Managing Muslim Mobilities

Between Spiritual Geographies and the Global Security Regime

A. Fábos, R. Isotalo, A. Fábos, R. Isotalo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137434869
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137386410
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Fábos and Isotalo address the issue of forced migration and mobility in the Muslim world. Their work explores the tensions between Muslim religious conceptions of space and place and new policies of 'migration management' and secure borders.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Managing Muslim Mobilities—A Conceptual Framework*

Anita H. Fábos and Riina Isotalo

Introduction

This edited collection explores the intersections between Muslim religious conceptions of space and place, increasing insecurity and mobility for millions of Muslims related to conflict and forced displacement, and the discourse of “migration management” in a range of contexts across the Muslim region—defined both territorially and spiritually. The book addresses a number of conceptual tensions and shifts in migration and forced migration policies and paradigms. We explicitly locate our thinking about the movement of Muslims in a mobilities perspective—a lens that obliges us to engage historically and critically with current policies and practices of migration management and the securitization of national borders. The mobilities turn in forced migration studies represents a shift from a bounded view of human belonging as static and rooted in specific places, toward one that recognizes that mobility is a normal state for stable populations and that people on the move do not automatically represent a pathology. Rather, the volume seeks to highlight the complex history and contemporary expression of regional connections and conflicts between Muslims that predate these borders and continue to frame movement in the region.

The volume takes its geographical cue from the Muslim concept of Dar al-Islam, roughly translated as “house/abode of Islam,” to denote the spiritual, political, and psychological boundaries of the “Muslim world” as distinguished from non-Muslim space, or Dar al-Harb (house/abode of War). The historical, religious, and cultural patterns that connect the peoples of the Islamic world are accepted by inhabitants and scholars of Muslim-majority regions alike, although any shared idea of a united Muslim World masks a messier reality of conflict, conquest, and enduring non-Muslim minorities. Although Islam is widely acknowledged to be a world religion, its emergence, practice, and political manifestation (in the form of 12 centuries of Islamic empires and the 56 Islamic states of the present day) are tied to particular regions and territories connected along pathways of religious conversion and historical conquest. The majority of the chapters in this volume focus on mobile populations from or within Arab-identified countries—all of which proclaim Islam as the official religion; however, several chapters present scholarship on mobile Muslims in non-Arab Muslim contexts (Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, and Albania) as well as in the more secular West.

This volume is relevant because people from Muslim territories make up the vast majority of the world’s forcibly displaced people today, and most of these movers are hosted by other Muslim countries. In addition to refugees and forced migrants along border regions in zones of ongoing conflict in these regions, urban centers including Amman, Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Peshawar, and Quetta represent important hubs for the movement of people through and from the region. Mobile Muslims are increasingly prevented from traversing traditional travel routes and pathways to safety and security, not only by fearful Western policymakers but also by their own Muslim leaders, as in the case of Syrian refugees blocked from entering Jordan, Turkey, and Lebanon in 2013,¹ and further prevented from moving into Europe.² The volume delves into the regimes of regulation and “irregulation” (Stepputat, 2009) through which Islamic countries construct “refugees,” “migrants,” “guests,” and other categories of foreigners of fellow Muslims seeking sanctuary, and examine how individuals are related and relate to the insecurity–security continuum as they move across different classifications imposed on them by receiving states and international organizations.

The securitization discourse on the part of asylum-granting countries is one of a number of responses to challenges to sovereignty and state borders. An international framework to protect and manage refugees emerged from the actions of the United Nations to address the displacement of Europeans after World War II (Harrell-Bond, 1996), but evolved in the postcolonial world of the 1960s as independence struggles in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia produced nations as well as refugees in the process. Although regional patterns in the framework’s application emerged,³ it is still part and parcel of a system of sovereign states in which individuals have the right to claim asylum according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, as pressure on exclusionary state immigration policies grows due to globalization and transnational realities, so too has the refugee legal protection deteriorated.

