Muslim Diaspora

Gender, Culture and Identity

Haideh Moghissi

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN: 9781135985400
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

Muslim Diaspora identifies those aspects of migratory experience that shatter or reinforce a group's attachment to its homeland and affect its readiness to adapt to a new country.

The contributors to this collection examine many dimensions of life in the Diaspora and demonstrate that identity is always constructed in relation to others. They show how religious identity in diaspora is mediated by many other factors such as:

• Gender
• Class
• Ethnic origin
• National status

A central aim is to understand Diaspora as an agent of social and cultural change, particularly in its transformative impact on women. Throughout, the book advances a more nuanced understanding of the notions of ethnicity, difference and rights. It makes an important contribution to understanding the complex processes of formation and adoption of transnational identities and the challenging contradictions of a world that is being rapidly globalized in economic and political terms, and yet is increasingly localized and differentiated, ethically and culturally.

Muslim Diaspora includes contributions from outstanding scholars and is an invaluable text for students in sociology, anthropology, geography, cultural studies, Islamic studies, women's studies as well as the general reader.

Part I
Diaspora, identity, representation and violence

1 Diaspora: History of an idea

Denise Helly

The term diaspora has been in fashion for the past 20 years, although it is more visible in anglophone than in francophone¹ literature. It means loss and dispersion as the result of a forcible displacement of peoples from countries or regions defined as their cultural and historical centres. The meaning of the word has greatly fluctuated depending on context, and continues to do so. However, if diaspora is a specific sociological reality, we must identify its parameters and processes, and we must review its definitional issues, which are subject to much debate (Tölölyan 1996; Chivallon 2002, 2004; Vertovec and Cohen 1999; Dufoix 2003).

If we focus on the most generally accepted definitions of the term diaspora, we can define four broad periods: antiquity, a time during which it had different meanings; the Middle Ages to the Renaissance; the beginning of the nineteenth century to the 1970s; and the 1980s to the present. During antiquity (800–600 BCE), the term was used to describe the Greek colonization of Asia Minor and the Mediterranean; it referred to trade expansion and had a positive connotation. It was first used by Jewish scholars during the third century BCE in a Greek translation of the Bible² and had a negative connotation: it referred to the Jewish experience of displacement to Babylon after the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple (586 BCE). So the terms diaspora and Babylon came to mean being cut off from one’s roots and being forced to live in a foreign place (Cohen 1997: 118–19). Diaspora conveyed the notion of loss, of suffering, and of exile from a place of origin, as well as the idea of religious punishment of the Jews.

This definition changed as Jews settled freely outside Palestine and diaspora came to mean the gathering of all Jews by the will of God (Paul 1981; Lenoir-Achdjian 2001). By the third century BCE, the term had shed its negative connotation and designated Jews living in the Greco-Roman world and speaking Greek, as well as the Jews living in Mesopotamia and speaking Aramaic (Sachot 1998). But with the Roman destruction of the second temple in CE 70, it became associated once again with exile (galût) from a historical and cultural centre, although this meaning waned during the centuries to follow. Jews suffered intolerance and displacement in Europe with the rise of Christian anti-Semitism in the Middle Ages, all the while being recognized and enjoying their status in Muslim countries. Their lives in Northern Europe improved during the Renaissance (Chaliand and Rageau 1991: 15–35).

Diaspora, nation-state, exile and loss

With the creation and predominance of nation-states during the nineteenth century, a coalescence of the notions of nation, state, culture and territory became the rule, and the term diaspora came again to signify exile, suffering and displacement (Marienstras 1989: 120).

A new way of looking at diasporas, and especially the Jewish one, became common, and gave rise to two debates. One was related to the Nationalities Principle adopted in the 1830s by major powers of the time, which was linked to the debate on the rights of national minorities to a state (Helly 2005). It was then commonly believed that it was normal for a human group, be it linguistic or cultural, to have a state. Zionist thinkers, in fact, compared communities in exile to sick creatures, suggesting that the Jewish diaspora was a pathological mode of existence. Others proposed a particular form of federalism, personal federalism (Karl Renner 1899), or national-cultural autonomy (Otto Bauer 1987). Both approaches were meant to protect cultural and religious minorities who lacked territorial continuity and could not claim national independence (Marienstras 1989: 121–3).

