Community-making in times of displacement: The place of marriage and religious identification among young Muslim men and women

Abstract

This concluding essay integrates the various contributions of this special volume to conceptualize how South Asian migrant communities, whether in the UK, Bangladesh, or the US, respond to and negotiate multiple experiences of displacement and resettlement. I draw attention to the place of Islam – as religion, institutional context, social connection, and moral community – among young men and women in these multiple sites to highlight the salience of religious networks in the meaning of family, the identification of marriage partners, and the making of a moral compass to guide social and personal life. These networks unfold in a particular historical context where forms of Islamic othering and economic insecurity shape relations of social engagement and belonging among Muslim immigrants youth.

Keywords:

• migrant
• displacement
• Islam
• marriage
• South Asia
• Bangladesh

Notes

1. I draw this distinction not to engage in the rich debate that addresses these questions, but rather to signal the multiple ways in which discussions about mobile populations and the different understandings of their settlement in new places drive the issues addressed in the social sciences and humanities.

2. Such mobility need not be to places elsewhere but also can include first-generation urban migration for new forms of employment as exemplified by the dramatic rise of rural women who secured work in garment manufacturing in Dhaka City.

3. In these circumstances, suicide may be an individual response but, as some suggest, suicide may also be forced (Feldman 2010; Osella, in this issue).

4. I prefer to use the term embedded ethnography, emphasising the synergy of the process rather than the reference to more than a single site for investigation.

5. Located in northeast Bangladesh, Sylhet is the site of long-term migration and remittance incomes, initially to London but subsequently to the Middle East and other world regions in search of employment.

6. At this time, too, upper middle-class families chose to send their children not only to the UK-based academic institutions but also to universities in the USA and, increasingly, to Australia.

7. These movements should not be conflated with new forms of political Islam.

8. I have kept Siddiqi's spelling of this term although it references purdah as used elsewhere in this essay.