Nevertheless, international border regimes are still significantly responsible for the current state-based system of migration management that attaches labels, identities, and rights to movers.⁴ Whereas “refugee,” as a conceptual category, signals the way in which people forced across borders are an anomaly for the nation–state system,⁵ the term “forced migration” is also problematic because it is a descriptive term that merges various types of compulsions to move, without fully accounting for the different ways these are shaped according to judicial systems and legal status.⁶ The international community and the major refugee organizations have expressed increasing anxiety about the dramatic increase in forced migration in, and from, the Muslim world in high-level meetings, media headlines, and urgent alerts for more funds for humanitarian relief. The European Union–United States coalition has sought to prevent refugees from moving in an unmanaged manner, particularly beyond the region of displacement to the West, although previous attempts at “regional containment”—as this policy was termed—were criticized after human rights abuses, including the 1995 massacre of Bosnian refugee men at Srebrenica (see Refugee Studies Centre, 2005, especially section by Hammerstad pp. 87–124).

Furthermore, the source and level of alarm indicates that specific Western nations—European Union countries and the United States, in particular—view Muslim population movements as particularly worrisome for the stability and security of refugee-receiving states also in the Islamic world such as Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey, and Mali⁷ although not Iran. Viewed from a realpolitik perspective, containing refugee populations in the vicinity of the conflict areas produces additional concerns that large numbers of refugees, albeit Muslim, might turn the friendly political climate of Muslim host countries to become less favorable to the West. Nevertheless, Western countries acknowledge that the region is also integrated by historical patterns of movement—of ideas, goods, capital, and people (Shami, 1996; Chatty, 2010; Chatty, this volume)—and those patterns endure despite the emergence of borders and the accompanying regimes of regulation and control. International migration management discourse about forced migration in the Islamic world has, to some degree, adopted the notion that Muslims share a religious responsibility toward fellow Muslims, and have pressed Muslim countries to clarify their stance toward asylum from a religious policy perspective (we discuss the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’s (UNHCR’s) support of Jordan’s religiously defined asylum policy for refugees from Iraq and Syria further).

This volume uses a mobilities perspective to reframe the relationship between Muslim movers and Muslim spaces as a way to identify emerging tensions between long-time patterns of movement and the hardening structures of control in the contemporary Muslim world. People move along a continuum of choice, and policy categories of “refugee,” “migrant,” “displaced person,” “oustee,” and so forth do not adequately capture or reflect the complex and multilayered experiences of movers, or the ambiguous and negotiated boundaries across which they are seen to move. The emerging “mobility” paradigm focuses on the relationship of people and places, the systems that enable and shape movement, and discourses of sedentarism and people “out of place” (Sheller and Urry, 2006; Cresswell, 2006; Urry, 2007). One of the most characteristic features of modernity is mobility itself; modernization, as a discourse, is largely framed by the tension between movement, and securitizing regimes that wish to restrict and manage movement. Cresswell’s (2006) proposal of a “metaphysics of sedentarism” analyzes the view of mobile people as suspicious and a problem, and demonstrates how the mobility of others is “captured, ordered, and emplaced in order to make it legible in a modern society” (Cresswell, 2006: 55).

We invite readers to superimpose a map of the spiritual geography of the region onto the political geography as it exists today as a means of understanding how Muslim movers experience—and Muslim states regulate—the umma as, simultaneously, a space of flows and a space of religious and political order. Although tensions between Islamically sanctioned movements, such as pilgrimage, and modern strategies of population control signify the orders/borders/identities of modernity more generally, we argue that Islamic ideas of space and place add a specific dimension to the transformation of empires into nations. A mobilities perspective allows us to discern these additional layers of spiritual meaning for Muslim movers and rulers that shape migratory decisions and policies in the region in unique ways. Finally, although the discourse of “security” as a global concern emerged prior to the events of September 11, 2001 for a variety of reasons that we do not tackle here, the significance of Islam as an alien and threatening set of ideas and practices in much Western analysis gives a particular shape to securitization policies in the region. Thus, despite the thorough discrediting of Huntington’s clash of civilizations thesis as portraying both “the West” and “the Muslim world” as monolithic, as well as overlooking millennia of exchange and interdependence, the existence of an Islamic geography is, nevertheless, recognized by actors within and beyond its unmarked borders.

