Remaking Islam in African Portugal

Lisbon—Mecca—Bissau

Michelle Johnson

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9780253052766
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

When Guinean Muslims leave their homeland, they encounter radically new versions of Islam and new approaches to religion more generally. In Remaking Islam in African Portugal, Michelle C. Johnson explores the religious lives of these migrants in the context of diaspora. Since Islam arrived in West Africa centuries ago, Muslims in this region have long conflated ethnicity and Islam, such that to be Mandinga or Fula is also to be Muslim. But as they increasingly encounter Muslims not from Africa, as well as other ways of being Muslim, they must question and revise their understanding of "proper" Muslim belief and practice. Many men, in particular, begin to separate African custom from global Islam. Johnson maintains that this cultural intersection is highly gendered as she shows how Guinean Muslim men in Lisbon—especially those who can read Arabic, have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and attend Friday prayer at Lisbon's central mosque—aspire to be cosmopolitan Muslims. By contrast, Guinean women—many of whom never studied the Qur'an, do not read Arabic, and feel excluded from the mosque—remain more comfortably rooted in African custom. In response, these women have created a "culture club" as an alternative Muslim space where they can celebrate life course rituals and Muslim holidays on their own terms. Remaking Islam in African Portugal highlights what being Muslim means in urban Europe and how Guinean migrants' relationships to their ritual practices must change as they remake themselves and their religion.

ONE

FAITH AND FIELDWORK IN AFRICAN LISBON

ONE AFTERNOON DURING MY FIELDWORK in Lisbon, my husband and I joined Amadi; her fiancé, Laalo; and her mother, Aja, to celebrate the Muslim feast day of Tabaski, the West African name for Eid al-Adha, the Festival of Sacrifice, which takes place annually during the time of the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca. On this day, Muslims throughout the world slaughter a sheep or goat and hold a feast to commemorate Abraham’s sacrifice of a ram in place of his son, Ishmael, according to God’s command. When we arrived at their apartment in Cacém, Aja was sitting in her favorite chair, dressed in her finest “big” (Muslim) clothing. We handed her a small offering to mark the occasion: a bag of fresh okra and five kola nuts, which we had bought from the Guinean merchants at Rossio in central Lisbon. We greeted Aja in Mandinga, saying, “Mother, is there peace?” to which she responded, “Peace only, my children,” as she wiped the tears streaming down her face with a white handkerchief. Fearing the worst, such as the death of a close relative or community member, I quickly went into the kitchen to join Amadi, who was grilling meat for the afternoon meal. As she handed me a bag of roselle leaves to clean and sort, she sighed and said, “My poor mother. She missed prayer at the mosque on Tabaski because I couldn’t find her a ride. This morning she asked me if we were going to kill a sheep. How can I kill a sheep in my tiny kitchen? If we kill one on the street, the police will surely arrest us. I went to the grocery store and bought some lamb. They gave me the head, so at least it looks like we killed it ourselves.”

I could hear Aja talking to my husband in the living room: “Son, I killed two goats in my compound last year in Bissau, not one, two goats!” Amadi explained that her mother had not been sleeping well since she arrived in Lisbon after the 1998 coup and start of the civil war in Guinea-Bissau. “She suffers from the cold and jumps at the slightest sound. I hoped to get her to the mosque today, but she will have to suffer it.” Amadi put another piece of meat on the grill and said, “Ah, Fatumata, Africa and Europe are not the same.”

This book is about the religious lives of Muslim immigrants from Guinea- Bissau living in and around Lisbon, Portugal. I focus on what being Muslim means for Guinean immigrants in the context of diaspora, as well as their changing relationship to their ritual practices as they remake themselves and their religion in a new locale. In exploring immigrants’ religious lives in Lisbon, I draw from and build on two related fields: the anthropology of Islam and religion and migration. Since the publication of Clifford Geertz’s (1968) seminal book Islam Observed, anthropologists of Islam have concerned themselves with the challenge of representing the diversity of Muslim communities worldwide while at the same time acknowledging Islam’s universal features. More often than not, this challenge has become an either/or matter. As John Bowen (2012, 1) explains, scholarship and popular discourse often reveal the tendency to consider Islam as “only a matter of culture” or “only a matter of religion.”