The second debate had to do with the political affiliations of diasporas. Members of a diaspora were suspected of allegiance only to their own community and not to the nation and society within which they had settled. The geographic dispersion of the Jewish diaspora was described as a-national or anti-national.

The ideology of national and cultural homogenization in the nineteenth century could only permit a negative connotation to be ascribed to the term diaspora. The term contradicted the precepts of national and state ideologies, since ‘nation’ implied the superimposition of an ethnic group, a territory and a political system, as well as the absence of loyalty to any extra-national community, group or institution. The expression ‘internal enemy’, used to designate diasporas, minorities or political opponents, was adopted in France in the nineteenth century. During the years 1870–80, both French Catholics and Jews were accused of disloyalty to France because they followed the dictates of non-national authorities (papacy, rabbinates and diasporas). Members of diasporas and minority groups (such as Gypsies) were disparaged and discriminated against in a number of Western European countries, expelled by autocratic nationalist regimes (Jews in Russia and Central Europe had to emigrate to North America,³ Turkey’s Armenians dispersed throughout the Middle East,⁴ France and the United States), or displaced by international accords (e.g. Greeks forced by the Lausanne Treaty,⁵ in 1923, to leave Turkey and settle in the north of Greece). The most extreme cases were the genocide of Pontian Greeks between 1919 and 1923,⁶ the Armenian and Assyrian genocide in 1915⁷ and the Holocaust.

From the 1950s onward, during the creation of Communist China and the accentuation of the colonial conflicts in Southeast Asia (notably in Indonesia and Malaysia), people started speaking of a Chinese diaspora in the region. The term ‘fifth column’was used to refer to persons supposedly without local national allegiances who were linked by powerful economic networks and were developing an allegiance to the new China.⁸

This perception of the people of diaspora as rather untrustworthy elements was reinforced by the role they played in the political and economic life of their regions of origin. For instance, Greek émigrés helped finance the Greek independence movement of the 1830s; the nan yang, referred to as hua qiao⁹ from the 1830s on, actively participated in the establishment of the Chinese Republic of 1911; from the end of the nineteenth century, large numbers of European Jews immigrated to Palestine and supported the creation of Israel in 1948.

The definition of a diaspora as a culturally specific population that places little value on the borders of empires, states, nations and majority cultures and religions was hardly questioned until the 1960s. Until this time, the term implied a clear distinction between diaspora and the migratory flux generated by industrial and capitalist development and by the creation of new states in Central and Southern Europe in the nineteenth century, and in the Third World in the twentieth century. Examples included large numbers of Polish, Russian, Irish, Scandinavian, German, Italian and Portuguese emigrants who were not seen as comprising diasporas, but as economic migrants, dispossessed or oppressed and with no sense of internal unity. However, starting in the 1960s, this distinction between diaspora and economic migration tended to be blurred in the anglophone context, notably in North America.

This evolution was a result of a change in relations between minority and majority cultural groups – between Europeans and non-Europeans (Helly 2000, 2001, 2002). The major facts were a shift in American (1965) and Canadian (1967) immigration policies, whereupon borders were opened to non-Europeans, as well as the adoption of the Canadian Multiculturalism Act in 1971 and a similar policy in Australia in 1977, the social uprising in African-American ghettos, the African-American elite’s demand for equal rights, the advent of the notion of a black diaspora and the protest movements of Native and African-American minorities. The term diaspora seems to embody the fate of a number of non-European individuals having emigrated or been displaced to the Western world, as it overlooks national borders and evokes an experience of victimization, the will to endure and a strong sense of solidarity. Three definitions were to be put forth.