The volume brings together a number of long-time observers of forced migration in the region to analyze the nexus of global securitization, religiously and culturally forged migration-management practices in the region, and international refugee law. Authors in the volume grapple with the current transformation in the ways people move across what is perceived by many to be a shared spiritual space and how mobility is managed by state and international and local nonstate actors in its cultural and regional contexts within the Islamic world. Their empirically grounded contributions illustrate how this uneasy confluence generates, blocks, or, otherwise shapes the choices of movers and overall regional mobilities. Central to this nexus is the notion of “guest” that is used widely in the Muslim countries’ political discourses on receiving forced migrants, and by immigration laws that give preference or favorable treatment to fellow Muslims and, in Arab League member states, fellow Arabs (Kapizewski, 2006). The “guest” concept represents a fluid categorization of foreignness based on nomadic traditions of hospitality as well as Islamic notions of sanctuary and Arab group solidarity (Chatty, El-Abed, this volume). “Guesthood” implies a welcoming attitude—demonstrated, for example, by the relatively accommodating policies of Jordan toward refugees from neighboring countries, Syria’s open borders policies toward refugees from Iraq, and hitherto unimpeded entry of Afghani refugees into Iran and Pakistan. However, the notion of “guest” indicates that the stay, although it can be indefinite according to Islamic legal notions of asylum (Abou-El-Wafa, 2009), is still temporary. Thus, as a culturally and religiously forged political notion, “guest” justifies open-borders policies and, at the same time, allows receiving countries to modify their policies toward forced migrants according to circumstantial needs, often citing dual security and development agendas.

A number of cross-cutting themes run through the individual chapters, and connect their empirical and theoretical contributions to the book’s focal points: the spiritual geography of Dar al-Islam, the mobility management processes/discourses that have polarized around development and security in an increasingly fluid migratory context, and contemporary mobile Muslim responses to the reshaping of this landscape through conflict, border control, and population regulation. We explore these further in the subsequent sections.

Muslim Spiritual Geography and the “National Order of Things”⁸

In a sense, to be Muslim is to move, and the Muslim world is both a product of theologically justified movement and an imagined community of mobile Muslims. Originally mapped out through the dual processes of conversion and conquest, its regional geography first emerged as Muslim leaders in the first millennium combined the political goals of territorial expansion with theological consolidation of the Umma (global community of Muslims). As the “Islamic world” grew, its associated spaces were knit together through the movement of Muslims that was motivated by exhortations to travel for knowledge and learning (rihla), pilgrimage (hajj), and, in the case of a threat to a Muslim community, migration (hijra). Although it would be inaccurate to describe Dar al-Islam as encompassing determined territorial boundaries, nevertheless, regional Muslim empires across Arabia, Persia, Central Asia and parts of China, South and South-East Asia, Turkey, North and East Africa and the Horn, and Central and West Africa supported shared religious, political, and cultural familiarity across time and space, even after the onset of European colonial control and the rise of nationalism. Furthermore, Muslim space extended beyond land to include Muslim maritime diasporas such as the Hadramut in the Indian Ocean, and the Hui of the South China sea. As such, the geography that we are exploring in this volume is not only physical, but also spiritual, cultural, and supra-territorial.

Modern nation–state borders, superimposed upon this spiritual geography, have increasingly inhibited the worldwide movement of Muslims, including Muslim refugees, despite, in many Muslim countries, official language that promotes Islamic notions of sanctuary. Increasingly, global and regional security regimes shape the options of Muslim migrants through securitizing politics and practices of containing so-called “mixed migratory populations”—that is, those mobile populations that include refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs), and labor or economic migrants—in conflict areas or in their immediate vicinity. Both Western coalitions and receiving states view refugee mobility between Muslim countries, such as Afghanistan and Pakistan or between Somalia and its neighboring countries, through the lens of a US-led “Global War on Terrorism.”⁹ At the same time, Western states express deepening fear of Muslim communities within their borders—that some observers have termed Islamophobia. The discourse of Muslim Otherness and the threat that Muslims are seen to present through their connections with global Islam supports the premise of a Muslim diaspora even when mobile Muslims are regulated by their nationalities—as Somalis, Sudanese, and Algerians, and so forth—by receiving states. Yet, despite expressing fear of Muslim communities within and beyond their border...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Chapter 1   Introduction: Managing Muslim Mobilities—A Conceptual Framework
• Section I   Histories
• Section II   Securitized Mobility, Politicized Presence
• Section III   Grasping the Transformation
• Section IV   Conclusion
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index