Diaspora, Muslims and the quest for belonging

Ashraf al-Hoque

Introduction

The British colonial experience has fashioned a society that is now composite of multiple ethnic, religious and national groups, vying to be recognised, consciously or otherwise, as bona fide protagonists of citizenship and celebrated contributors to civil society. Within this “multicultural” milieu, British Muslims have, in recent years, seemingly fallen short of such expectations. Muslims have become increasingly disconcerted as a result of their community being continuously situated under a critical microscope by various social commentators, policy-makers and the mass media in the years of political inertia following the declaration of the War on Terror.

In light of the recent suicide bombings in London, the question of Islamic radicalism among British diaspora Muslims is receiving considerable attention both on a local and global level. The executors of the attacks were all British-born Muslims of South Asian origin – all under the age of thirty five. At a superficial glance, it is difficult to differentiate any one of the suicide bombers involved in the London attacks with other young Britons. These individuals spoke the same language as the majority of the population, went to the same schools, shared the same jobs, lived in similar homes and were even interested in the same sports. Yet despite the veneer of “conformity”, the bombers candidly demonstrated how emphatically severed they were from the social mainstream. Consequently, one is prompted, even compelled, to locate the origins of such extreme attitudes and methods of dissidence and contempt towards British society. Particularly as the bombers emanated from “within” – not strangers from the Middle-East who were not acquainted with or accustomed to the “British way of life”.

Contrary to the suggestions made by certain bellicose commentators (Huntington 1993; Lewis 2001), the attacks in London did not occur as a result of some deep-rooted archaic hatred harboured by Muslims towards the west that has been culminating for centuries. Rather, the origins of Islamic radicalism of the nature on display in the recent atrocities emerged as a result of specific historical and political contexts. I contend that Muslims in Britain, especially the latter generations, are increasingly becoming sympathetic towards Islamist doctrines as an existential chasm has been allowed to emerge between them and the social mainstream due to social, political and economic mismanagement. In this paper, I endeavour to present a discussion pertaining to general “diaspora consciousness” in an effort to contextualise the phenomenon of Islamist radicalisation in our era. Essentially, to analyse how a sense of “belonging” and “identity” fundamentally influence the attitude and behaviour of diasporans in modern society. The study of diaspora has recently come in to vogue in the social sciences and there exist numerous theoretical perspectives that attempt to provide an understanding of communities that have traditionally been associated with “cognitive rupture”, “social duality” and “cultural schizophrenia”. The purpose of this chapter is two-fold; (i) to introduce to the reader certain definitions and debates that currently exist in the social sciences regarding diaspora; (ii) to create an abstract “theoretical platform” that can then be utilised in order to understand British Muslim consciousness in relation to the spread of Islamist radicalisation.

Problematising Diaspora

Safran defines diaspora communities as;

“Expatriate minority communities (1) that are dispersed from the original “centre” to at least two “peripheral” places; (2) that maintain a “memory”, vision or myth about their original homeland; (3) that believe that they are not – and perhaps cannot be – fully accepted by their home country; (4) that see the ancestral home as a place of eventual return, when the time is right; (5) that are committed to the maintenance or restoration of this homeland; and (6) whose consciousness and solidarity as a group are “importantly defined” by this continuing relationship with the homeland” (in Clifford 1997:247)

This definition succinctly identifies salient features of diaspora consciousness in our current era, (although a slight amendment is required when referring to Muslims in diaspora which I will return to at a later moment). Appadurai suggests that diaspora interpretations of what might be termed “locality”, “neighbourhood” or “community” are “primarily relational or contextual rather than as scalar or spatial […] a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity and the relativity of contexts” (in Fardon [ed.] 1995:205). Appadurai argues that group identities do not necessarily imply a need to be spatially bounded, historically unselfconscious or ethnically homogenous forms, especially in the modern age where “human motion, the volatility of images and the conscious identity-producing activities of the nation-states lend a fundamentally instable and perspectival [sic] to social life” (Ibid:205). In other words, although diaspora communities are profoundly affected by the locality-producing capabilities of larger-scale social formations (nation-states, kingdoms, missionary empires and trading cartels) that determine the general shape of all communities living within their powers, hegemonic power relations do not always succeed in invoking a homogenous and uniform social meta-unit. Communities contextualise their existence through a dialogical engagement of dominant power structures and discourses that then manifest in the production of identities that are relational to the larger-scale social formations but are also simultaneously possessive of previous or indigenous cultural residues. Diaspora communities possess a dualistic ability of adjusting to their immediate environment while simultaneously not discarding the terrain of their “ancestors”.

