Contemporary Islam – Envisioning Hijra among European Muslims

I had the pleasure and honour to participate in a special issue of the journal Contempary Islam on the theme Envisioning Hijra: the ethics of leaving and dwelling of European Muslims, edited by Nadia Fadil, Annelies Moors and Karel Arnaut.

Thanks to the editors for their great work. I have listed all articles below. Click on the titles to go directly to the article.

Envisioning Hijra: the ethics of leaving and dwelling of European Muslims – Nadia Fadil, Annelies Moors & Karel Arnaut

Abstract

Within the current Western European context, where the presence of Islam in the public sphere has become an object of continuous polemics and debates, emigrating or ‘leaving Europe’ has emerged as a conceivable option among a wide range of people who identify as Muslim. Both within and beyond specific pious circles such migratory moves have sometimes been framed as hijra. This special issue enquires into the way hijra is imagined and experienced, but also how the issue of hijra is debated and acted upon among European Muslims who are contemplating the possibility of leaving Europe, or who have already left the continent. In order to cover both the specific and the more general dynamics surrounding hijra, this thematic issue is motivated by one, albeit multi-layered hermeneutical objective. In general terms, we aim to understand the complex and multiple significations operating around the notion of hijra among European Muslims of various backgrounds and convictions. In so doing we seek to contribute to the mounting anthropology of Islam in Europe by examining articulations of mobility and migration through religious imaginaries and repertoires. This implies ethnographically accounting both for the perspectives and assessments of those who are situated and located in Europe and desire to leave the continent in order to perform the hijra, as well as for the ways in which hijra is lived and practiced by those who have left Europe and moved to a Muslim-majority context. In order to buttress further the emerging anthropological field at the nexus of religion and mobility/migration, this introduction cautiously maps out a number of analytical concepts which we think could strengthen the multifaceted ethnographic ventures of the contributions comprising this thematic issue: the ‘ethics of dwelling’, ‘regimes of mobility/diversity’ and religious imaginaries and repertoires, being the most prominent.

“Some kind of family”: Hijra between people and places – Joud Alkorani

Abstract

This article follows one woman’s serial migration to, away from, and back to Dubai in order to consider the intersections of migration, subjectivity, and piety. It analyzes how Hanna’s migratory journey, or hijra, relates to her desire to become pious and reveals how people in her life shape the trajectories of both her faith and her movement. Engaging scholarship on migration and ethical subjectivity, it traces how Hanna’s mobility runs parallel to her attempt to surround herself by those who make her piety possible. Whether it is the relationship with her parents and siblings in Birmingham, or the community of “sisters in Islam” she establishes in Dubai, Hanna is moved both by aspirations of piety and by the people who support (or inhibit) her efforts, highlighting the social nature of the geographic places she moves through and inhabits. Recognizing the ability of others to help or hinder her spiritual goals, Hanna actively seeks to settle amongst those who motivate and empower her to become the ideal Muslim she desires to be. Seen in this way, Hanna’s experience allows us to shift from a notion of subjectivity premised upon individualized acts of self-cultivation like prayer, fasting, or veiling to an appreciation of the intersubjective role of others in the development of the self. Combining this intersubjective lens with an alternative account of mobility, I argue for understanding Hanna’s self-positioning as an act that is not only geographic, but (inter)subjective, with the trajectory of her piety discernible both geographically and socially.

‘Making Hijra’: mobility, religion and the everyday in the lives of women converts to Islam in the Netherlands – Vanessa Vroon-Najem & Annelies Moors (Open Access)

