Sacralized citizenship: women making known selves in an Islamic teachers’ college in Israel

Based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Islamic teachers’ college in Israel and interviews with women lecturers, this article explores how the women combine education and religion to create a revitalized self and sense of belonging despite lived experiences of structural racial, national, and gender inequalities. The women’s experience is understood through the lens of various social theories that are informed by religious or spiritual epistemologies. We see how the women build on sacred energy to make their selves known to the sacred and to the community in a way that infuses their own education and educating with the power to transcend oppressive social categories. I suggest that these women’s known selves present an alternative conceptualization of citizenship, not previously recognized by scholarship on Israeli society.