethnic and racial studies. Drawing on current debates and theoretical resources from both, the book has included a critique of dominant conceptual frameworks, providing new insights to advance understanding of Muslim family life. It has paid close attention to change and diversity throughout, taking account of resulting ambiguities, complexities and contradictions in capturing the arrangement of social life known as family. It has critically evaluated the enduring significance of family to Muslims in a society in which Muslims are a minoritized group and in which different aspects of Muslim family life are overlooked or misunderstood. In doing so, it has contributed by showing how racialized ideas of Muslim families feed into wider problematization of Muslims, fuelling Islamophobia. The rest of this short concluding chapter summarizes the book's main contributions with the overall aim of setting out an agenda inviting further exploration of Muslim family life to influence policy and practice.

Developing a framework for theorizing Muslim family life

A general lack of interest in Muslim family life has arisen from multiple exclusions within mainstream sociology. The book has charted how traditionally dominant theories of family have overlooked Muslim families, from the discipline's foundational investigations to the development of family and relationships studies. This has included a lack of critical engagement with ideas of extended family and connected role of collectivism in the arrangement of family life. This book has demonstrated how the cultural turn in family and relationship studies can be extended to families outside of the unmarked White normative ideal, which is helpful in contributing to a framework for theorizing Muslim family life. Overall, the conceptual orientation of family practices and personal life provides some valuable tools with which to explore Muslim family life.