Senegalese migrants’ children, homeland returns, and Islamic education in a transnational setting

ABSTRACT

Homeland visits and stays have only recently began to receive attention within the growing literature on the religious beliefs and practices of ‘second generation’ Muslims in Western contexts, just as African Muslims have largely been neglected within this emerging field. Drawing on data collected over a total of 14 months among Senegalese migrant communities in the greater New York area, and in Islamic schools receiving migrants’ children in Dakar, Senegal, this paper outlines how young people’s homeland returns for the sake of religious education give rise to complex negotiations of meaning and identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Return migration
• Muslim youth
• second generation
• Islamic education
• West Africa

Acknowledgements

Financial support from the Research Foundation – Flanders (FWO) and the Philippe Wiener – Maurice Anspach Foundation (FWA) is gratefully acknowledged.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

ORCID

Hannah Hoechner http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6804-2819

Notes

1 I have changed or removed the names of respondents where I felt it necessary to protect their identity.

2 King and Christou (2011, 456) write aptly that ‘[i]n many respects, second-generation returnees are first-generation immigrants in their homelands’. Being sent ‘back’ can mean for some children going to a country they have never been to and that they know only indirectly from their parents’ tales, or phone calls with relatives there.

3 Levinson and Holland (1996, 2) propose this notion to refer to the often contested, constantly renegotiated ‘set of criteria by which members [of a given society] can be identified as more, or less, knowledgeable’. This paper uses it broadly to shed light onto competing ideas about desirable behaviour and appropriate strategies for inculcating it.

4 For girls, this mostly means dressing and behaving modestly. For boys, notions of appropriate dress and demeanour are more fluid, even though I encountered frequent and fierce opposition to American youth fashion styles, notably trousers worn ‘down’, letting the underwear show.

5 Private full-time Islamic schools mostly charge fees of 400$ minimum per month. While flights to Senegal are also costly (a return flight from New York to Dakar costs around 1,000$), general living costs are significantly lower in Senegal, and fees in most Islamic schools are below 100$ per month (upmarket bilingual schools charge almost as much as US-based schools though).

6 Marriages are extremely fragile in a context where both spouses work long hours outside the home. This triggers conflicts about the distribution of domestic chores, and about financial responsibility for the household budget (see Kane 2011, 167ff for an extensive discussion of the renegotiation of gender roles and the resulting marital conflicts among Senegalese couples in New York).

7 While these youths had been told that they were going on vacation to Senegal, their parents intended to leave them there for longer.

8 I have decided to use the term ‘Sunni’ here as this is how most people referred to themselves, rather than using the more loaded exonyms ‘Salafi’ or, in Senegalese parlance, ‘Ibadou’. Most Sufi Muslims would of course also claim to be following the Sunnah of Prophet Mohammed. According to the Pew Research Center, 92% of Senegalese Muslims say they belong to a Sufi order (2012, 31). Admittedly, some young women wear the hijab (occasionally) without adopting a reformist orientation. To some extent, the hijab has become a fashion statement, indexing, because of its association with the Arab world, a certain cosmopolitanism.

9 When my respondents commented on the religious practice of their Senegalese age-mates, it was mostly to state that they were less pious than they made people believe (especially the girls), which bespeaks a certain desire to not be regarded as the only youths with religious ‘shortcomings’.

10 The history of Christianity in Senegal is of course much shorter than that of Islam, which arrived in the region in the 11th century. The first Europeans arrived on the West African coast at the end of the 15th century, but most busied themselves with the slave trader rather than with evangelisation. Missionary activity gathered pace mostly in the 19th century.

11 Women’s use of hair attachments spark a certain controversy though, with stricter Muslims looking upon it critically, arguing that ‘adding’ something to the body amounts to saying that Allah has created imperfect bodies. There is also a prominent exception to the rule of short hair for men. So-called Baye Fall, disciples of Mouride Cheikh Ibrahima Fall, a contemporary of Cheikh Amadou Bamba, commonly wear dreadlocks – though this meets with some disapproval from Muslims of other religious orientations.

12 I gave English and French lessons in Qur’anic schools in Senegal and Nigeria, and on various occasions, my students told me that if I wanted my class to be quiet, I would have to beat them.

13 These critical comments were made outside of the Islamic schools where the beatings had taken place and in retrospect.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Fondation Philippe Wiener - Maurice Anspach [grant Number postdoctoral fellowship]; Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek [grant number postdoctoral fellowship].