Happy at home and going international: Young Portuguese Muslims

2012

While recent immigration from Muslim countries contributes to the diversification of Islamic life in Portugal, postcolonial people of Indian-Mozambican background continue playing a key role in Islamic association work. One example is the Youth Association of the Islamic Community (CilJovem) in Lisbon, which gets more engaged in Muslim activities at the international level since 9/11. A study which compares cultural attitudes of these young Portuguese Sunnites with those of non-Muslim peers reveals: Islam and Muslim-ness are important matters; they are deeply attached to their home country and ‘mainstream Portuguese’.

Lusotopie, 2007

For around 30 years, Muslims have represented the largest non-Christian religious minority in Portugal. This “New Islamic Presence” is largely the result of the post-colonial movement of Muslims of Indian Mozambican and Guinean backgrounds to Portugal, and is estimated to be in the region of between 30,000 and 40,000 people in scale (Tiesler 2000; 2001; 2005). The discussion which follows focuses on studying Muslim youth, adopting the original perspective of exploring everyday issues, such as educational and occupational experiences, rather than exceptional matters: issues of security, religious extremism and violence, nevertheless presumed to be of over-riding importance to young Muslims. In this investigation, we also explore the experiences of Muslim youth in the city of Lisbon in juxtaposition with a further group of young people drawn from a broad range of social backgrounds in the same city.

Lusotopie

West European Politics, 2009

This article reports the results of interviews with Muslim leaders in Portugal and Spain. The main finding of the article is that key Muslim leaders and principal Islamic organisations are seeking to spread views about how Islam and western democracy ought to thrive together. The political belief systems of Muslim leaders reveal a diverse set of influences, including universalist syntheses of Islam with liberalism, as some claim to find in the work of Tariq Ramadan, but also anti-modernist political Islamism and notable figures such as Hassan Al Banna, Yusef Al Qaradawi, and Ali Shariati. The research finds that the views of Muslim elites are shaped by the national political context, especially partisan polarisation vs. consensus over the political regulation of religion, and the cultural and educational resources within Muslim communities.

Lusotopie, 2007

Islam en lusophonies – Islão nas lusofonias – Islam in Portuguese-speaking areas, special issue of the trilingual peer-reviewed journal LUSOTOPIE (Brill), XIV (1), 303 pages. Now online: http://www.lusotopie.sciencespobordeaux.fr/somma2007.htm

2010

A m s t e r d a m U n i v e r s i t y P r e s s

HAU : Journal of Ethnographic Theory , 2024

This article examines the networks of charity developed by Muslims to discuss community-making in Portugal. Giving allows donors to create affective and moral spaces of communal life with recipients of aid that move beyond the ethical and pious dimensions of charity. By exploring past and present postcolonial links between two Muslim groups in Portugal, I argue that acts of charity allow us to explore the material conditions of Muslim groups in Europe and the tensions emerging from power hierarchies. This article demonstrates that home-making is built in the unstable and ambiguous adjustments between the narratives of horizontal belonging to the umma and the power relations that cut across Muslim communities.

More than 40 years after the end of Portuguese colonialism, those who migrated from the former colonies in Africa to Portugal remain silenced and forgotten as if they were not part of a colonial project that forged an imperial nation overseas. At least a third of these subjects were actually descendants of white Portuguese people as well as of populations of different faiths, skin colours and ethnic and cultural backgrounds, who were migrating for the first time to an unfamiliar country. Among them were Muslims of both Indian and Mozambican origin who have, since colonial times, been portrayed as the Muslim, racialized and ethnic Other, and whose senses of belonging have not been voiced, heard nor properly understood. As such research is required, within the framework of the Lusophone postcolonial critique. This thesis aims to contribute to this critical approach by providing a ethnography of the postcolonial material, affective, sensory and bodily ways through which these postcolonial subjects, and their descendants already born in Postcolonial Portugal, have been reproducing and negotiating collective memories of belonging. It departs from the assumption that one cannot understand people’s belonging without going beyond the simplistic identity categories often used to label them. Therefore it adopts a phenomenology of material culture and experience in order to understand how these subjects have been re-appropriating and reconstructing general ideas of Indian-ness, Muslim-ness, Mozambican-ness and Portuguese-ness across generations, particularly when engaging with a multiplicity of objects that integrate into their everyday life, namely objects of home décor, food and media. This thesis results from fieldwork conducted over a period of 12 months in these subjects’ current public and private contexts of conviviality, such as the Lisbon Central Mosque and their family homes. Biographical interviews and visual methods were also applied to two generations (parent and child) from the 11 family-household units collaborating in this research.