Geographies of Muslim Identities

Diaspora, Gender and Belonging

Peter Hopkins, Cara Aitchison, Cara Aitchison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317129127
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Human Geography
• Index: Social Sciences

In recent years, geographies of identities, including those of ethnicity, religion, 'race' and gender, have formed an increasing focus of contemporary human geography. The events of September 11th, 2001 particularly illustrated the ways in which identities can be transformed across time and space by both global and local events of a social, cultural, political and economic nature. Such transformations have also demonstrated the temporal and spatial construction of hate and fear, and of increasing incidences of 'Islamophobia' through the construction of Muslims as 'the Other'. As the social scientific study of religion continues to be marginalized within mainstream scholarship, there remains an important gap in the literature. This timely book addresses this gap by collecting a range of cutting-edge contributions from the social, cultural, political, historical and economic sub-disciplines of geography, together with writings from gender studies, cultural studies and leisure studies where research has revealed a strong spatial dimension to the construction, representation, contestation and reworking of Muslim identities. The contributors illustrate the ways in which such identities are constructed, represented, negotiated and contested in everyday life in a wide variety of international contexts, focusing upon issues connected with diaspora, gender and belonging.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Geographies of Muslim Identities

Peter E. Hopkins, Mei-Po Kwan and Cara Carmichael Aitchison

Introduction

Following the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001 in New York, there were feelings of ‘shock, anger [and] fear’ (Flint, 2002: 77) alongside recognition of the global and local nature of the events (Smith, 2001). As Fred Halliday (2002: 31) observed:

The crisis unleashed by the events of 11 September is one that is global and all-encompassing. It is global in the sense that it binds many different countries into conflict, most obviously the USA and parts of the Muslim world. It is allencompassing in that, more than any other international crisis yet seen, it affects a multiplicity of life’s levels, political, economic, cultural and psychological.

(Halliday, 2002: 31)

More recently too, the bombings in Bali on October 12th 2002, the Madrid train bombings of 11th March 2004 and bombings on the London underground on July 7th 2005 have all contributed to these discourses of danger, fear and risk (Bauman, 2006; Beck, 1992, 1999). Furthermore, these events also share an association with terrorists and suicide bombers who are almost always identified as being Islamic. In recent years, markers and signifiers of Muslim identities have increasingly come to signify ‘the Other’; resulting in many Muslims becoming ‘the victims of discrimination, harassment, racial and religious profiling, and verbal and physical assault’ (Peek, 2003: 271).

Despite the demonisation of Muslims and their associated bodily marking and dress, Islam is by no means a homogenous category. As Halliday, 1999: 897) notes “Islam’ tells us only one part of how these people live and see the world: and that ‘Islam may vary greatly”. Tariq Modood (2003: 100), for example, has sought to clarify the diversity and heterogeneity of the category ‘Muslim’:

Muslims are not, however, a homogenous group. Some Muslims are devout but apolitical; some are political but do not see their politics as being ‘Islamic’ (indeed, may even be anti-Islamic). Some identify more with a nationality of origin, such as Turkish; others with the nationality of settlement and perhaps citizenship, such as French. Some prioritise fundraising for mosques, other campaign against discrimination, unemployment or Zionism. For some, Ayatollah Khomeini is a hero and Osama bin Laden an inspiration; for others, the same may be said of Kemal Ataturk or Margaret Thatcher, who created a swathe of Asian millionaires in Britain, brought in Arab capital and was one of the first to call for NATO action to protect Muslims in Kosovo. The category ‘Muslim’, then, is as internally diverse as ‘Christian’ or ‘Belgian’ or ‘middle-class’, or any other category helpful in ordering our understanding …

(Modood, 2003: 100)

A key aim of this book is to demonstrate, highlight and explore the diversities of Muslim identities, their geographical specificity and variation, and the ways in which markers of Muslim identities are resisted, contested and manipulated in various ways across time and space.

The places where Muslim identities are negotiated, celebrated or resisted matter to how these identities are experienced by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. The geographies of Muslim identities, be they based around neighbourhood connections, national affiliations or regional associations, are important to the ways in which these identities are experienced in everyday lives. Clearly then ‘… place matters if we want to understand the way social identities are formed, reproduced and marked off by one another’ (Smith, 1999: 139). Tied in with the importance of place and the significance of locality are other markers of social difference: ‘aside from contestations over meanings, the politics of religious spaces are also tied up with gender, race and class politics, and politics between nations’ (Kong, 2001: 217). So, alongside the influence of place and locality on Muslim identities, are other identities that influence people’s opportunities, life course trajectories and everyday experiences. Thus, the second aim of this book is to identify and explore the ways in which Muslim identities and geographies interact with, produce, reproduce and rework other significant markers of identity such as gender, race and class.

The chapters in this book focus on experiences of the Geographies of Muslim Identities in the context of diaspora, gender and issues of belonging. Whilst geography forms the central underpinning discipline to the collection the contribution of other disciplines and subject fields including sociology, social anthropology, political economy, media studies, gender studies and leisure studies is evident. Through theoretically-informed empirical research many of the chapters seek to challenge dominant understandings of, and associations with, Muslim identities. Overall, this collection brings together research conducted across five continents, in a range of urban, rural, regional and national contexts, and with different social groups and people possessing different forms of Muslim identities.

