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

Muslim Migration In & Out of Africa  Beth Buggenhagen  Assistant Professor of Anthropology  Where you can contact me with futher questions:  Fieldwork in Senegal and US Dakar, Senegal Dec. 2010

Muslim Migration

African Continent

True Size of Africa (Kai Krause 2010)

Tuba, Senegal

Muslims Web resources for teaching Islam  Frontline, “Muslims” at PBS.org  s/ s/  Michigan State 

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

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?

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

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,

Muslim Migrants (pbs.org 2004)

Muslim Migrants

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

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

Additional Resources Recent Ethnographies of African Migration  Carter, Donald Martin Navigating the African Diaspora. Minnesota University Press.  Kane, Ousmane The Homeland is the Arena. Religion, Transnationalism, and the Integration of Senegalese Immigrants. Oxford University Press.  Abdullah, Zain Black Mecca. The African Muslims of Harlem. Oxford University Press.