Abstract

Drawing on long term research – including topical life stories, interviews and participant observation – we analyze how women converts to Islam in the Netherlands signify and experience making hijra. Our interlocutors, all observant Muslims, had left the Netherlands between the late 1990s and the mid 2010s. In the course of the last 5 years many have again returned to the Netherlands. Their life courses indicate that physical and existential mobility are interconnected in their everyday lives as well as in their migration trajectories. Whereas they considered conversion to Islam as moving forward, the majority society did not share this perspective. They were sharply aware of how they were no longer seen as self-evidently part of the Dutch nation. This produced feelings of stuckedness – in an existential and a material sense – for themselves and their children, and hence a desire to move to a Muslim majority country. They differed amongst themselves as to whether and how they signified leaving Europe as making hijra in an Islamic sense. To some, making hijra was a highly desirable religious act. Others did not foreground such religious signification, but nonetheless expected positive effects of living in an environment where Islam would be an integral part of daily life. Their attempts to settle in various Muslim majority countries were, however, often not successful. Material conditions made it difficult to enact their ethical aspirations, that included the moral and material wellbeing of others, especially their children. Moreover, their appreciation of the self-evident presence of Islam in the countries of settlement was tempered, first, by the tension between their quest for a reflexive, deculturalized Islam and the culturalized practices they encountered in their new environment, and second, by their growing awareness of how their sense of self was much more shaped by habitual ‘Dutch’ conventions than most of them had envisioned beforehand. As a result they were often unable to develop meaningful social relationships in their new environment. Eventually, almost all of them returned to the Netherlands.

“They have no taste in Morocco.” Home furnishing, belonging, and notions of religious (im)perfection among white Dutch and Flemish converts in Morocco – Nina ter Laan (Open Access)

Abstract

This article focuses on furnishing practices in the domestic space of the homes of white Flemish and Dutch Muslim female converts to Islam who made hijra (Islamic migration) to Morocco. Fed up with European Islamophobia and longing for a place that supports and strengthens their faith, they decided to emigrate to a Muslim country. However, remarkably, once settled in Morocco, many experience discontent with regard to a perceived “lack of true Islam” in the country. To gain insight into the positions and experiences of these women, I look at how they create a sense of belonging through furnishing practices in the domestic space of their new homes. I am interested in how various senses of belonging are expressed and come together in relation to their construction of religious belonging and place, and are renegotiated through domestic decoration practices. Building on literature on home, transnational migration, conversion, and material religion, I demonstrate that mechanisms of distinction and notions of religious (im)perfection intersect in the organization of the domestic space. Based on ethnographic accounts, I argue that my interlocutors bring a “culturalized” West-European Islam to Morocco, with tastes and sensibilities that jostle uneasily against local Moroccan religious practices but also allows them to repair some of the privileges they lost upon their conversion in their homeland. Lastly, this article shows that it is through the engagement with mundane material forms, but also with absence and empty spaces, that Islam becomes present in their domestic spaces, enhancing the cultivation of their ethical selves.

The journey from france to france: the spiritual moves of muslim youth from marseille – Cécile Evers

Abstract

Based on long-term ethnographic research with youth who were born to North, West, and East African families in northern Marseille, this article explores the common experience of alienation that practicing Muslims from Marseille report as they endeavor to live piously in their hometown, together with the mobility-oriented strategies they have devised to achieve belonging. Following these Muslim-Marseillais young adults longitudinally, it emerges that some relied on physical migration away from France (religiously conceived as hijrah) as a means of remaining pious and finding belonging. Others, meanwhile, navigated towards pious personhood and finding home in ways that still involved movement but transpired within France. Significantly, individuals who have chosen to remain in France carve out pious belonging by engaging in domestic movements to particular places in France, by pursuing occupational mobility, and by making advantageous use of prestigious linguistic registers like Standard French and Modern Standard Arabic. As such, the article suggests that hijrah is but one—and the most transnational—among various kinds of movement to which young Muslim-Marseillais turn as they grapple with discrimination, seek to improve themselves, and ascertain how best to belong.

‘Reaching the land of jihad’ – Dutch Syria volunteers, hijra and counter-conduct – Martijn de Koning (Open Access)

Abstract

The topic of hijra is very much present in the ideological messages of IslamicState and Al Qaeda as well as in many studies exploring why and how people are motivated to join the violent struggles in Syria. Yet, with a few exceptions, many studies mention hijra as something self-evident without exploring the meanings attached to hijra among the volunteers who joined Al Qaeda and/or IS. Based upon ethnographic work among Dutch Islamic militant activists of the Behind Bars network constituting a very vocal early contingent of male Syria volunteers, this article explores the meanings of hijra. I will show that ideas about hijra were essential to the construction of their departure narratives and examine how hijra for them, in different and sometimes contradicting ways, became a pathway to an ethical and political transformation. One which was, at the same time, being instrumentalized to strengthen the very type of governance they tried to escape.