Muslim Identities: Diaspora Spaces and Communities

The first part of the book explores the transnational experiences of Muslims and the complex hybrid cultures that have developed across diasporic communities. Experiences of migration and mobility are important to the construction, negotiation and contestation of various identities, including religious identities. As Rachel Silvey (2005: 138) argues, migration is a socially embedded process. It reflects and reinforces social organization along multiple axes of differences (including gender, race, class, nation, sexuality, and religion). As migrants often maintain multiple ties to their countries of origin, they create new transnational cultural and social spaces for themselves (Ehrkamp, 2005). Yet these ties are not the only, or even the most important, sources of migrants’ identities because their experiences are also shaped by the social networks they establish in their new place of residence, by the larger social and economic milieu of the destination country, by state policies and actions, and by the media’s representations of migrant groups. The authors of the four chapters in this section examine the ways in which Muslim identities have been negotiated in new environments and cultures. They explore the movement of peoples from Pakistan to Scotland, Iran to the U.K., Canada, and Australia, Turkey to Germany, and South Asia to Northern Ireland.

Chapter two, ‘Beyond the Mosque: Turkish Immigrants and the Practice and Politics of Islam in Duisburg-Marxloh, Germany’, by Patricia Ehrkamp examines the transnational experience of Turkish immigrants and how they shape the neighbourhood and establish it as their home. She explores the ways in which Islam is practiced and lived by the Turkish immigrants in a neighbourhood, and how these immigrants engage in contestations and struggles over religious meaning and place. The study found that Turkish immigrants in Germany consist of a heterogeneous group with different migration biographies. Their Islamic practices and cultural expressions are far more complex and diverse than the public discourse at the national level suggests. Further, these cultural practices undergo constant change as the lives of Turkish immigrants unfold in German neighbourhoods and cities. Ehrkamp concludes that negotiations of identities and belonging are highly complex, that it is necessary to view identities in more differentiated ways that move beyond the well-known registers of race, class and gender, and that we need to take into consideration the multiplicities of human subjectivity.

Chapter three, by Cameron McAuliffe makes an important methodological contribution to understandings of the geographies of Muslim identities, by exploring the contested ways in which diasporic Iranian Muslims are visually represented and how these representations link with gender, age and nation. Based on research with the children of Iranian migrants in Sydney, London and Vancouver, he explores how visual representations of Iran and Muslims in the media intricately shape their experiences of racism. McAuliffe argues that photographs and illustrations that accompany articles about Iran often construct an inscrutable Muslim ‘threat’. These visual representations also serve to construct a monolithic Islamic Iran and lead to popular understandings of Iranians as a homogeneous group. The study found that the extent to which the children of Iranian migrants are perceived as ‘Muslim’ and experience racism depends heavily on how closely they resemble the stereotypical Muslim images in media representations.

Just as global migration and mobility are important to the geographies of Muslim identities, so too are local and regional experiences. Local experiences of negotiating Muslim identities, creating Muslim space and managing other identities alongside this, are significant in helping to understand the experience of being Muslim in various places. Muslim identities are often assumed to be connected to traditional Muslim spaces such as areas of Muslim settlement in cities or areas near mosques or shops where halal meat can be purchased. It is important for geographers to understand the complexity and multiplicity of ways in which Muslim identities are experienced in such locations. As such, in chapter 4, Sadiq Mir’s challenges the tradition in social geography that associates immigrant communities with the inner-city by focusing upon the middle-class professional identities of Muslims in suburban Glasgow in Scotland, UK. His analysis combines economic and cultural geography in order to explore the new suburban Muslim identities inhabited by his respondents. Mir examines the effects of the suburbanization of the Pakistani community in Glasgow on the cultural landscape and social geography of the city. The study found that the identities of the young and professional suburban Pakistanis are more in line with a middle-class Scottish suburbanite identity (as house-proud homeowners who send their children to good schools, etc.) than a distinctly ‘Pakistani’ identity. It reveals the diverse, complex, and professionalizing identities of Scottish-born Pakistanis as a crucial influencing factor in the community’s dispersal from areas of the city centre to more affluent suburbs. The study thus calls into question the stereotypical and dominant understandings of Britain’s black and minority ethnic communities and their perceived association with economic and social marginality or threat.

The final chapter in this section, chapter five, is by Gabriele Marranci who explores the processes through which Muslim migrant women in Northern Ireland construct their identity. He argues that a sense of identity is an outcome of the symbolic communication of one’s emotional commitment through which a person experiences her/his autobiographical self. According to Marranci, personal identity can be viewed as a ‘circuit’ connecting the autobiographical-self to the environment and its stability can be disrupted by changes in the environment which may challenge the circuit that composes our identity. Based upon three years of ethnographic work with seventy-six Muslim women, he found that Muslim women in Northern Ireland have developed specific acts of identity through Islamic rhetoric despite facing difficulties integrating within the Northern Ireland community. Through their ‘acts of identites’, these women were able to foster a sense of being part of Northern Irish society without feeling challenged by its western values and Christian sectarian environment.