In an attempt to reconcile the problem of the “one and the many” in the anthropology of Islam, some scholars have asked, given the diversity of Muslims worldwide, if it even makes sense to talk about Islam in the singular, or if there are instead multiple Islams. But as Robert Launay (2004, 5) writes, such a notion is “theologically unacceptable to most Muslims, who assert that there is, and can only be, one Islam.”¹ Here, I join Edward Simpson and Kai Kresse (2008, 24), who critique the universalist-particularist dichotomy in the study of Islam and acknowledge that most Muslims oscillate between these two positions, or even embody both simultaneously, in their daily lives. Anthropologists of Islam have examined this complex dynamic, highlighting debates sparked by religious conversion, change, and Islamic reform movements (e.g., Janson 2013; Launay 2004; Masquelier 2001, 2009; McIntosh 2009; Soares 2005; Schulz 2012) in African societies. They focus on conflicts that emerge, for example, between various types of Muslims that can be characterized loosely as “traditionalist” and “reformist.” While the former commonly conflate Islam with ethnicity, customary practices, or belonging in a Sufi order, the latter stress the importance of Islam’s central texts (the Qur’an and hadith) and the five pillars: the declaration of faith, prayer, almsgiving, fasting during the holy month of Ramadan, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. Islamic reformists—for example, Wahabbis in Côte d’Ivoire as described by Launay (2004) and the Tablighi Jama’at in the Gambia as described by Marloes Janson (2013)—seek to “purify” local versions of Islam and divide communities by introducing new ways of being Muslim.

These works have provided considerable insight into the complex relationship between Islam and local cultures on the continent. We know much less, however, about how these processes play out in contemporary diaspora settings, where their contours are different and the stakes far higher. As the various case studies and ethnographic vignettes throughout this book demonstrate, being Muslim in African Lisbon is fraught with ambiguities and contradictions that extend beyond the traditionalist-reformist dichotomy. There are no names for the various groups or positions, and the usual oppositions of global/local, one/many, and orthodox Islam / popular Islam do not hold. Rather, the orientations of “African custom” and “global Islam” appear more as points along a continuum, between which people move back and forth at certain times or even during fleeting moments throughout their daily lives.

This book also draws inspiration from scholarly works in the field of religion and migration (e.g., D’Alisera 2004; Daswani 2015; Fesenmyer 2016; Leichtman 2016; Selby 2012; van Dijk 1997; P. Werbner 1990). These scholars ask, as Mara Leichtman (2016, 2) puts it, “What is at stake for religion in a globalized world unchained yet bounded by processes of migration [and] cosmopolitanism?” JoAnn D’Alisera (2004, 9) explains that for Sierra Leonean immigrants in Washington, DC, religion has become “a focal point of transnational identity.” In providing new ideas about faith and proper practice, members of a culturally diverse community of Muslims inspire Sierra Leonean immigrants to reflect more deeply on what it means to be Muslim in Africa, America, and beyond. In a similar fashion, I argue that when Guinean Muslims leave their homeland and make their way to the European metropolis and the land of their former colonizer, they encounter a new version of Islam and a novel approach to religion more generally.

Like members of other Muslim ethnic groups in West Africa, such as Mende (Ferme 1994) and Kuranko (Jackson 1977) peoples in Sierra Leone and Dyula peoples (Launay 2004) in Côte d’Ivoire, Mandinga and Fula in Guinea-Bissau have conflated ethnicity and religious identity since Islam arrived in West Africa centuries ago: to be Mandinga or Fula was to naturally be Muslim. But as they come into increased contact with Muslims from outside Africa and encounter other ways of being Muslim, they are coming to see these identities as increasingly distinct. This heightened consciousness has also sparked a broader shift in how Guinean Muslims understand religion more generally. In his insightful volume, Hent de Vries (2008, 10) argues that “the study of ‘religion’ . . . depends upon a rigorous alternation between the ‘universal’ and ‘essential’ and the ‘singular’ or exemplary ‘instant,’ ‘instance,’ and ‘instantiation.’” Religion is what people do on a daily basis; it is, as de Vries (2008, 14) puts it, the “words, things, gestures, powers, sounds, silences, smells, sensations, shapes, colors, affects, and effects” of everyday life. At the same time, however, religion is bigger than this. Abstracted from taken-for-granted experience, it is a frame that connects practitioners to a new, unfolding present and imagined future, full of possibilities. I argue that in African Lisbon, these two experiences of religion are sometimes congruent and other times conflictual.

