Inter-Generational Negotiations of Religious Identity, Belief and Practice: Child, youth and adult...

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RescRipting Religion in the city



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Rescripting Religion in the cityMigration and Religious identity in the

Modern Metropolis

Edited by

Jane gaRnettWadham College, University of Oxford, UK

alana haRRisLincoln College, University of Oxford, UK



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© Jane garnett and alana harris 2013

all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher.

Jane garnett and alana harris have asserted their right under the copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work.

published by ashgate publishing limited ashgate publishing companyWey court east 110 cherry streetUnion Road suite 3-1Farnham Burlington, Vt 05401-3818surrey, gU9 7pt Usaengland

www.ashgate.com

British Library Cataloguing in Publication DataA catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:Rescripting religion in the city : migration and religious identity in the modern metropolis/edited by Jane garnett and alana harris. pages cm includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-3774-1 – ISBN 978-1-4094-3775-8 (ebook) – ISBN 978-1-4724-0352-0 (epub) 1. Cities and towns–Religious aspects. 2. Emigration and immigration–Religious aspects. 3. Identification (Religion) 4. Identity (Psychology)–Religious aspects. i. garnett, Jane, editor of compilation.

Bl65.c57R47 2013 200.9173ꞌ2–dc23 2013002712ISBN 9781409437741 (hbk)ISBN 9781409437758 (ebk – PDF)ISBN 9781472403520 (ebk – ePUB)


© Copyrighted Materialww

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Refugee camps and cities in conversationyousif M. Qasmiyeh and elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

throughout my childhood, my mother would sporadically leave our refugee camp, sometimes with us [my siblings and me] and at times with other women, and walk through the Lebanese neighbourhood bordering our camp, to the isolated mound which was home to the wali [holy man]. Reaching this annexed space, neither camp nor city, exposed us to our lebanese ‘neighbours’ en route to the shrine. Walking with my mother and my siblings, the shrine’s green exterior would appear; we knew to be silent as we approached the tomb. As we started to read al-Fatiha,1 my mother sometimes cried, whispering her calls to heaven. i never questioned my mother’s intentions as she completed these religious exercises in this secluded, private space – as if it were an extension of the mosque we left behind in the camp, a spiritual correlative for my mother and other women.2

this chapter engages an emerging body of literature which explores the multi-dimensional connections between refugee camps and cities. such literature includes considerations of whether refugee camps ‘can be likened to virtual cities in view of their population and demographic density’,3 assessing camps’ and camp-dwellers’ positions vis-à-vis basic typologies of urban concentration and processes of urbanization. other studies explore ‘the phenomena of refugee camps with the methodologies of architecture and urbanism’, identifying desert-based camps as a ‘borderline case’ of urbanity4 or the military destruction of palestinian refugee camps such as nahr el-Bared as a case of ‘urbicide’.5 More philosophical

1 Al-Fatiha is the first chapter of the Qur’ān.2 Very few women in the palestinian refugee camp in north lebanon referred to in

this extract attend the camp’s mosques, preferring to pray indoors. With only one mosque in Baddawi camp (Masjid al-Sunna) having a female prayer room, women typically pray at home. although men as a collective are religiously obligated to attend the mosque for jumu’ah prayers (Friday prayers), women are exempted from doing so and at times individually visit the shrine to perform extra rituals beyond their required prayers.

3 Marc-antoine perouse de Montclos and peter Mwangi Kagwanja, ‘Refugee camps or Cities? The Socio-Economic Dynamics of the Dadaab and Kakuma Camps in Northern Kenya’, Journal of Refugee Studies 13/2 (2000): 205–22, at p. 205.

4 Manuel herz, From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara (Zurich, 2012).

5 adam Ramadan, ‘Destroying nahr el-Bared: sovereignty and Urbicide in the space of exception’, Political Geography 28/3 (2009): 153–63.



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Rescripting Religion in the City132

reflections in turn examine refugee camps as ‘non-places’ or ‘spaces of indistinction’ which ‘do not integrate other places, meanings, traditions and sacrificial, ritual moments but remain, due to a lack of characterization, non-symbolized and abstract spaces’.6

in contrast with the existing literature, which is primarily written by external observers and analysts, this chapter centralizes subjective experiences and perceptions of both camps and cities from diverse perspectives over time and space. it especially critiques the denomination of camps as ‘non-symbolized and abstract spaces’ and their supposed failure to integrate ‘sacrificial’ and ‘ritual moments’. as noted by one of the authors of this piece:

