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Recent research finds that Muslim girls increasingly have in-group friendships in adolescence, while Muslim boys remain more open to interreligious friendships. This gender gap mirrors established findings of female Muslims’ lower involvement in interreligious romantic relationships, which is attributed to gendered religious norms. In this study, we examine whether gendered religious norms also contribute to the emerging gender gap in Muslim youths’ interreligious friendship-making. Building on the literature on intergroup dating, we identify religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities as key factors through which religious norms may not only constrain Muslim girls’ intergroup romantic relationships, but also their interreligious friendships. We also examine the contribution of gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection by non-Muslims to religious friendship-making. We study 737 Muslim youth from age 11–17 with six waves of longitudinal German data and find that religiosity, parental control, and leisure time activities all contribute to the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. Religiosity is associated with more in-group friendships, but only rises among Muslim girls in adolescence, not among boys. By contrast, parental control increases among both genders, but it only constrains girls’ interreligious friendships. Muslim girls’ declining participation in clubs also is associated with fewer interreligious friendships. Gendered experiences of religious discrimination and rejection do not contribute to the gender gap. Jointly, these factors explain one third of the emerging gender gap in interreligious friendship-making. This finding suggests that gendered religious norms not only limit interreligious romantic relationships but also interreligious friendships of Muslim girls.
In the early 21st century, scientists once more declared God a delusion and announced the end of faith, boosting the current critique of religious belief known as 'New Atheism'. Yet the contemporary British and Irish novel engage with religion in various forms, and religion has indeed "returned", Andrew Tate argues, "to the study of literature". The Bible in particular proves a rich source for novelists as different as Colm Tóibín, Zadie Smith, and Philip Pullman among others. Where Colm Tóibín's 'The Testament of Mary' (2012) offers a fictional memoir by the mother of God, depicting the Virgin Mary as "a powerful, unsparing figure" ('Guardian'), Zadie Smith's 'NW' (2012) describes the lives of its two female protagonists against the backdrop of the stories of Mary and Elizabeth in the Gospel of Luke. And Philip Pullman's bestselling trilogy 'His Dark Materials' (1995- 2000) is a re-writing of Milton's 'Paradise Lost' (1667) that "only really makes sense" according to Tate "if the reader has a detailed knowledge of the biblical scriptures against which it writes". Despite being written from a very critical, ironic or atheist stance, all these novels rely on the Bible as an intertext in crucial ways. The Bible, in other words, is once more living up to its ancient reputation as "the Book of Books", "the Urtext of Western literature".