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- Convenors:
-
Marzia Balzani
(New York University, Abu Dhabi)
Leonardo Schiocchet (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
- Stream:
- Moving bodies: Shamanism, Spiritualism and Reliogiosity/Corps mouvants: Shamanisme, spiritisme et religiosité
- Location:
- TBT 319
- Start time:
- 3 May, 2017 at
Time zone: America/New_York
- Session slots:
- 2
Short Abstract:
How do Muslims incorporate complex histories of travel and dislocation into practices reestablishing everyday life in new locations? How are experiences of migration understood in relation to faith and traveling theories even when this is a fraught process for those making new homes far from home?
Long Abstract:
Places left behind, whether as sites of exclusion and exile or because they can no longer offer viable futures for those who dwell there, often invoke ideas of home as refuge, of center and origin, even as one moves further away from them both geographically and across time. This panel considers how Muslims in the diaspora incorporate diverse and complex histories of travel, displacement and dislocation into practices that reestablish home and reinvent everyday life in new locations. In particular, we seek to understand how experiences of migration, both forced and otherwise, are understood in relation to faith and 'traveling theories' serving to order and shape experience, even when this is a fraught and contested process for those who are compelled to make a new home far from home. How do ideas of places of origin, however imagined or reinvented in new contexts, interact with the locations to which Muslims journey and in which they establish their lives, to create identities that may often be conceptualized as unchanging in spite of altered circumstances? What happens to notions of a place of origin not only to first but also to second or third generation Muslims born in the diaspora? What can 'going home' to somewhere conceptualized as a place of origin mean for one who has never been there before? How is faith mobilized and enacted across borders, and how might faith inform conceptualisations of time, space and movement beyond the mundane?
Accepted papers:
Session 1Humayun Kabir (North South University)
Paper short abstract:
This paper interrogates the construction and maintenance of the Shia Muslims’ (the Twelver Shia) identity in relations to their ethnic, linguistic, and transnational Shia religiosity in Bangladesh, a predominantly Sunni Muslim society.
Paper long abstract:
The Shia community—predominantly the followers of the Twelver Shia—represents a very small number, and relatively unknown, in the majoritarian Sunni society in Bangladesh. This paper interrogates the Shia Muslims in Dhaka in relation to three important identity markers—ethnicity, language, and religious practices. The ethnic origin of the Shia Muslims is inextricably tied to the migration histories: those migrated long before the 1947's Partition of the Indian subcontinent, such as the Shia nobility during the Mughal reign, and those after the Partition. Both of the groups identify themselves as part of a minority linguistic tradition, the Urdu-speaking community. The earlier migrants, particularly, the Shia nobility settled in Old Dhaka being recognised under the Dhakaiya cultural and linguistic traditions have been subsumed under the Bengali society. In contrast, the degree of Bengalization is lesser among the Shia community migrated after the Partition from various parts of India, Bihar, in particular, for the political treatment towards them. However, ethnic and linguistic differences are often subsumed under Shia identity as articulated through regular commemorative practices, the embodiment of Shia martyrdoms, and the interaction with the Shia religious leaderships of Iran. What distinguishes the Shia community in Bangladesh is their relative co-optation and accommodation of religious practices to the syncretistic Islamic tradition of Bengali Sunni Muslims and their less political presences in 'othering' the Sunnis, though some recent attacks on the community challenge the premise.
Marzia Balzani (New York University, Abu Dhabi)
Paper short abstract:
Ahmadi Muslims have converted migration and exile fracturing ideas of home into a resilient transformation of diaspora into home, a transformation that is remarkably responsive, both ideationally and practically, to the political, economic and cultural realities of globalization.
Paper long abstract:
In under one century the spiritual home of the Ahmadiyya Muslims and physical home of their leader, the Khalifa, has moved from India to Pakistan to London. The Khalifa's move was not solely a communal dislocation but also the beginning of a diasporic movement of Ahmadis. Originally of South Asian heritage, the transnational proselytizing Ahmadis have made the UK their home and are now British citizens, often twice migrants from East Africa or Europe and converts from diverse ethnic backgrounds and cultures. Persecution in Pakistan has resulted in migration, exile and refugee status for many Ahmadis and in the need to make their home in a new country. The construction of collective memory and tradition has been central to Ahmadiyyat as has remaking home away from the original homeland of Ahmadiyyat and of many Ahmadis themselves in the subcontinent. While some collective experiences of migration encompassing memories and myths of the original homeland and beliefs originating in Islam apply, others such as the idea that the ancestral homeland may be a place of eventual return require a more complicated historical explication. For, in the Ahmadi eschatological vision, the eventual conversion of the globe to Ahmadi Islam is the future, and therefore no single place can constitute a homeland site for return when the whole globe is to become theirs in the fullness of time. Of course, should such a time come to pass, it will, by definition, constitute the very negation of diaspora as the whole world will be 'home'.
Sholeh Shahrokhi (Butler University)
Paper short abstract:
From mosques to halal markets; from religious events to charity, Muslims in diaspora have shifted the discourse of belonging from places of origin to communities of care. Muslims in America blur the lines between familiar/strange through space-making strategies connecting faith with public life.