My role here is not to talk about the historiography of ‘the camps’, but rather to present my own perceptions and my own fights with these places. I was born in Baddawi camp on the outskirts of the Northern Lebanese city of Tripoli. According to many Palestinians, Baddawi is an insignificant camp in the sense that it is not as popular as other refugee camps such as shatila in Beirut and ain el-helwe in sidon. We used to visit my mother’s family in nahr el-Bared camp nearby, and we spent a very long time there, visiting and staying in contact with my grandparents, my uncles and aunts, cousins, and of course their respective families. We always perceived that their celebrations, as well as their funerals, embodied the continuity of our common presence in lebanon. hence, throughout my life, the journey itself to nahr el-Bared has embodied an unbreakable link between one camp and another through a non-camp space. However, the unbreakable nature of this link was both amputated and transmuted due to the lebanese military’s destruction of nahr el-Bared in 2007, which entailed the physical erasure of the camp and the relocation of the entire camp population, including my relatives, to my own family camp – Baddawi – and other camps across lebanon. Despite the physical destruction of the camp infrastructure, or what Ramadan refers to as an instance of ‘urbicide’, this space, this land, still bears the traces of both the living and the deceased, and my mother has continued to visit the cemetery where my grandparents and relatives are buried in nahr el-Bared. if the destruction of nahr el-Bared in and of itself embodied a nakba within the Nakba,7 the determination to return, visit and revisit the cemetery there has become a central form of solidarity with

6 Bülent Diken, ‘From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities: Biopolitics and the end of the city’, Citizenship Studies 8/1 (2004): 83–106, at p. 91 (referring to Marc Augé).

7 Nakba (catastrophe) is the Arabic term used to denote the mass exodus from Palestine in 1948 (see Constantine Zureik, Ma’na al-Nakba [Beirut, 1948]). The notion of a nakba within the Nakba therefore refers to an additional catastrophe (such as the destruction of the camp and subsequent displacement from Nahr el-Bared) within the overarching national catastrophe. as noted by adonis, ‘place is not outside of a human being but rather inside and so every spoilage of the place is damaging to human beings’ (‘Beirut today: a Veritable city or a Mere historical name?’, Home Works II [Oct.–Nov. 2003]: 14–23, at p. 15).



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Refugee Camps and Cities in Conversation 133

memory and history. since leaving the camps to live in Beirut and later oxford, i have completed what i would refer to as a benign desertion of the camps – this is a physical absence that allows you, or perhaps requires you, to reflect on the ways in which you perceive and understand camps and cities. it is as if i needed that absence from the camp to be able to evaluate the situation from a different location.

Far from an official historiography of the Palestinian or other camps, this chapter therefore invites further conversations between differently situated individuals to explore the interconnectivities between diverse types of camps and forms of city-space. it centralizes subjective accounts constituted and reconstituted at a critical distance and incorporating comparative experiences which facilitate a sharper and more multi-faceted understanding of these spaces and diverse dynamics. the nature of palestinian refugee camps is thus addressed through a reflection on the position of the individual and the collectivity in relation to the construction and reconstruction of ‘the camp’ at home and away. the traces and symbolisms embodied in such camp-like spaces are illuminated, as are the ways in which refugees and those bearing the signs of ‘refugeeness’ negotiate their belonging to a medium which is both abstract and yet ever-present.8

the chapter presents the outcome of an iterative process which has involved the development of three rhetorical lenses which ultimately culminate in the emergence of a joint voice.9 it derives from a preliminary informal conversation held between, and subsequently transcribed by, the two authors: yMQ, a poet and translator who was born in a palestinian refugee camp and who lived and worked in a variety of camps in Lebanon before arriving in the United Kingdom, and EFQ, a scholar working within the field of refugee studies with extensive academic experience of conducting research in and about refugee camps and urban hosting contexts in the Middle east and north africa. Rather than systematically presenting these two voices as separate and distant interpretive positions, however, it is precisely the long-standing shared and intimate connection and attachment with each others’ experiences, interpretations and re-interpretations of such matters which has led to the explicit development of a third voice. in spatial terms, once could depict this as a multi-directional and fluid movement between space A and space B into the constitution of space c, a hybrid ‘third space of enunciation’ (following Bhabha).10 it is this intense personal and academic interconnectivity

8 this chapter can usefully be read in conjunction with Fiddian-Qasmiyeh’s multi-sited contribution regarding Muslim asylum-seekers’ and refugees’ inter-generational negotiation of religious identity and practice in three key city-scapes in this volume.

9 We thank the editors of this volume for encouraging us to implement this rhetorical device in our piece.

10 Bhabha refers to the third space as a ‘contradictory and ambivalent space of enunciation’ arguing that ‘it is in this space that we will find those words with which we can speak of Ourselves and Others. And by exploring this hybridity, this “Third Space”, we



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and the recognition of the processes of mutual influence underpinning both our individual and conjoined perspectives, which has led to the development of this third voice, which neither negates nor confirms our respective views. While the original transcribed conversation which underpins this piece was formally structured as yMQ and eFQ respectively posing and responding to one another’s questions, ideal-typically from the position of insider and outsider,11 the third voice aims neither to dilute nor to artificially amplify the divergences and similarities of our opinions. As a result, and perhaps as a direct reflection of the increasingly fluid ways in which both camps/cities and normative and symbolic religious/spiritual practices and identities are conceptualized, this chapter at times presents a clearly identifiable speaker whose lived experiences are immediately recognizable as ‘their own’, while at other times the authors’ voices and perspectives are blurred.

