"The Mother is a School": Muslim Mothers and Their Religio-Educative Roles

Abstract

Using found poetry extracted from in-depth ethnographic interviews, this study seeks to explore the experiences and imaginations of eleven Muslim mothers of the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), particularly focusing on their religio-educative, child-rearing roles. With strikingly spatial language, participants describe themselves in terms of heroines and poets, while also expressing overwhelming feelings of failure to fulfill self-defined “ideal” motherhood. Using poetic inquiry, this research moves beyond apparent paradoxes, offering the concept of poetic spaces –in-between spaces that are fluid and transformative, navigating everyday truths in relation to religious Truths- to demonstrate the complexity of mothers’ imaginations. This work is also part of a small yet growing line of inquiry, seeking to explore Muslim imagination from an aesthetic perspective, rather then through a predominantly legal lens. Within this small yet important area of inquiry, this work is the first of its kind to focus exclusively on Muslim mothers.