For Guinean Muslim immigrants in Portugal, new encounters with Islam and religion are sparking debates focused on customary aspects of life-course rituals and other ritual practices. Like Pakistani Muslims in England as described by Pnina Werbner (1990), for whom migration inspires reflection on taken-for-granted aspects of ritual, Guinean immigrants are also examining, questioning, and revising their own ritual practices as they encounter Muslims from outside Africa and other, more universalistic ways of being Muslim. Many claim, for example, that aspects of the rituals they have long practiced—name-giving rituals, writing-on-the-hand rituals to initiate Qur’anic study, initiation rituals, funerals and postburial sacrifices, and healing-divining—are really African customs that should be updated or replaced altogether by a more cosmopolitan practice of Islam focused on the five pillars of faith that unite Muslims everywhere. At the same time, however, I show that these same people continue to draw on customary beliefs and practices as they remake themselves and their religion in Lisbon.

In the chapters that follow, I reveal the complex gender, class, and generational dynamics at play as Guinean Muslims remake Islam in African Portugal. Specifically, I consider what is at stake as men and women in the colonial metropolis grapple with dissonant visions of what previously they had taken for granted as Islam and religion in their homeland. For example, while Guinean Muslim women believe that in order for them to be truly Muslim they must be circumcised, their husbands insist that female circumcision is an African custom that has nothing to do with Islam, a debate I explore more fully in chapter 3. I argue that as Guinean Muslim immigrants confront various groups of others in Lisbon and as they move in and between different types of religious and cultural spaces, they forge new accommodations between ethnic and religious identity, new ways of being simultaneously Mandinga and Muslim, national and transnational, local and global, in a new diaspora where secularism, racism, and anti-Muslim sentiment abound.

Before I explore the contours and details of these accommodations and debates, it is first necessary to say something about the research and the people who have informed it.

BETWEEN AFRICA AND EUROPE: GUINEAN MUSLIMS IN LISBON

My experience with Guinean Muslims in Portugal spans two decades, but it has an even longer history than that. In fact, I never intended to work in Lisbon. I conducted my predissertation fieldwork in 1996–97 in Guinea-Bissau both in the capital city, Bissau, and in Bafata-Oio, a Mandinga village in the country’s northern Oio region. In 1998, shortly before I was planning to return to the village to conduct my dissertation fieldwork, a civil war broke out in the country. A coup attempt led by rebel leader Ansumane Mané to oust the country’s president João Bernardo (“Nino”) Vieira divided the country and sparked an eleven-month political conflict. The War of June 7, as some call it today, resulted in widespread death, destruction, and displacement as refugees fled to neighboring countries and to Portugal. I spent one year working with established Mandinga immigrants in Lisbon, as well as the refugees who were pouring into the city. This resulted in my dissertation, a transnational study of debates about personhood, religious identity, and ritual practices.

I returned to Lisbon in 2001 for new fieldwork and again in 2003 (as well as to Guinea-Bissau) and went back to Lisbon in 2011 and 2017. It was during these subsequent periods of fieldwork in Lisbon that the focus of this book took shape. While it draws on my previous fieldwork in both sites, unlike my dissertation, it focuses on the religious lives of Guinean Muslims living in Lisbon and its many exurbs. Although the Guinean Muslim community in Lisbon is ethnically diverse, consisting of Mandinga and Fula peoples, I chose to work primarily with Mandinga immigrants. Having worked previously with Mandinga in Guinea-Bissau, I was familiar with their culture and ritual practices and proficient in their language.

In West Africa, Mandinga are part of the Mande diaspora, which comprises a variety of ethnic groups whose members speak related languages and trace their origins to the Mande heartland, located in present-day Mali. This unified, diasporic identity is exemplified by the common Mande proverb “We are all one.” Mande peoples live in many countries throughout West Africa, where they make their living primarily as farmers, merchants, or Qur’anic scholars and healer-diviners. Mandinga are the fourth-largest ethnic group in Guinea-Bissau and make up about 15 percent of the country’s total population of 1.4 million (Mendy and Lobban 2013, 3). Because their origins lie elsewhere, they are considered outsiders even though Guinea-Bissau has been their home for centuries. They differentiate themselves from Guinea-Bissau’s egalitarian ethnic groups who live on the coast and practice indigenous African religions, Christianity, or both, and they identify with other socially stratified Mande and Fula peoples throughout West Africa who inhabit the interior regions and practice Islam (see Brooks 1993; Lopes 1987).