In addition to reflecting on the tropes of cities and camps and focusing in particular on the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and camp-like spaces constituted by palestinians elsewhere, the chapter investigates selected religious or sacred dimensions of experience within city/camp life and a range of ways in which social and socio-cultural rituals and religious practices may overlap in these contexts. In so doing, it transcends an explicit identification and analysis of religious modes per se and rather develops an ‘alternative’ articulation of forms of expression and identification which may, or may not, fall within the traditional remit of ‘religious studies’.12

may elude the politics of polarity and emerge as the others of our selves’ (homi K. Bhabha, ‘Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences’, in Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin [eds], The Post-Colonial Studies Reader [2nd edn, New York, 2006]), pp. 155–7, at pp. 156, 157).

11 In earlier collaborative work, we addressed the researcher’s insider–outsider position in more detail and presented ‘an invitation for future research to invite refugees and asylum-seekers to become co-researchers rather than simply “participants” and “interviewees”’ (Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, ‘Asylum-Seekers and Refugees from the Middle east and north africa: negotiating politics, Religion and identity in the UK’, Journal of Refugee Studies 23/3 [2010]: 294–314, at pp. 300–1). The present chapter transcends this denomination of ‘co-researchers’ through the alternative rhetorical voice and invocation of Bhabha’s third space of enunciation.

12 As argued by Talal Asad, ‘there cannot be a universal definition of religion’, as its ‘constitutive elements and relationships are historically specific, [and] because that definition itself is an historical by-product of discursive processes’ (Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam [Baltimore, MD, 1993], p. 29). in line with his argument, this piece is guided by the recognition that ‘religious symbols cannot be understood independently of their historical relations with non-religious symbols or their articulations in and of social life, in which work and power are always crucial’ (ibid., p. 53). As such, we draw upon and explore a range of symbols and practices which can be seen as marking and being marked by temporality, permanence and/or transient permanence in a specific historical and geopolitical context: that of the Palestinian refugee camps in lebanon.



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at least two ontological religious modes emerge as being prevalent in Palestinian camps such as Baddawi. The first is intimately and inherently related to religion as an organic power which sheds light on the individual’s beliefs as well as his/her practices according to a clear set of principles and values governed by faith itself. the second is the metaphorical condition which gives the camp a central role in people’s lives as the all-encompassing sphere to which people return in an attempt to seek validation of their identities as refugees.

In other words, camps themselves have become a key destination-point (both for those of us who live in the camps and those of us who have been able to leave to live elsewhere), which can only be accessed through a laborious process of identification and understanding of the place itself. palestinian refugees who live in camps, as well as those of us who visit on a seasonal basis, can be understood to perceive their journey, on a symbolic level, as a pilgrimage to a sacred space which attaches them directly to their national dreams and pending state. the conceptualization of these pilgrimages as a strategy of constant reconnection between the (current or former) camp-resident and the camp itself not only problematizes the way we observe religion and religiosity in general terms, but also challenges us to upgrade the status of camps into that of, for instance, mosques, churches and altars: destination-points with key metaphorical and ontological underpinnings. such an aporia draws attention to the simultaneous tension and attraction between permanence and transience, visibility and invisibility, presence and absence, which pervades conceptualizations of religious practices and performances, on the one hand, and the image of the refugee, on the other, as the one who visits and then disappears and as the one who remains omnipresent. Refugees return to that innate place which we call a camp because it is there that the remnants of ourselves lie, and it is there that we believe in ourselves as refugees whose status is still pending. only there do religion and its metaphorical interpretations lie equidistantly from each other.

Beginnings

Refugee camps are archetypally conceptualized as temporary and transient spaces, with temporality or temporariness typically associated with the notion of the camp:

Refugee camps boast a new quality: a ‘frozen transience’, an on-going, lasting state of temporariness, a duration patched together of moments none of which is lived through as an element of, and a contribution to, perpetuity. the inmates of refugee camps live, literally, from day to day.13

this conceptualization would suggest that it is paradoxical to consider a refugee camp to be a home. yet, qualifying such generic imaginations of the camp, it is possible to propose that memories and politics of the home-land ‘are

13 Zygmunt Bauman, Society Under Siege (Malden, MA, 2002), pp. 114–15.



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complemented and at times superseded by the development of and longing for’ refugees’ home-camps. such refugee camps themselves become ‘spaces to be remembered, and equally spaces for political intervention and action’.14

