Since the 1970s the Persian Gulf has drawn hundreds of thousands of Pakistani labour migrants, primarily working in construction, agriculture, and transport sectors. Historically, the majority of Pakistani male migrants have ended up in two countries: Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. While most Pakistanis in the Gulf come from the Punjab, the most populous of Pakistan’s provinces, over the past decade other ethnic groups like the Pathans from the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province have been seeking jobs in the region. Pathan migrants represent a particular sub-national profile, as many of the Pathans who come to the Gulf tend to be from remote rural or mountainous parts of the Khyber Pahtunkhwa, where there are fewer opportunities for paid employment and families largely depend on subsistence farming. The tribal belt in particular, which is heavily underdeveloped and has recently suffered heavily as a result of political instability, conflict and any-terror military operations, has also served as key geographic location of outmigration. The substantial outmigration of tribal Pathans substantiates existing literature that suggests a strong correlation between economic and political instability at home and overseas migration. This paper is the outcome of fieldwork that was undertaken in Pakistan, and draws on interviews that took place at a day-long focus group held in the rural outskirts of Islamabad in May 2017. The focus group brought together approximately forty male Pakistani citizens, many of whom were Pathan, some of whom were considering migrating for the first time, others who were in the pre-departure stages and were waiting for the finalization of their visa and job contracts, as well as several return migrants who had completed their Gulf migration journey. The group discussions focused on a number of key themes but primarily highlighted on the experiences of migrants while navigating the recruitment process and also their experiences of living and working in a host state in the GCC. While the opportunity to earn higher income in the Gulf continues to attract Pathans to the region, the dependency generated through this system, and the fact that their remittances play such a critical role in the wellbeing of their extended families, often means that these migrants are willing to pay exorbitant sums of money to find a job in the Gulf, and willing to also endure difficult and harsh working and living conditions once in the host state.

Baha’is who have been seeking asylum since early revolutionary years in Iran are considered by the Islamic Republic a wayward sect (ferqeh-ye zalleh), religiously unclean (najes), and foreign spies. After the summary executions of the elected members of the Baha’i Assemblies, many were imprisoned and their belongings confiscated. Baha’i marriages have faced challenges, and Baha’i cemeteries are randomly bulldozed. They are forbidden from holding public offices, their businesses are shut down, and Baha’i youth are denied higher education. The Baha’i narratives of seeking asylum that I collected during two years of field research in Turkey, embeds this historical consciousness of marginality. Changing strategy from acquiescing to the officials’ demand for invisibility, on the one hand, to that of demanding religious rights including active ‘sharing’ of their religion, as well as participating in philanthropic projects in the last fifteen years, on the other hand, shed some lights on the reasons for the renewed crackdown and the consequent inadvertent spread of the religion. Under such dire condition, among the Iranian asylum seekers, the testimonials of Iranian Shi?i Muslims who have converted to become Baha’i offer valuable fields of analysis regarding conversion, religious membership, and instrumentalization of religious identity while seeking asylum, as well as relations with Islam and with those born into Baha’i families. I will further address examples of Baha’i transnational and pedagogical practices through classes, workshops, and seminars, hence the construction of a global diasporic Baha’i identity aligned with the proclaimed worldwide religious plans.

Current media and political discourses on the European migrant crisis are predominantly framed within a discourse of a so-called ‘Islamization of Europe,’ supposedly threatening ‘Western values.’ This paper offers a different perspective on Islam and migration by focusing on a recent phenomenon: the emigration of ‘white’ European Muslim converts to a Muslim majority country. I specifically focus on the experiences and positions of Muslim converts from Belgium and the Netherlands, who perform hijra (the religious migration to a Muslim country) to Morocco. In their longing for religious freedom, and the building of a stable Islamic home far away of West-European islamophobia, many of these muhijarat, once settled in Morocco, experience isolation and feelings of disappointment regarding the perceived lack of ‘true Islam’ in their new fatherland. Based on the results of ongoing longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork among seventeen muhijarat in Morocco, I explore how their emigration to a Muslim majority country affects their religiosity, by concentrating on ‘home-making practices.’ I explore how they negotiate the complex intersections of their religious, cultural, and national identities through food, domestic decoration, and parenting. I argue that these practices should not only be understood as strategies these women employ to try and feel at home in their new environment (Boccagni 2017; Duyvendak 2011), but also as a space where they (re)arrange conflicting feelings of belonging in reference to Islam, to Moroccan society, as well as to their Dutch and Belgian backgrounds. Their general critique of Moroccan cultural and religious practices, while idealizing Belgian and Dutch manners, is often expressed in Islamic terms. This raises reflections on how their home-making practices may exemplify the formation of a new type of religious imperialism (Stoler 2002, Strathern 2016). Their narratives and practices of running a household in Morocco also highlight the ‘multiscalar’ complexities (Çaglar & Glick Schiller 2018) of transnational connections at work. The analysis of these domestic practices will be situated within recent debates about Islam and citizenship. The governments of all three countries have made explicit calls for a fight against ‘radical Islam’ and the installation of a ‘moderate Islam’ (Kundnani 2014, Mamdani 2002, Wainscott 2017). This evokes the question whether the predominantly Salafi-oriented converts fleeing an increasingly hostile social and political climate towards orthodox interpretations of Islam, are actually able to construct an alternative religious space in Morocco, where they find themselves in similar government programs.