One can also derive a correlation between abstract phenomenological agency and the politics and rationalisation of “space” in the modern epoch. Bounded territory symbolises the fixity, stability and sovereignty of the nation-state, consequently borders have become the contested sites for international warfare, refuges and immigration policies. For example, for most of Sikh history, territory has not played a significant role in defining Sikh identity, but the politics of space so often intertwined with nationalist discourse led to the demand for Kalistan in the 1980s (Van Der Veer 1995:11). Gupta & Ferguson argue that space itself becomes a “neutral grid on which cultural difference, historical memory and societal organisation is inscribed” (1995:34). The politicisation of space in the colonial and post-colonial period has added a dimension to diaspora identity construction that is analytically imperative. That is not to suggest that prior to the colonial period space invoked an arbitrary sentiment among human groups – spaces have always been associated with particular inhabitants at particular moments. The difference is that the colonial encounter has reshaped how certain spaces are recognised and claimed. “Instead of assuming the autonomy of the primeval community, we need to examine how it is formed as a community out of the interconnected space that always already existed. Colonialism […] represents the displacement of one form of interconnection by another” (Ibid:36). In the specific case of diaspora, space assumes an abstract, even “mystical” value that is not necessarily tied with physical territory. Our era has given rise to the “transnational public sphere” that has rendered any strictly bounded sense of community obsolete. At the same time it has enabled the creation of forms of solidarity and identity that do not rest on the appropriation of physical space as such or even everyday physical encounter. “In the pulverised space of post-modernity, space has not become irrelevant: it has become de-territorialized in a way that does not conform to the experience of space that characterised the period of high modernity” (Ibid:37).

Although there is certainly an element of individual agency in the production of “space” or “community consciousness”, such agency is secondary and consequential to the role played by dominant power structures. The experience of space is always socially constructed and anthropologists have often identified particular indigenous cultural factors that may have contributed towards such constructions. It may be more relevant in our current period, however, to politicise these understandings of space and relate them with broader processes that incorporate political, social and economic factors. These factors originate outside the given community that are then able to penetrate it as a consequence of various historical developments (Lavie & Swedenburg 1996:2). “The forces of new technologies, globalisation ‘time-space compression’ have together created a sense of information flows, fragmentation and pace, replacing what is now perceived to be a previous stability of homogeneity, community and place” (Carter, Donald and Squires 1993:viii). As old divisions and loyalties based around class and geographical loyalty have been undermined by the globalisation of markets , communications networks, networks of power and capital flows, in their place new communities of interests and beliefs are emerging that are resistant to, and at the same time the product of these global forces. In the specific case of the Muslim diaspora, their status as such has very much been formed by the demands and ramifications of colonialism and global capitalism. Moreover, their articulation of the “self” is also dependent upon “local” articulations and perceptions of identity and origin - both local and diaspora notions of space, place, identity and origin are determined and formulated, (as compliant or hostile), by dominant power structures. These power structures do not necessarily function as coercive mechanisms that restrict any scope for individual agency; however, they are the producers of dominant social discourses and sociological orientations.