Directly challenging the typical understanding of camps as spaces or structures constructed a priori – for you rather than by you, by others rather than by yourself – we can counterpoise elements of a self-constructed entity. camps are not merely places which have been imposed upon people; rather, at times they may be chosen, despite the inherently limited array of options available, in order to mark a personal inbetweenness and to highlight an inability to return to a place of origin. creating this temporary space may thus permit the accentuation of concrete political and social injustices. even following displacement, a refugee can still pitch a tent and assert that this is her camp – this is her temporary address – and this is an affirmation not directed by United Nations agencies such as UNRWA15 or UnhcR.16 this is a way of viewing a relationship with a place which is not your own – which is not a place that you were given the chance to choose. the lack of choice, from that perspective, creates ‘the camp’. There is no inherent contradiction in structure and agency in such a context: we have no other option, apart from creating or constructing that place, that camp, to mark our existence. a tension exists, however, between the recognition that camps are not absolutely constructed by UnRWa or UnhcR and the fact that it cannot simplistically be stated that an individual can wholly create her or his own personal camp. the camp ‘always already’ exists before that individual takes the decision to establish a camp or to establish a home within a camp. indeed, can one individual’s house be a camp, or is there an inherent need for a collectivity and an a priori structure to justify the construction of that particular space of inhabitation as a camp?

Whether individually or collectively established, these temporary places rarely become permanent: what is accessed is a state which is beyond temporariness but remains less than permanent – what Bauman refers to as ‘transient permanence’.17 hence, it is somewhere, sometime, between temporary and permanent – it is beyond temporary but is not yet permanent, as we know neither how this refugeeness will end, nor who, or what, might have the capacity to transform this individual and collective state of refugeeness: the Un, states, organizations or communities themselves. We have yet to find a new adjective or transitive verb to mark that phase more precisely.

14 Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘The Inter-Generational Politics of “Travelling Memories”: Refugee Youth Remembering Home-Land and Home-Camp’, Journal of Intercultural Studies (29 Jan. 2013), <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/07256868.2012.746170> (accessed 19 Apr. 2013).

15 The United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near east.

16 the United nations high commissioner for Refugees.17 Bauman, Society Under Siege.



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the intention here has not been to create or enlarge a rupture between the collective and the personal but to underline the force of subjectivity: the individual is the one who determines whether a place is a camp or not. For example, there are certain places in Lebanon not classified, either legally or logistically, as camps, because they do not fall under UnRWa’s areas of operation: these are instead officially labelled ‘gatherings’. The inhabitants of these so-called gatherings, of which there are 39 in lebanon,18 including the Qasmieh and Jal el-Baher gatherings, nonetheless consider these places to be camps. it is not the institution that defines the place but rather the individual who does so, the individual who then forms a community or becomes part of a collective.19 given the variety of people’s depictions and conceptualizations of the term ‘camp’, such heterogeneity must be recognized and explored further.

Transitions and Transpositions

a particularly relevant development in the way that people see themselves as refugees, residents or citizens is conspicuous in the example of palestinian refugees who have successfully left the camps for Sweden and live as citizens, legally speaking, in what might be called ‘estate-camps’ (in terms of their location in social housing estates) or ‘tent-ative camps’. to visit a small neighbourhood in sweden and discover a ‘new Baddawi’ beyond Baddawi camp can be pleasantly disconcerting20 – to meet former neighbours and school-friends living together in a swedish estate, rather than in the refugee camps of my childhood, is deeply suggestive of the significance both of channelling certain identity-markers and of re-creating certain spaces, to ensure that your position as an individual who has a cause, who belongs to a loaded history – that is your refugeeness – continues to be palpable.

these people, who decided or had to leave certain refugee camps in lebanon for europe, initially attempted to distance themselves physically from the camp, and yet, in so doing, they have ultimately reconstructed a camp in a new location: the act of deconstructing the camp in lebanon ironically produced another form of camp in sweden itself, in the urban spaces allocated by the swedish authorities. these spaces now have better conditions, and yet their inhabitants continue to

18 Danish Refugee council, Needs Assessment of Palestinian Refugees in Gatherings in Lebanon (Beirut, 2005).

19 the term ‘community’ is not used as such in this context given the presence of multiple, fragmented and often contesting and contested communities within the camp. attempts to present the camp as a homogenous or homogenized place inhabited by a refugee community must therefore be unsettled rather than reproduced.

20 the notion of a ‘new Baddawi’ emerging in sweden was referred to by yMQ’s brother following his visit to the city of helsinborg in southern sweden, where he encountered dozens of acquaintances whom he had last seen over a decade earlier in the original Baddawi in lebanon.