Diaspora, dispersion and ties to a homeland

Starting in the 1970s and 1980s, the term diaspora came to mean a population living outside its homeland (Tölölyan 1996: 13–15). According to the authors of this semantic change (Scheffer 1993; Esman 1986; Connor 1986), minorities of immigrant ancestry who develop strong ties with their country of origin make up modern-day diasporas. We can then refer to Mexican, Filipino, Serb, Kosovar, Croat, Haitian, Irish, Polish, Japanese, Ukrainian, Sikh, Turkish, Basque, Finnish, Korean and Acadian diasporas. The acceptance of this meaning was popularized during the 1980s through the journal Diaspora. Its use became so widespread that one of the directors of the journal, Khachig Tölölyan (1996: 8), warned of the possible dissolution of the notion of diaspora, a word that had become so common that it spoke for itself (Dufoix 2003: 123).

When assigned to a migratory movement with strong ties to its centre of origin, the term is indeed denuded of its original content, and its use becomes purely ideological rather than sociological. The reality of the 1990s brings to light the vacuousness of this definition. In view of the globalization of communications, politics and the economy, the majority of emigrant groups can easily maintain ties with their homeland. Rare are those who lose interest in their countries.

This confounding of diaspora with networking by emigrant peoples who maintain ties with their country of origin is upheld by numerous governments that seek to reinforce allegiances for their own interests. This situation is not new, but it has been reinforced by the increased ease of communications. More and more states call on the patriotism of emigrants with the aim of summoning their votes, their financial resources, their expertise and even their return.

Since the 1990s, immigrants and their descendants have been in frequent contact with their homelands, and their political ties, whether trivial or dramatic, are well known (Demetriou 1999). For example, after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the Armenian diaspora mobilized in favour of the independence of Soviet Armenia (Ritter 2005; Lenoir-Achdjian 2001; Norton 1998), while Ukrainians, Baltic peoples and Poles all fought to rebuild their home states. Besides, many emigrant groups, like most members of diasporas, transfer money to their countries of origin. New theories focusing on how migrant families calculate risks (Stark 1991; Stark et al. 1986; Congressional Budget Office 2005) and on immigration networks and channels (Gurak and Caces 1992) explain the growth of these transfers within the context of economic globalization. They have become so important over the past 15 years that they now play a key role in negotiations over the control of migratory movement; they are also an issue in the debate on the brain drain from the south (Stark et al. 1997). Estimated at about $150 billion, remittances by emigrants can amount up to 5 per cent of the revenue of some states (CBO 2005; Pérouse de Montclos 2005), and represent high percentages of the GNP in some countries: in 2002, 22.8 per cent in Jordan, 13.8 per cent in Lebanon, 9.7 per cent in Morocco, and 5 per cent in the People’s Republic of China.

In these conditions, naming a migratory population that maintains contact with its homeland diasporic does not add anything to the sociology of diasporas. Moreover, it overlooks two facts: the violence causing the dispersion of certain populations, and the network linking different centres of settlement.

Diaspora, hybridity, and challenging modernity

Another definition of the term diaspora gained acceptance during the 1960s and 1970s. Taken from African Studies, it emphasized the victimization of Africans deported to the Americas and the recreation and invention of hybrid, mixed and plural identities and cultures. Representing oneself as a member of a diaspora took precedence over forming a diaspora, organizing a dispersed population, and linking disseminated groups and individuals. A diaspora was then considered a type of representation, a discourse, a protest rather than a representation and a form of human action and cultural community. Nevertheless, the importance of this definition resides in its denunciation of one of the sinister faces of modernity.

African-Americans showed an interest in their roots and in Africa as soon as they were emancipated. An African Civilization Society was founded in the United States in 1858; African states for free black Americans (Liberia, Sierra Leone; Schama 2005) were created at the end of the nineteenth century, and the Universal Association for Negro Improvement and African Communities League was founded in 1914. The notion of returning to the land from which they were wrenched by force took on a new form in the 1930s along with the notion of a Black Babylon. The Rastafarian movement¹⁰ was born in Jamaica, its main advocate Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican political activist. Largely derived from the Old Testament, it promoted a return to Africa of African-Americans, leaving behind oppression. Ethiopia was likened to the promised land, and Prince (Ras) Tafari to the Messiah after his coronation as Emperor Haile Selassie in November of 1930 (Cohen op. cit.: 126). Melville Herskovits (1938) also contributed to this recognition of Africa and the slave descendants’ culture.