For most Guinean Muslims, Islam is as much an ethnic identity as it is a religion: to be Mandinga or Fula is to be Muslim, and the fusion of ethnicity and religion shapes their identity and infuses their ritual practices. A common response to the question “What is your ethnicity?” is “I am a Muslim” or “I am a Christian,” with the term Christian denoting a non-Muslim, either a Christian, a practitioner of an indigenous African religion, or both simultaneously. Increasingly, these religious identities are becoming racialized, in that people term others Musulmanu (“Muslim”) or Kriston (“non-Muslim”) and generalize about their beliefs and practices irrespective of their actual ethnicity and religious identity. Although Mandinga and Fula historically consider themselves rival ethnic groups, Islam has brought them together to some extent in Guinea-Bissau and even more so in Lisbon, where they often live side by side, worship together at the same mosques, and, on some occasions, even attend each other’s life-course rituals and other cultural events. Many Mandinga in Lisbon also speak Fula and vice versa.²

Although it is often assumed that ethnicity is replaced by a more unified, national identity in diaspora contexts, in this book I show that ethnicity remains key for Guinean immigrants in Lisbon. During my fieldwork, Fula immigrants would often joke with me as Fula in Guinea-Bissau often did, asking me why I was studying Mandinga rather than them. When I explained I did not understand or speak Fula, they told me that this did not matter, since Fula is “lighter” (by which they meant easier to learn) than Mandinga, they are good teachers, and as many Fula as Mandinga in Lisbon speak Kriolu, Guinea-Bissau’s lingua franca. Intermarriage between these two ethnic groups is still rare, even in Lisbon. Indeed, I knew of only one case in Lisbon, and the couple faced much criticism in the Guinean Muslim immigrant community.

Migration from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal is a relatively recent phenomenon. As Clara Carvalho (2012, 19–20) explains, elites of mixed African and Portuguese descent first migrated to Portugal from Guinea-Bissau in the 1950s to study. A larger wave of migration followed Guinea-Bissau’s independence from Portugal in 1974. Guinean Muslims, including the Mandinga and Fula immigrants I came to know, were part of the largest wave of immigration to Portugal, which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s. Guinea-Bissau’s 1998–99 civil war sparked another wave of immigration, which continued as conditions in the country deteriorated through the early 2000s. Fernando Machado (1998, 49) points out that Muslim immigrants to Portugal were distinct from earlier groups in that most came to Lisbon directly from villages rather than from the capital, Bissau. As such, they remain rooted in ado, or “custom,” which they imagined as originating in rural Guinea-Bissau and representing the most traditional or authentic aspects of their cultures. I show that it is precisely such custom that is being destabilized and remade as Guinean immigrants engage new models of Islam in the diaspora, and the chapters that follow demonstrate that ritual practices are the principal sites of argument and debate. Talal Asad (2009, 22) asserts that conflict and argument over the meaning and form of ritual and other religious practices are “a natural part of any Islamic tradition.” In exploring such debates among Muslims worldwide, however, scholars have privileged text and discourse over the body. In this book, I focus on embodied ritual practices as forms of argument and, in so doing, join Rudolph Ware (2014) in the attempt to recapture the primacy of the body in the making and remaking of Islam.

The Guinean Muslims I met lived either in apartments in central Lisbon or in the city’s many exurbs. Some exurban neighborhoods were inhabited almost entirely by African immigrants from Portugal’s former African colonies, who at the time of my fieldwork organized themselves by country of origin, ethnic group, or religion. Some of these neighborhoods were known locally as barracas, which referred to the small, shack-like structures that were common in some areas. This term also described large, unfinished apartment complexes—many of which lacked internal plumbing, electricity, and even doors and windows—into which African immigrants moved and lived rent-free, a phenomenon referred to in Kriolu as salta parediu, or “building jumping.”³

The men I knew earned their living primarily as construction workers, tailors, or street merchants who sold “things from the homeland,” such as kola nuts, local tobacco, tea, and fruits and ve...