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believe that they belong to something, to a state which takes them back to their national identity, to their homeland and even to certain cultural, religious and national(istic) rituals which are regularly observed both in Sweden, and during seasonal visits to the camps. indeed, collective celebrations such as iftar (breaking the fast) during Ramadan, the establishment of Muslim burial sites and the annual commemoration of the palestinian Nakba in swedish towns and cities are now markers of permanence which are as institutionalized as the anticipation of those who remain in the camps and who expect their family members to continue their seasonal migration to the south (to paraphrase Tayib Salih)21 not only during the summer holidays but also during Ramadan, eid al-Fitr and eid al-adha.

it could be argued that palestinians’ seasonal visits to the camps have been made both possible and necessary by the increasingly permanent migration of the camp to the city, leading to blurred boundaries between these constructs. it is therefore impossible to present a pure and monolithic understanding of specific places, as if these were static and lacked the energy or the ability to change and evolve – as if these places were devoid of residents. Rather, it has been a conscious decision amongst palestinians in sweden to congregate around the same location and to pursue a similar set of activities, rituals and commemorations as those which they and their families pursued in the refugee camps and continue to re-enact during their seasonal visits. in so doing, it is as if they have truly established their own camp for the first time in Sweden, having been constrained through diverse structures when the camps in lebanon were established for them and, ostensibly, on their behalf.

is this conceptualization of the swedish estate-camp or new Baddawi made problematic by these inhabitants being citizens rather than refugees? can one have a refugee camp inhabited by citizens, just as we can have refugees and asylum-seekers living in cities? To what extent does the legal denominator ‘refugee’ or ‘citizen’ mean that the designation ‘camp’ is not solely used from inside but also recognized and is legible for outsiders? once again, i would argue that such a stance should be determined through these individuals’ lenses:

Reflecting upon my own experience, becoming a [British] citizen does not exclude or erase the fact that i was born a refugee. on the contrary, it is particularly vital for me to remain in contact with my history, or perhaps histories, of refugeeness, and the reality that the majority of my family are still refugees, and are still inhabitants of different refugee camps in lebanon. how can a son or a brother be a citizen while the rest of his family are refugees elsewhere? It is that personal, familial linkage which allows you to respond to that history with knowledge and acceptance of the fact that you are part of a group. It is not a tribalistic linkage, and yet as a result of being part of that place, of that upbringing, your citizenship does not cancel out the refugeeness of the other (which is simultaneously part of yourself).

21 tayib salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. D. Johnson-Davies (oxford, 1969).



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That is why you can, of course, have refugees, citizens and asylum-seekers all within the same place, all within a camp or, indeed, within a city. in effect, it is possible to relate cities directly to diversity, to their ability to absorb people with different cultural, religious, social and political backgrounds and who may have different causes within that particular place. london as a city is rooted in differentiation – the capacity to include or incorporate different nations within its space, nations which ultimately function within an overarching nation but continue to have other, transnational relationships.

In this regard, leaving Baddawi camp to work in Beirut was a highly significant transition for me, despite the apparent geographical proximity of these locations. Relocating to live with my brother in Burj al-Barajneh camp on the outskirts of Beirut and to work in the Sabra and Shatila camps and then to leave Burj al-Barajneh and settle in Shatila camp offered me the opportunity to live and work in different refugee camps. Revisiting the relationship between individual and assigned spaces, i have been fully aware that the physical transposition, which in some respects offers the opportunity to expand and flourish, is compromised by an inability to feel settled. sadly, we have never had this feeling: we have never felt settled or at ease with the place. indeed, leaving a camp does not necessarily mean changing conditions – you are only changing geography, and yet these conditions continue to haunt you, continue to accompany you. When moving between camps, cities such as tripoli and Beirut have only acted as transit stations, as the route which you cannot inhabit, on which you cannot stay for long, which you have to leave. it is about passing or crossing or moving from one camp to another – these cities have always existed outside the camps rather than functioning as ‘real’ cities. i have always had a problematic relationship with these places, and, tragically, i have always felt relatively more comfortable in the camps: this attachment to a space, despite its ostensible temporariness and transience, is validated through a diversity of means, ranging from the intrinsic characteristics of the place and its inhabitants, to the ambivalent relationship revolving around physical and spiritual markers embodied in specific sites and signs therein.

Markers of (Im)permanence

Despite their size, some of the camps have acted like cities in their capacity to include tens of thousands of people of diverse nationalities – not only palestinians, but also Sudanese, Egyptians, Sri Lankans, Syrians and even Lebanese. These individuals and groups have continuously permeated the camps, because they correspond socially and economically within the parameters of the camps. in that respect, the palestinian camps in lebanon act as small cities, developing their own economies, their own shops, even if these do not exist as concrete architectural additions. such mechanisms are intimately attributed to survival and to the fact that people may establish a shop to maintain their own precarious existence but also to respond actively to, and within, a very passive environment. in light of all of the



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sanctions and restrictions placed upon the camps’ inhabitants, responding to such enforced passivity in such a creative fashion is ingenious, inscribing their presence and concurrently a sense of security and belonging, even if this is characterized by investing in a place which is ultimately dead. Dead in the sense that camps – if we personalize them – do not belong to the rest of lebanon. even if they have been trying to be part of that landscape, they have failed to be accepted and take on a life of their own. Whilst acting as independent spaces within a country, they have nonetheless always maintained their own passivity, in the sense that they are physically and psychologically besieged – feeling unable to expand, to belong, to believe that their presence will be acknowledged in a way which might show some human correspondence between palestinian refugees and the lebanese government.22 palestinian refugees remain ostracized within their refugee camps, unable to exercise, to look after their bodies and ageing dramatically as a result. simultaneously, both architecturally and demographically, the population is increasing, and yet the space is contracting – hence the term passivity, as these two dimensions have not developed at the same rate, resulting in a sense of stagnancy: despite the multiplication of the population, these places fail to grow in terms of facilities, vision or acceptance by others.