The independence of European colonies, the civil rights movement in America, and the Rastafarian movement were all factors in the re-emergence of African-West Indians’ and African-Americans’ pan-African consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s. Terms such as Black diaspora (Shepperson 1966) and African diaspora were used (Ziegler 1971, in Dufoix 2004: 7–8), and a link was made between the Jewish diaspora and the violent displacement of African slaves to the Americas. The ‘return of the South’– that is, of slave descendants and non-European immigrants becoming politically visible in white man’s land–transformed the notions of Black Babylon and diaspora, and will ensure the success of post-colonial studies.

Colonization is not only a political and economic domination, it is also psychological and intellectual. It destroys or distorts the past; the colonized then have to recreate their past in order to access their history and gain social recognition. Frantz Fanon mentioned the passionate research of identity by post-colonial subjects who hoped to discover an era of splendour and happiness beyond their memories of daily denigration, self-loathing and poverty, and which could rehabilitate them in their own eyes (Hall 1990: 223).

This research of identity is not made easy. Enslaved Africans and their descendants continue to form a diverse population, dispersed among different societies. Their memories of their regions of origin in Africa, of the slave trade and of their emancipation vary greatly. Furthermore, the absence of written materials renders the task of rediscovering and reinterpreting their past difficult – it has to be recreated from signs and traces. The notion of diaspora becomes the trace of a memory of dispersion, of separation, of enslavement, of contempt, of loss of identity and of transplantation. A diaspora is a collective memory as well as something positive built by victims; it is creativity, cross-breeding and cultural hybridization that is best embodied by the West Indians (Hall 1990; Chivallon 2004). Léopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire spoke of blackness and hybridity between African, American and European worlds. Paul Gilroy (1993) refers to slavery in the New World as an experience of violent dispersion, of cultural creation (Chivallon 2002) and as a diasporic experience: Black Atlantic. Drescher (1999) compared the Atlantic slave trade and the Holocaust and spoke of the Black Holocaust.

This definition of the term diaspora is in line with the political struggle concerning minorities’ status and the responsibility of the cultural majority and the state towards them. There were many protest movements from the 1970s to the 1990s as groups claimed to be historical victims of a state or a nation and identified themselves with diasporas to validate their point. Accepted as meaning exclusion and forced exile, the term diaspora was and is still used to make such claims. Even in France, where the myth of republican equality reigns, pressure groups of West Indian, African and Arab origin want the state to recognize its colonial past and its practice of slave-trading. African nationals are also asking for status as victims of the state, questioning in a way the exceptionalism of the victimization of the Jews.¹¹ For those who have forgotten the return of the South or the post-colonial subjects, like Alain Finkielkrault, the link between the Holocaust and the European slave trade is an attack on the national French identity.

According to this second definition, the first modern diaspora appeared in South America, where the notion of European purity, to the exclusion of other races, was first introduced. The diaspora is then a product of European expansion beginning in the fifteenth century, resulting in the annihilation and displacement of native populations (Anderson 1998), the enslavement of thousands of Africans and Asians, and the expulsion and extermination of minorities due to the rise of nationalism. The term diaspora participates in the self-examination of the discourse on modernity and progress. This statement is legitimate, but sheds little light on the notion of diaspora; it just repeats a well-known fact. The logic of diasporas is contrary to the logic of the nation-state.

Diaspora, mobility and transnational networks

During the 1980s, the term diaspora acquired a new...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures and tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Diaspora, identity, representation and violence
• Part II: Home and exile: Gender and politics of memory
• Part III: Contested terrains: Islam, gender and struggles for continuity and change