Aside from state ideologies and national elites, the production of knowledge pertaining to spatial representations can also be attributed to the “mass media” and the “culture industry”. “Existing symbiotically with the commodity form and profoundly influencing even the most remotest people mass media pose the greatest challenge to orthodox notions of culture. National, regional and village boundaries have, of course, never contained culture in the way that anthropological representations have often implied. Yet the existence of a transnational public sphere means that the fiction of such boundaries enclose cultures and regulate cultural exchange can no longer be sustained” (Gupta & Ferguson 1995:48). The production and distribution of mass culture – films, television and radio programmes, newspapers and wire services, recorded music, books, live concerts – are controlled by placeless multinational corporations that do not necessarily conform to different ideological proclivities as capitalist nation-states, but are, nevertheless, autonomous in their operations. State ideologies as well as the ubiquitous reach of multinational corporations therefore attempt to monopolise the cultural sphere. Although this “cultural invasion” has enjoyed various degrees of success, it should not be assumed that recipients of this process are wholeheartedly accommodative. Recipients do not always passively consume, leaving no room for the active creation of disjuncture and dislocations between the flow of industrial commodities and cultural products, rather, the potential for resistance is particularly high when aspiring power bases attempt to penetrate areas that harbour understandings concerning the life-world that are still fully conscious and well-preserved, especially in the case of Muslim peoples.

“The Minority Discourse” – inception, location, fruition

Gilroy suggests that diaspora communities create their own discourse regarding their minority status that is not specifically African, American, Asian, Caribbean or British but all of these at once; a culture whose themes and techniques transcend ethnicity and rationality to produce something new and “unremarked” (Gilroy 1993). Focussing on the black community in Britain, Gilroy argues against the notion that Afrocentricism among Caribbean communities is a complete break form ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture as a means of displaying popular dissent towards the establishment; on the contrary, Afrocentric cultural formation is similar to mainstream Anglo-Saxon culture in the sense that it operates through the same structural and conceptual framework. Gilroy suggests the notion of British nationalism is inadequate and culturally exclusivist in relation to providing a valid and convincing ideology to which the black diaspora (or any other) can identify with and adopt thereby aiding the process of cultural assimilation and integration of the diaspora communities into the British social mainstream. That British nationalism is inherently ethnocentric and not designed to cater for the demands of peoples that emanate from a different ethnic, cultural and historical milieu. Contemporary black identity itself did not organically emerge without historical contexts – much of what can be classed as ‘black diaspora consciousness’ is vociferously anti-imperialist and anti-establishment, sentiments that became fossilised as a consequence of slavery and the digressions associated with its processes. Gilroy traces the roots of such sentiment and concludes that “ideas about rationality, ethnicity, authenticity and cultural integrity are characteristically modern phenomena”. That these ideas were crystallised with the revolutionary transformations of the west at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries and involved “novel typologies and modes of identification” (1993:2). These ‘modes of identification’ are manifest in many different ways, and, in the British black diaspora’s case, it adopts an overtly antagonistic and aggressive methodology where black music and literature is littered with scathing references to slavery, racism, and marginalisation. Through their music and literature, black diasporans have empowered their ability to resist and vocalise grievances that they were hitherto unable to express. Simultaneously, Gilroy warns us of the danger of assuming a distinct and pure black counterculture will be consequently forged as a result of this process. Rather, the methodology employed by the black diaspora in Britain is distinctly modern and has appeared as the result of a process of cultural fusion, hybridity and syncretism that has its roots in profound historical developments (Chrisman 1997:51).