In spite of the existence of permanent markers and markers of permanence in the camps, important points of reference such as ration-centres, on the one hand, and markers such as tombstones, on the other, paradoxically resist representing a stable sense of place. Frequenting the former demonstrates the ambivalent bond which exists between palestinians and UnRWa, suggesting refugees’ reliance upon a god-like entity which acts as the ultimate provider23 to which we pay homage in order to ensure our survival, while visiting the latter centralizes a crucial but transcendent bond between refugees, their history and the space of memory. the existential attraction to these particular sites located within the camps, both by camp residents and those undertaking seasonal visits to their home-camps, is often paralleled by processes of individual and collective repulsion, rather than these spaces and experiences necessarily being perceived as symbols of stability and belonging:

Visiting the camp and its constitutive sites, in particular our family home, the market and the cemetery, acts as a unifying factor for those of us who live outside of the camps. it is not the inherent characteristic of the camp which attracts us

22 tragic incidents, including the israeli invasion, the camps War and the civil War, are amongst the numerous processes which have scarred the relationship between palestinian refugees and the lebanese government.

23 The notion of UNRWA as a god-like entity implicitly relates to Turner’s research, which explores Burundian refugees’ perceptions of UnhcR as ‘a better husband’ by virtue of its power to provide for families which are unable to or prevented from providing for themselves (simon turner, Angry Young Men in Camps: Gender, Age and Class Relations among Burundian Refugees in Tanzania, UNHCR Working Paper No. 9, New Issues in Refugee Research [Geneva, 1999]).



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to return. Rather, it is an almost magnetic force that draws us towards our past and present, a ‘placeless place’,24 in which we are positioned on ‘the inside of the outside, or vice versa’,25 to which we travel in order to fulfil our material and symbolic duty towards our families and broader communities, to personally sustain a continuity between refugees in the camps and those dispersed abroad. When my sister, who is based in sweden, my brother, based in canada, and i, direct our sights towards the camps from a distance, and when we return to our home-camp and the camps of our relatives, we do so primarily to maintain the pulse in our bond with our family and heritage, and, of course, to assist our families materially. comfort in this respect is related to being able to belong – not to a fixed identity or a fixed place – but to an overarching community and its major concerns and unfulfilled hopes.

if the camp itself is simultaneously a magnetic and yet repellent space, which one is beholden to visit and revisit, despite the suffering which it entails, to which we belong without belonging, particular spaces within the camp further demonstrate the specificities of this ambivalent relationship.

in many respects, the regularity of queuing up at UnRWa distribution centres could be interpreted as a ritualistic act in itself, mobilizing palestinians in and towards these pre-assigned places, effectively conditioning refugees to flow towards these sites in the expectation of receiving a material reward: to prepare, to travel, to arrive, to enter, to receive, to exit, to exist. to quote my mother’s words at each and every distribution ritual: ‘Let us all queue up so we can find a place.’

The entire rule revolved around us and, for them, it was for our sake. I never believed them. hours of waiting at the UnRWa distribution centres for some flour, a few tins of tomato paste, sardines and corned beef never made us full or patient enough to come to terms with a superficial reading of Machiavelli.26 My mother would always get up very early to make sure that we received our rations quickly. All of us would take part. My mother was the one whose fingerprints were taken at every ration distribution. No signatures, since she is illiterate.27

24 See Peter Johnson, ‘Unravelling Foucault’s “Different Spaces”’, History of the Human Sciences 19/4 (2006): 75–90, at p. 77.

25 ibid., p. 81.26 The notion of a ‘superficial reading of Machiavelli’ refers, simultaneously, to the

principles that ‘the end justifies the means’ and that the ‘habituation to laws and gods makes possible the institutional life of [refugee camps], in that cooperative habits solve the collective-action problem faced by a multitude of self-ruling [refugees]’ (we have substituted ‘refugee camps’ and ‘refugees’ for the original terms ‘republics’ and ‘citizens’ respectively) (Markus Fischer, ‘Machiavelli’s Political Psychology’, Review of Politics 59/4 [1997]: 789–829, at p. 789).

27 yousif M. Qasmiyeh, ‘Rationing time’, Critical Quarterly (forthcoming). ‘Let us all queue up so we can find a place’ is the opening line of this piece.



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Despite certain family members’ ambivalence or explicit refusal to believe, it is as if palestinians have come to perceive these distribution centres metaphorically as shrines which they attend regularly to ensure their survival and well-being both as individuals and as a collective.