This paper examines the migration of Iraqis, Palestinians and Syrians in the 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s to the city of Amman. It explores the resulting changes to the development and character of the city. The paper finds that Amman’s residents have consistently attached more importance to their economic well-being than to political doctrine, ethno-national pride, or religious zeal. As a result of its location and stability, Amman has emerged as the largest refugee city in the world. It has retained a measure of demographic harmony among its many residents despite the tense regional climate of the Middle East. In addition, this paper provides the reader with a general overview of the demographic and urban realities of Amman today. The argument is advanced that, even with large numbers of migrants, refugees, and exiles coming into the city, the fabric of the urban community of Amman has held together peacefully. The fact that this is still the case even when the city is prohibitively expensive, resources are scarce, neighbors are at/in war, in chaos, or on edge, and local unemployment rates are high, is significant. The paper identifies the reasons that account for this relative harmony, based on a range of primary sources, including interviews with key decision makers and recent archival material from the Department of the National Library and the Department of Statistics in Jordan. The paper deliberately employs a broad approach to understanding the realities of modern Amman during this period. Instead of focusing on one aspect of Amman’s physical development or one theme in its political and social history, it probes broadly the story of Amman’s urban, socio-economic, and political development since 1990. My choice of a multitude of themes relating to Amman is also influenced by a genre in urban history used to examine cities that engages both the physical/spatial and sociological aspects of a city, instead of either one or the other. The re-writing of the history of Amman in this vein is an important historical subject with wide-ranging theoretical, historiographical and empirical implications.

In January 1980, the Turkish teacher Celalettin Kesim was murdered in Berlin. That Kesim’s killers had emerged from a nearby mosque marked the event in the contemporary press and in popular memory as a religiously-motivated act, what was referred to as the “first Islamist murder in Germany.” For West Germans, Kesim’s death signaled that religious and political developments in the Middle East were now “all too near,” as Der Tagesspiegel put it. For West Germans, Kesim’s death signaled that the global “wave of re-Islamization,” of which the Iranian Revolution was the most dramatic symptom, had reached the Federal Republic. Before 1980, problems perceived to arise from Turkish Islamic practice in West Germany had been attributed by policymakers to class, party politics, or rural backwardness particular to Turkey or the culture of the Anatolian village. After 1980, Germans increasingly invoked Islam in and of itself in explaining problems of integration. Islam became a cause, and not a consequence, of other problems. Turkish Islam was analogized with Islam elsewhere and connections between Muslim groups in West Germany and the wider world were more frequently drawn. As Islam became a matter of greater policy concern, West Germans lamented that, to quote a 1979 federal report, “we know so little about Islam.” To address this deficit, German policymakers turned to small group of experts on the Middle East, most prominently the journalist Peter Scholl-Latour. The knowledge these experts offered about Iran or Afghanistan was taken to be applicable not only in those countries but also to the Muslim minority in West Germany. In this paper, I examine how knowledge provided by these experts about Islam in the Middle East shaped policies and debates on Islam in West Germany. Informed by these new understandings, policymakers saw Islam was an essential, inherent, and potentially revolutionary aspect of Turkishness that required state intervention to manage. This in turn informed policies as varied as the failed attempts to introduce Islamic religious lessons in German schools in the 1980s or the decision to issue entry visas only to imams sent by the Turkish state. This new knowledge discourse contributed to the flattening of differences and compression of imagined space between West Germany and the Middle East. It enlivened and institutionalized the notion Cemil Ayd?n refers to as “the idea of Muslim world” with implications for policies and popular attitudes that persevere to the present.