Muslim Migration In & Out of Africa

1. Muslim Migration In & Out of Africa African Studies Program Summer Institute 2012 Senegalese Muslims in Harlem, NY August 2005

2. 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 US Dakar, Senegal Dec. 2010

3. Muslim Migration

4. African Continent

5. True Size of Africa (Kai Krause 2010)

6. Tuba, Senegal

7. Muslims Web resources for teaching Islam • Frontline, “Muslims” at PBS.org • http://pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/muslims/ • Michigan State • http://exploringafrica.matrix.msu.edu/index.php

8. 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

9. 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?

10. 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

11. 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,

12. Muslim Migrants (pbs.org 2004)

13. Muslim Migrants

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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.