Regular visits to the tombstones of people’s loved ones also conspicuously and vividly mark the way in which the ritualistic connects with the religious, and vice versa. Whilst such visits to the cemetery often take place in line with particular institutionalized religious occasions (especially during Eid) and national commemorations (such as visiting the tombstones of those martyrs killed during specific wars and attacks),28 these enactments also represent a fluid and highly personal attempt to bond with one’s own history through the dead. i recall my mother once saying that ‘tombstones are the only thing that we will not be able to carry with us when we leave’.

Despite its tragic roots, her statement ironically represents a form of physical permanence which is sadly embodied by the dead while the living continue simultaneously to seek transience in the camps and permanence through a desired return to palestine. as such, while the living ‘desire’ transience and refuse their permanent situatedness in the camps – wanting to move, migrate or return to the palestinian home-land – the inevitability of leaving physical and spiritual traces through both bodies and shrines continues to force a never-ending bond with this transience. it is as if neither transience nor permanence has in this context succeeded in existing as a monolithic mode.

Renewed Beginnings

Demonstrating the extent to which this conversation is but starting, the centrality of returning to visit and revisit the cemetery has become even more pertinent since the destruction of the nahr el-Bared camp by the lebanese army in 2007: ‘the old cemetery in the camp is off-limits to civilians because the army has classified it as a military zone, thereby restricting cemetery visits to religious holidays or at the times specified by the army.’29 Refugees have responded vehemently to the interruption or explicit prohibition of their access to these spaces by demanding the opening of the cemetery,30 not only as an embodiment of memory and history but also as an intrinsically holy site within the camp. By reclaiming such burial sites and demanding unmediated access to them, palestinians have not only restated

28 lala Khalili, ‘palestinian commemoration in the Refugee camps of lebanon’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 25/1 (2005): 30–45.

29 Qassem Qassem, ‘palestinians in lebanon struggling for neutrality’, Al-Akhbar (20 June 2012), <http://english.al-akhbar.com/node/8702> (accessed 12 Aug. 2012).

30 Marcy newman, ‘Free the Refugees of nahr al-Bared’, Aljazeera (26 June 2012), <http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/06/2012624122326485838.html> (accessed 12 Aug. 2012).



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their desire to forge a strong connection with their past but also to ensure that current and future generations continue to understand and validate their present and presence through the centrality of that and those who have been lost: it is here, in the camps as a whole and in our cemeteries more specifically, that the remnants of ourselves lie.

through a purposefully subjective analysis, which has centralized personal experiences of being physically absent from and yet intimately connected with Baddawi camp, and through the invocation of a ‘third space’ and ‘third voice’, this piece has explored the complex and at times paradoxical relationship which exists between refugees, camps, cities and their respective markers of permanence and impermanence. As key destination-points for residents and seasonal visitors alike, the palestinian refugee camps in lebanon and their constitutive parts, including distribution centres, cemeteries and shrines, have been viewed from a distance and from within, demonstrating the extent to which such spaces can be seen to be replete with, rather than devoid of ‘meanings, traditions and sacrificial, ritual moments’.31 although not all of these locations would traditionally be conceptualized as religious or spiritual in nature, the relationship between the ritualistic aspects of refugees’ visits to distribution centres and those to cemeteries, tombstones and shrines, have been explored in this chapter, in order to shed light on refugees’ relationships with UnRWa, their identity, their past and their precarious present. seasonal visits from urban contexts, which can themselves be characterized as miniaturized camps (such as the Swedish estate-camps), in turn demonstrate the diverse motivations for our on-going return to our home-camps, despite the harsh conditions there. such a return constitutes a means of substantiating both our presence and absence, through pilgrimages to what can be considered to be ‘holy’ camps.

31 Marc Augé, cited in Diken, From Refugee Camps to Gated Communities, p. 91.



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inter-generational negotiations of Religious identity, Belief and practice: child, youth and adult perspectives from three cities

elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

Introduction

This chapter explores the significance of inter-generational dynamics in the context of children’s, adolescents’ and adults’ negotiation of religious identity, belief and practice through diverse processes of migration and different stages of migrants’ lifecycles. Drawing upon insights from three research projects conducted with Muslim1 Middle Eastern and North African (MENA) refugees and migrants in oxford,2 havana3 and Madrid,4 the chapter illustrates both the heterogeneity

1 Bearing in mind the diversity of its interpretations and implementations, personal and collective identification in relation to Islam was a central and often ambivalent element arising from the interviews conducted with children, youth and adults alike in all three of the research cities. Interviewees’ multiple (re)presentations of religious identification reflect not only the heterogeneity of the category ‘Muslim’ but also the range of ways in which individuals define themselves and present themselves to others in different contexts. thus interviewees often made precise references to the notion of religious practice and identity, ranging from non-committal descriptions of themselves as non-observant to a self-categorization of being a ‘bad Muslim’. For a more detailed discussion, see elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, ‘Asylum-Seekers and Refugees from the Middle east and north africa: negotiating politics, Religion and identity in the UK’, Journal of Refugee Studies 23/3 (2010): 294–314.

