Engaging with Islam
Muslims in Diaspora
The front of a public elementary school in East London, named after Kobi Nazrul Islam, one of the national poets of Bangladesh. East London is home to one of the largest Bangladeshi settlements in Great Britain.
Nazli Kibria has described her work as “part of a larger scholarly project of unraveling the 'Islam versus the West' framework, of digging beneath the polarizing rhetoric to uncover the complex realities of people's lives.” Like Shakir Mustafa, Kibria, an associate professor in the Department of Sociology, is interested in understanding how individuals construct a sense of self in the context of the ideas and conditions that shape the lives of today's Muslims. “What I have to teach is one very simple idea,” she says. “People who are Muslim, and who claim a Muslim identity, are not all the same. They have very different views—that's true even among those who have orthodox views.”
“People who are Muslim, and who claim a Muslim identity, are not all the same. They have very different views—that’s true even among those who have orthodox views.”
Kibria's forthcoming book, Muslims in Diaspora: Bangladeshis at Home and Abroad, is the product of several years of fieldwork, incorporating more than a hundred interviews with Bangladeshis who have left their home country either to work temporarily in the Middle East or to settle permanently in the United States or Britain. In her research she sought to explore how these immigrants' identities are shaped by Islam and Muslim identity, both internally, in terms of their relationships to their culture and their faith, and externally, in terms of how they are treated by others in the wider communities in which they live and work. She also gained insight into the recent rise of “Islamization,” a society-wide shift toward a more stringently fundamentalist practice of Islam. She calls this new, orthodox form of religion “revivalist Islam,” because it frequently represents a change from the Islam with which its adherents were raised. “I want to show how people understand themselves and what it means to be a Muslim,” says Kibria, who is herself a Muslim of Bangladeshi origin. “A lot of the discussions I see in the popular media here, when they talk about radical Muslims, there's this sense that 'They were just born like that,' as though it's an innate, almost a biological, quality.”
Bangladeshi companies, including a travel agency, doctor's office, and currency exchange, advertise on a wall in Jackson Heights, Queens, a neighborhood in New York well known for its South Asian businesses.
But in reality, Kibria's research shows, the adoption of revivalist Islam is a social process shaped by changes in the course of people's lives and the lives of the community. In some contexts, her respondents identify their conversion to orthodox Islam as a reaction to what they perceive as Western culture's immorality or materialism; others describe finding a sense of community—and a haven from the stigmatization of Muslims in the West—as members of the global Ummah. But she found that in fact people's reasons for turning to revivalist Islam differed from place to place and from individual to individual. For example, she spoke to young people who looked to an Islam different from that of their parents as a means of establishing an identity which distinguishes them both from their immigrant families and from the dominant society.
In Muslims in Diaspora, Kibria explains that the worldwide rise of Islam—and particularly of orthodox Islam—is far from the monolithic global movement it's often portrayed to be. And she finds in her work a lesson of hope: “In my research you see people grappling with very complicated questions, and responding differently to different circumstances,” she says. “Rather than this sense that Muslims are somehow 'different' from the rest of the world, you get a sense of the human condition that everyone shares.”
For more information, see www.bu.edu/sociology/fac-kibria.html.
