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Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds ZMO-Studien Studien des Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Herausgegeben von Ulrike Freitag Band 40 Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds Religion and Society in the Context of the Global Edited by Jeanine Elif Dağyeli, Claudia Ghrawi, and Ulrike Freitag This publication was supported by the Leibniz Open Access Monograph Publishing Fund. ISBN 978-3-11-072676-3 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-072653-4 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-072711-1 DOI https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110726534 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. For details go to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ Library of Congress Control Number: 2021936637 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available in the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Jeanine Elif Dağyeli, Claudia Ghrawi, and Ulrike Freitag Cover image: Conference logo, designed by Daniel Kraft for Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com Acknowledgements Books carry the names of their editors and authors. This book being the culmi- nation of Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient’s research programme from 2008 to 2019, the names in this book only reflect some of the outcomes. Behind them were years of animated academic debate, intense research and multiple cooper- ations. Consequently, this volume is a collective effort by ZMO colleagues as well as the academic contributors to the conference from which it emerged. Beyond the academic contributors, not all of whom are represented in this volume, there was a dedicated group of people without whom this book might never have been completed. We are particularly grateful to Hannah Newbery for her careful language editing. Nele Brunner and Berenice Brüggemann were indispensable when it came to standardising the different styles of citation. We are very grateful to Dr. Sophie Wagenhofer for her support at De Gruyter. How- ever, without Svenja Becherer’s dedicated support, effective oversight and or- ganisational talent, this book would perhaps never have seen the light of day. We thank the Federal Ministry for Education and Research for the funding of the Research Programme and gratefully acknowledge a grant by the Leibniz- Association supporting the open access publication. Contents Jeanine Daǧyeli, Ulrike Freitag, Claudia Ghrawi Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds 1 Part I: Making Translocal Muslim Spaces Antía Mato Bouzas Framing Religion in a Transnational Space: Migration, Development Cooperation, and Faith Solidarity between the Gulf and Pakistan 31 Manja Stephan-Emmrich A Material Geography of ‘Dubai Business’ : Making and Re-Making Muslim Worlds across Central Asia and the Gulf 55 Peter Wien Exile as Liminality: Tracing Muslim Migrants in Fascist Europe 77 Part II: Defining and Controlling Islam in the Nation-State Abdoulaye Sounaye Governing Muslim Subjects in the Sahel: Deradicalisation and a State-Led Islamic Reform in West Africa 101 Britta Frede In an Era of Terror Threats: Negotiating the Governance of a (Trans)Local Islamic Heritage in the Islamic Republic of Mauritania 131 Judith Scheele Islam as World Religion in Northern Mali 159 Brahim El Guabli Islamist and Islamised Memories in Moroccan Testimonial Prison Literature 183 VIII . Contents Part III: Claiming and Translating Norms and Ideas Lorenzo Casini (Re-)Configurations of Islam in the Development of the Arabic Novel: Case Studies from Egypt and Kuwait 213 Farzana Haniffa ‘Reconciliation’ Problems in Post-War Sri Lanka: The Anti-Muslim Movement and Ulema Council Responses 229 Claude C. Kempen “We Don’t Need to be Saved”: An Investigation of My.Kali Magazine and its Related LGBTQIA+ Community in Amman, Jordan 255 Abdulkader Tayob Representation and Ethics: The Making of the Islamic World from a Place of Exile 277 List of contributors D 297 Jeanine Daǧyeli, Ulrike Freitag, Claudia Ghrawi Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds Introduction The contributions to this volume examine different ways in which Muslims have laid claim to, and shaped their worlds in the 20 th and 21 st centuries. While the negotiation of identities and the ordering and reordering of societies is a com- mon process, why do we choose ‘Muslims’ as a ‘field’ of enquiry? Would we ask similar questions about Christians or Buddhists? 