Paper long abstract:
In the era of neoliberal reforms, mass migration across the globe is deemed an inevitable condition of life in the contemporary. However, current ideas about displaced bodies and immigration continue to be deeply shaped by notions of "home" and "places of origin". Whether as an articulation of a sense of longing for the "life that once was" (memory of a place); or else as a social marker to classify the dislocated (politics of exclusion), uprooted populations are situated in a liminal space of "belonging". Specifically, in recent years, Muslims in diaspora have become the embodiment of the figure of the "trespassing other" in western political cartographies. Everyday life practices of Muslim immigrants in the global north, however, is illustrative of their power in place-making that intersects across an ethnically diverse community. Faith, in this light, becomes the bond that connects Muslims in diaspora, not only through shared identities, but more powerfully, through shared practices. Mosques, as institutions for worship, become community centers where Muslim immigrants can seek guidance and refuge regardless of their linguistic, ethnic, and national ties to their respective countries of origin. "Home", in other words, emerges as a sense of a place that flows between the two regions of im/possibilities - the memory of the origin; and the vision for the life in the present. Based on a series of multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork among diverse ethnic groups of Muslim immigrants in the US, I look at how new forms of belonging emerge through everyday practices and relationships.
Martin Slama (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
The paper analyzes changes in how movement is conceptualized by members of Muslim diasporas in Indonesia with a special focus on the growing popularity of digital communication. It also aims to examine how “movement” and “home” can be connected in today’s social media age.
Paper long abstract:
The vast archipelagic state of Indonesia is home to a plurality of Muslim diasporas. Their networks span various regions of Indonesia and partly also cross Indonesian borders, particularly exhibiting connections to countries in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Whereas high levels of mobility have been a constitutive feature of these societies for a long time, the particular concepts of mobility prevalent in these diasporas, i.e. the actual practices of moving in space and the meaning that is attached to these practices, have not remained the same. The paper thus attempts to analyze changes in how movement is conceptualized by members of these Muslim communities with a special focus on how the growing popularity of social media has influenced their practices and discourses. It draws on fieldwork in various sites in Indonesia, ranging from the political and economic centers on the island of Java to more peripheral places in the eastern parts of the archipelago that nonetheless can be imbued with special religious meaning. The ethnographic examples represent Muslim diasporas that originate from outside as well as inside Indonesia adding to the complex picture of how "movement" and "home" can be connected. Taking these complexities into account, the paper aims at generating new insights about diasporic concepts of movement by comparing these diasporas and their transformations in today's social media age.
Liza Dumovich (KU Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
After the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey, the Hizmet Movement has been largely affected by the ensuing crackdown. This paper analyzes changes in how members of the Hizmet community in Brazil have dealt with their experience of migration, reimagining Turkey, the Movement, and their role in it.
Paper long abstract:
The Hizmet community in Brazil is part of the Hizmet Movement, a transnational Turkish Sunni Muslim movement with a missionary character, present in many countries worldwide. "Hizmet" means "service" and is a term used by the community's members to refer both to the Movement itself and to the religiously motivated service in which they engage - a whole set of activities and practices, which includes religious performances but also different kinds of involvement in the community's daily life and worldly activities. After the July 15 coup attempt in Turkey, the ensuing crackdown has led to a financial and social reconfiguration of the Hizmet community in Brazil, affecting the ways its members imagine their country, the Hizmet Movement, and their role in it. Since then, the idea of hicret (the Turkish version of the Arabic hijra) has been used by the community's members to reaffirm their migratory movement as religiously rather than politically motivated. This paper is based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork with the Hizmet community in Brazil, and is centered on that period of transition, comparing the two ethnographic moments - before and after the coup attempt. Then, it analyzes how members of the community have articulated the religious notions of hizmet and hicret in order to deal with their new reality, thus mobilizing Islamic history and vocabulary to reelaborate their migration experience and life mission.
Leonardo Schiocchet (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
After more than 65 years of protracted refuge, Palestinian refugees have to make elsewhere "home". This situation has prompted Palestinians worldwide to conceptualize home abroad. What lessons can anthropologists engaging (im)mobility learn from the Palestinian case?
Paper long abstract:
After more than 65 years of protracted refuge, Palestinian refugees have to make elsewhere "home". Even non-refugee Palestinians are prohibited to return to their villages of origin. This situation has prompted Palestinians worldwide to conceptualize home abroad. This paper discusses how Palestinians engage home in exile. In the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, for example, taking up local citizenship (tawtin) has historically prompted resistance from the political leadership, as this has been seen as the main barrier to the "Right of Return" (Al-Haqq al-'Awda), which in turn is often seen as key to the Palestinian Cause (al-Qadyyia al-Falastinyyia) and the Palestinian Struggle (al-Nadal al-Falastyn). In this sense, Palestinians Muslim and Christians alike have often referred to their existence as entailing resistance, mobilizing the idiom of al-sumud (steadfastness), a concept with Islamic undertones resignified by the PLO leadership especially in the 1970s as secular to prompt political action. In Latin America, to where most Palestinians migrated before the creation of Israel (Al-Nakba), many still describe Palestine as home (baladna, meaning "our country"), alongside their countries of residence. Even though this migration would fit neatly most definitions of a diaspora (shatat), and indeed this is the concept most widely used by scholars to refer to this social situation, Palestinians tend to refer to their own experience abroad as one of exile (ghurba). What lessons can anthropologists engaging (im)mobility learn from the Palestinian case?