Muslim Identities: Gender, Place and Culture

Muslim women have received much attention from geographers interested in the interaction between religion, gender and place (Bowlby et al., 1998, Dwyer, 1999, Falah and Nagel, 2005). As Caroline Nagel (2000: 63) has observed, ‘it is difficult to find another group of women (especially one defined in religious terms) that has generated a similar degree of scrutiny and interest’. However, as Claire Dwyer (1998: 53) has emphasised, there has often been a tendency to represent Muslim women as the ‘passive victims of oppressive cultures’ and as the ‘embodiment of a repressive and ‘fundamentalist’ religion’. This growing body of research has focussed on issues of domesticity, familial relationships and changing patterns of employment rather than exploring the myriad components that make up the culture of everyday life including leisure, sport and the media and the ways in which such cultural forms and processes inform Muslim identities (see for example, Mohammad, 1999; Dwyer, 1999).

In chapter six Sonja van Wichelen offers a detailed analysis of the interrelationships between gender and the media in the representation and re-inscription of Muslim identities and bodies in post-Suharto Indonesia. Her exploration focuses on the mass-mediated but historically situated images and debates relating to the wearing of the veil by Muslim women and the practice of polygamy by Muslim men. Van Wichelen argues that different socio-political periods in Indonesian history have allocated different meanings to the praxis of veiling and polygamy and that such praxis can be seen as part of the process and practice of ‘Islamization’ in Indonesia. She discusses the increasing visibility of veiled women in public spaces and in the ‘mediatized landscapes’ of urban centres by exploring two dominant discourses of veiled bodies: the consumerist discourse prevailing in the middle and upper classes and the politicized discourse which appears more frequently in the lower middle class stratum. Van Wichelen then contrasts her findings relating to the veiling of women with the debate surrounding the practice of polygamy by men. She concludes that, while the representations of veiling reaffirm ‘Muslimness’ rather than femininity, the act of being polygamous appears to reaffirm masculinity rather than Muslim identity. Van Wichelen’s chapter thus introduces us to the complex intersections and entanglements of gender and religion in the formation of identity whilst not losing site of the influences of nationality, spatiality and class relations.

In chapter seven Eileen Green and Carrie Singleton explore the interrelationships between gender, leisure and Muslim identities in relation to the growing discourse of fear and risk through their detailed study of young South Asian women’s perceptions of risk and risk management strategies in leisure settings in a town in the North-East of England. They argue that whilst there is a wealth of knowledge within the social sciences relating to ‘risk society’ (Beck, 1992; Giddens, 1991), there is limited research exploring the experiences of young women and the ways in which they manage aspects of risk as part of their everyday leisure lives (Pain, 2001). Through their exploration of the ways in which women create, negotiate and maintain ‘safe’ spaces for leisure, Green and Singleton argue that leisure, as both embodied and spatially located, can be developed and managed to offer secure and appropriate environments in which young women develop networks of belonging and friendship. As such, leisure is seen as both a site and process in the production, legitimisation, representation and reworking of Muslim identities that intersect gender, sexuality, ethnicity, ‘race’ and class in everyday life (Aitchison, 2003; 2007).

Kay, in chapter eight, then examines the role of sport as a vehicle for enhancing the social inclusion of young Muslim women within education. Her chapter outlines the workings of an outreach project undertaken in Loughborough in England where an ‘Education and Sport’ Development Worker was appointed to run an activity programme for female Muslim youth within the town. The chapter explores the role of sport in relation to the Muslim faith and the challenges facing the delivery of female only sport-related programmes. The chapter seeks to contribute to our understandings of being a young Muslim woman in England by drawing attention to family diversity and the dynamics of intra-family relationships as a core component of ethnic identity. Like many of the other chapters in this book, Kay seeks to offer new and nuanced insights into the ways in which Muslim women conduct their day-to-day lives in the context of the varied and sometimes contradictory influences of their religion, the culture of their family’s country of origin and their exposure to western values and expectations. Thus, the three chapters in this section each provide evidence, explorations and explanations of the complex and dynamic interrelationships between Muslim identities, gender, place and culture.

Muslim Identities: Belonging, Attachment and Change

The processes of migration that have been discussed, along with the gendered construction and contestation of Muslim identities, influence the senses of belonging and attachment experienced by Muslims in different places. As Lily Kong (2001: 226) has observed, ‘religion, like class and race, must be a matter for historical and place-specific analysis rather than taken as a priori theory’. So, understanding the historical development, contestations and changes in Muslim places and landscapes are important to understanding the contemporary nature of the geographies of Muslim identities. Furthermore, Muslim identities also intersect and interact with other identifications, based on, for example, everyday experiences of nationality, caste, gender, age and so on. Political circumstances, economic development and cultural change on the local, national and transnational levels also influence the ways in which sense...