1 Thus, the very choice of the field of research raises a number of fundamen- tal questions which arose in the very particular historical context of the first two decades of the 21 st century, when the devastating and highly symbolic attacks on the World Trade Centre by the Islamist organisation al-Qaʿida in September 2001 triggered what was termed the ‘Global War on Terror’. Of course, the iden- tification of Muslims as the Christian (and Western) ‘Other’ goes back almost to the inception of Islam. The long history of mutual relations and perceptions underwent many permutations, which need not be rehearsed here. Suffice it to say that the Age of Imperialism, where this book takes its starting point, coin- cided with an often violent reconfiguration of these relations. While the 20 th century itself witnessed multiple shifts, which we reflect on below, at the time of planning the research on which the book is based, mutual perceptions had taken another distinct turn for the worse. Since the end of the Cold War, some political scientists and area studies specialists have become adherents of a school of thought that promotes the notion of a ‘Clash of Civilizations’.2 With the 22 1 “We” refers primarily to the editors of this volume and reflects, more generally, the orienta- tion of the ZMO research programme between 2008 and 2019. We are grateful for the feedback received from many colleagues at ZMO, and would like to specifically acknowledge the com- ments of Kai Kresse and Sarah Jurkiewicz. 2 The classical post-Cold War shift occurred with Samuel Huntington’s thesis of the ‘Clash of Civilizations’, which was presented as a lecture in 1992, published as an article in Foreign Affairs (72;3, 22–49) in 1993, and appeared as a book entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster) in 1996. The term is said to have been derived from Bernard Lewis’s 1990 essay “The Roots of Muslim Rage”. Other prominent authors who contributed to this trend are Bassam Tibi ( Krieg der Zivilisationen: Politik und Religion zwischen Vernunft und Fundamentalismus, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe 1995) and Martin Open Access. © 2021 Jeanine Elif Dağyeli, Ulrike Freitag and Claudia Ghrawi, published by De Gruyter. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License. https://doi.org/10.1515/ 9783110726534 -001 6 Jeanine Daǧyeli, Ulrike Freitag, Claudia Ghrawi transformation of the Afghan Jihad against the Soviet Union into an insurgency aimed at Western regimes and their allies, the emergence of al-Qaʿida, and the attack on the World Trade Centre, being identified as ‘Muslim’ has become high- ly problematic in Western contexts. At the same time, and partly sparked by these developments, but also partly in response to internal dynamics, debates among Muslims about identity and what it means to be a ‘proper Muslim’ also gained traction, often in ways that mirrored the encounter with the non-Muslim ‘Other’. What gets lost in such politically volatile contexts are the self-attributions, conceptualisations, and practices by which ordinary people constantly envi- sion, create, and remake their lifeworlds. Twinning the discursive potential of ‘claiming’ and ‘making’, we wanted to restore a voice to the myriad ways in which ‘Muslimness’ is manifested, while at the same time unmuting marginal voices that are excluded from the hegemonic discourse within Muslim commu- nities. Such internal differences, constitutive to Shahab Ahmad’s approach to Islam, are evidenced, for example, in the chapters by Haniffa or Frede. 3 While this is one important reason for this book to highlight multiple Muslim ‘worlds’ rather than claiming the unity of one ‘world of Islam’, another is the observation that factors other than Islam can be Just as constitutive for local perspectives, as shown in the chapter by Scheele. So, how are plural Muslim lifeworlds and conceptual world-making inter- woven? And how are these imbricated with etic group concepts such as that of the umma , the community of believers? The chapters of this book provide an- swers which are specific to certain regions, places and times. This is very much linked to the epistemological stance uniting the authors of this volume regard- ing the regions and people they study: While most subJects appearing in these studies profess Islam or are classified as Muslims, this does not per se explain much about their lives. Instead, we ask how people who either declare them- selves to be Muslims or who are, in specific contexts, labelled as such by non- Muslims, understand and use or do not use Islam in their daily lives and in dif- ferent contexts. 4 We also ask how states and individuals in Muslim maJority and minority contexts actively refer to Islam in a global setting where ‘Islam’ – or rather particular variants thereof – has become synonymous with fanaticism, and worse, for many non-Muslim governments since the end of the Cold War? 22 Kramer ( Ivory Towers on Sand: The failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America , Washington: The Washington Institute 2001). 3 The plurality of Islam is one of the main topics of Ahmad 2016 and McBrien 2017. 4 Otayek and Soares 2007. Claiming and Making Muslim Worlds 6 This negative equation is quite irrespective of earlier Western support for Ji- hadists when it seemed expedient, as in the case of the Soviet-Afghan War in the 1980s.