Study title

The interviews were semi-structured. The interviewer worked with an interview-guide which is included in this submission. We chose participants based on the fact that they were highly involved in parenting guidance, either as authors who wrote a parenting guide-book, a parenting course or people who activated a parenting program aimed at Muslim parents. We analysed these interviews using thematic and discourse analysis.

The relation of fundamentalist religious groups to modern Western culture is ambivalent. Various studies have demonstrated how religious groups adopt from Western culture practical and useful elements such as technology, medicine and managerial techniques, while rejecting its liberal and secular values. This research examines a surprising case, in which an insular religious community adopts aspects from the modern Western culture- very little explored in the academic literature on religious groups so far - the psychological and democratic discourses. One of the areas in which these discourses have made a clear impact is the religious discourse about parenting which will be at the centre of this study. We examine and analyse the portrayals of parents and children and their recommended relationships as presented in current self help parenting guidebooks written in British and European Muslim communities, for their members. In addition to these texts we analyse interviews with a group of parenting experts who wrote some of these texts. This study continues a similar study I have completed about parenting guidebooks in the Israeli Jewish Ultra Orthodox (Haredi) community.