In addition to Gilroy’s contention that black diaspora consciousness does not assume a ‘pure’ form that is the static antithesis of the white mainstream, Hall contends that identity should not be thought of as an already accomplished fact, which the new cultural practices then represent; identity should be viewed as a “‘production” which is never complete, always in process and always constituted within, not outside, representation” (Hall 1993:392). Furthermore, Hall argues that displaced communities attempt to homogenise their identity as a collective and attempt to impose a “shared culture” even where this process seems difficult to engender. Community cohesion is achieved through displaying unified projections of ideological solidarity even where such solidarity is superficial or artificially imposed. This method of sustaining and invoking unity among displaced communities may be relational to what Fanon claims to be “some very beautiful and splendid era whose existence rehabilitates us both in regard to ourselves and in regard to others” [in order to escape] “the misery of everyday life, self-contempt, resignation and abjuration” (Fanon in Hall 1993:394). Fanon suggests that the experience of colonialisation has contributed towards the “emptying of the natives’ brain of all form and content”. Colonial authorities manipulating the power and knowledge mechanisms at their disposal resulted in the historical trajectories of the subject populations to be reshaped to the extent of “distorting, disfiguring and destroying them”. Once fully conscious of these historical mutations, displaced or marginal communities’ then attempt to unearth that which the colonial experience has buried and overlaid. Hall suggests that one should be careful not to assume that this process of historical archaeology will necessarily be accurate and surface historical developments as they were before the colonial experience. Rather, a certain ‘production of identity’ will take place where the past will be re-told to suit the particular circumstances of the times. Cultural identity is always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. “cultural identities are the points of identifications, the unstable points of identification, which are made, within the discourses of history and culture…not an essence but a positioning…hence there is always a politics of identity, a politics of position, which has no absolute guarantee in an unproblematic, transcendental law of origin” (Hall 1993:395). Caribbean identity has emerged from heterogeneous roots as slaves were taken from different countries, tribal communities, villages, languages and religions, the subsequent homogenisation of Caribbean culture in contemporary times is a construction by Caribbean peoples in order to compensate for the void in their history as well as to fashion an alternative discourse, (particularly among diaspora), that can then function as a unifying counter-culture against the toils of social marginalisation, as well as providing a potent sense of “being”.

Conclusion

Muslims in Britain have adapted to their environment while at the same time preserving fundamental facets of their previous cultural heritage – a “mutated” consciousness of sorts, the origins of which cannot be fully located in Britain or the traditional Islamic heartlands. It seems that the advent of the modern-nation state and the ideologies that are synonymous to it have profoundly affected the Muslim diasporan psyche. Demands for autonomy and the desire to create a “homeland”, manifested through notions of “ummah” and “state”, can be attributed to the flow and ownership of hegemonic knowledge; the existence of culturally and ethnically “bounded” nation-states and of progressive and authentic modernist ideologies. Some Muslims in Britain, similar to those of Caribbean origin, have created a counter-discourse of resistance which is imitative of the mechanisms of mainstream British cultural-discourse glossed with an Islamic veneer and cultural nuances. Turning to Islam in the face of perceived adversity allows Muslims to articulate their demands in a manner that is recognisable to them and fellow diasporans, thereby empowering an otherwise silent and alienated community. The counter-discourse that Islamists attempt to forge is not necessarily a demonstration of any “real” or “pure” form of cultural identity. Rather, it is a deliberate attempt to construct a discourse that manages to conveniently cater for all Muslim diasporans by employing a “reductionist” ideological schema. The discourse is paradoxically kept simple as well as ambiguous in order to be able to accommodate the greatest number of sympathisers. It enables the individual to resist perceived marginalisation, (whether on a local or global scale) through utilising a methodology which is comprehensible through the adoption of a “vocabulary” recognisable by both diasporans and the social mainstream. Islamists utilise modern techniques and methods of articulation when addressing potential activists as well as when conveying their message to the rest of the world.

By (dis)virtue of their “otherness”, diaspora communities are prone to notions of social isolation. The lived-experiences of such communities dictate its ability to reconcile difference and rupture as well as the cognitive complexities that form “diaspora consciousness”. Such lived-experiences function as the fundamental gauge through which the “successful integration” of minority communities can be assessed. It is naïve and imprudent for the host nation to assume minority communities will triumphantly navigate through their new-found social mosaic independently. Communities left to the “elements” will react to their exposure accordingly; they will either perish or seek shelter. Muslim diasporans in Britain are the descendants of economic migrants and political refugees, the vast majority of whom are permanently settled within these shores. Contrary to Safran’s implication, the “myth of return” is not transcendental; rather, it is intrinsically linked to the degree of empathy afforded by the social mainstream. Hostility breeds resentment which in turn acts as the anti-dote to even the most nominal form of social cohesion – it is within this ontological sphere that the “myth of return” surfaces. The Islamist operates within this realm. Religious nationalism rather than its secular equivalent is offered as the ideological adhesive to bind disenfranchised Muslim diasporans and to provide a counter-narrative, in turn, an alternative “meta-identity” to negotiate social phenomena as well as one’s “place” in the world.

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