Muslim Migration In & Out of Africa

Muslim Migration In & Out of AfricaAfrican Studies Program Summer Institute 2012

Senegalese Muslims in Harlem, NY August 2005

Muslim Migration In & Out of Africa

Beth Buggenhagen

Assistant Professor of Anthropology

Where you can contact me with futher questions: babuggen@indiana.edu

Fieldwork in Senegal and USDakar, Senegal Dec. 2010

Muslim Migration

African Continent

True Size of Africa (Kai Krause 2010)

Tuba, Senegal

Muslims

Web resources for teaching Islam

Frontline, “Muslims” at PBS.org http://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muslim

s/

Michigan State http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/index.php

Muslim Migration in the Recent Past

Immigrants were first welcomed into France after WWII to address a labor shortage, many of these immigrants had been conscripts and sailors during the period of the war

1970s the French economy, like the American economy, suffered a recession and immigrants became competitors for low skilled low paying jobs

Itinerant single male immigrant workers became permanent immigrant families, esp. after 1974 under the family reunification act

Far right played on insecurity and racism,

1980s: resentment over cultural differences, fear of suburban violence, and international terrorism

Many West African Muslims come to U.S. from France

Muslim Migration Today If a defining feature of migration in and out of Africa is its circular nature,

then how do we understand processes of assimilation and integration in receiving countries?

Rather than settling permanently in foreign countries, many Africans remain tied to their home countries.

Some migrants are refugees of war, such as people from Libya, Somalia, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo (DRC).

Others are economic refugees, such as people from Senegal, Mali, Niger.

What is the impact of global sojourns on social and moral orders at home?

How does the political economy of migration and the global War on Terror affect people around the world?

Muslim Migration and Globalization

West African communities have a long tradition of migration and Islamic cosmopolitanism

Muslims in West Africa have always been tied to long distance networks.

The question of globalization here then perhaps is one of directionalities and temporalities

Muslim Migration and Globalization

Think about relations, processes, paths, networks that operate beyond the level and purview of the nation-state not as undermining the state,

But as the spaces in which the state is constituted, that is way in which state kind of steps back from these processes and then profits from them

Or even ways in which the traders made a profit by being able to cross boundaries, evade regulation,

Muslim Migrants (pbs.org 2004)

Muslim Migrants

Muslim Migration and African States

Focus on global circuits rather than nation-state, usual way of looking at globalization as weakening of the state

How traders switch in an out of the law

When official structures collapse, people turn to unofficial activities

In other cases, states rely on revenue from overseas remittances

Muslim Migration and the West How does a religious minority fit within a secular

nation?

Islam and a universal and global religion

Versus French republican ideology

Or U.S. notions of integration

Additional Resources

Recent Ethnographies of African Migration

Carter, Donald Martin. 2010. Navigating the African Diaspora. Minnesota University Press.

Kane, Ousmane. 2011. The Homeland is the Arena. Religion, Transnationalism, and the Integration of Senegalese Immigrants. Oxford University Press.

Abdullah, Zain. 2010. Black Mecca. The African Muslims of Harlem. Oxford University Press.