2 ibid.3 Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘Representing Sahrawi Refugees’ “Educational

Displacement” to Cuba: Self-Sufficient Agents or Manipulated Victims in Conflict?’, Journal of Refugee Studies 22/3 (2009): 323–50; Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘Education, Migration and internationalism: situating Muslim Middle eastern and north african students in cuba’, Journal of North African Studies 15/2 (2010): 137–55; Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,‘paradoxes of Refugees’ educational Migration: promoting Self-Sufficiency or Renewing Dependency?’, Comparative Education 47/4 (2011): 433–47.

4 gina crivello and elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘the ties that Bind: sahrawi children and the Mediation of Aid in Exile’, in Dawn Chatty (ed.), Deterritorialised Youth: Sahrawi and Afghan Refugees at the Margins of the Middle East (Oxford, 2010), pp. 85–118.



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of children’s and adults’ experiences of migration and a selection of common concerns vis-à-vis religious identity, belief and practice emerging across all three research sites. it concludes by highlighting a range of methodological approaches which can enhance our understanding of the interconnected roles of generation and religion in individual and family experiences of migration.

the chapter is based around three case-studies which centralize the heterogeneity of children’s experiences of migration in line with hemming and Madge’s proposal that multiple case-study work is ‘one of the best ways of adequately reflecting’ ‘the varied and changing contexts within which’ children and youths negotiate their position and identification with/against individual, familial and communal forms of religious identity and belonging. Multiple case-studies enable us to engage ‘with the logic of comparison, between different cases, situations and social and spatial units’.5 By exploring Muslim Mena refugees’ and migrants’ experiences in what I denominate the Asylum City (Oxford), the Educational City (Havana) and the Foster City (Madrid), the chapter explores the diversity of Muslim Mena children’s participation in individual, family-based and peer-based migration to these cities, focusing on the perceived implications of different degrees of separation from children’s and youths’ nuclear and extended families and from broader communities of faith in their contexts of origin. Whilst highlighting this diversity of experience, the chapter simultaneously identifies and analyses a range of key themes arising across all three cities, including the fear of cultural, linguistic and religious ‘loss’, concerns about the interruption of inter-generational religious continuity and a perceived threat to the family’s existence per se. While the case-studies are largely child- and youth-focused, broader research with migrants of diverse ages (ranging from 7 to 70s) and at different stages of their life-cycle is drawn upon to explore the decisions which children, adolescents and adults alike take and intend to take regarding their own and their families’ present and future(s) when negotiating diverse processes of migration, separation and cohabitation. in this way, the chapter advocates an inter-generational approach. an awareness of heterogeneous perspectives on the migration–religion nexus permits a deeper understanding of the multiple ways in which age, generation and life-stage influence, and are influenced by, migratory experiences and religious identity and identification alike.

Children, Adolescents and Adults in Three Cities: Asylum City, Educational City and Foster City

the following three mini-case-studies are based on interviews conducted by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh with 14 children and family members in the asylum cities of oxford and Manchester in the UK, by Fiddian-Qasmiyeh

5 peter J. hemming and nicola Madge, ‘Researching children, youth and Religion: identity, complexity and agency’, Childhood 19/1 (2012): 38–51, at p. 46.



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Inter-Generational Negotiations of Religious Identity, Belief and Practice 165

with over 20 refugee- and citizen-migrants and their adult ‘supervisors’ in the educational city of havana, and by crivello and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh with approximately 50 refugee children and their spanish host-families in the Foster city of Madrid. this third research project is supplemented by 50 household interviews conducted by sahrawi researchers in sahrawi refugee camps as part of the ‘Sahrawi and Afghan Refugee Children’ project (SARC).6 Taken together, these case-studies demonstrate the blurred nature of identificatory categories (asylum-seeker, refugee, migrant, student, tourist), of spaces (home and/or away, here and there, nowhere and everywhere) and of life experiences (as children, children who become adolescents, adolescents who reflect on their childhoods and anticipate their adulthood, and adults who are concerned about their own children and their children’s futures). While it is beyond the scope of this chapter to explore each of these categories, locations and experiences in detail, these case-studies illustrate the ways in which multi-case-study qualitative research may facilitate the identification of common trends as well as internal and external heterogeneity.

Refugee Children and Negotiating Religion in the Asylum City7

In our research with Muslim MENA asylum-seekers in the UK, ‘the house’ was explicitly presented as both a safe location for the family within the broader urban asylum-landscape and a site for inter-generational cultural and religious reproduction.8 in light of their uncertain legal position in oxford, four of the palestinian parents interviewed stressed their roles as providers of religious knowledge and information for their children within the house and their desire for their children to have a ‘deep’ understanding of islam, especially in the contemporary political environment on both a global and local (urban) level. Nadia, a palestinian mother of two teenaged daughters indicated that, since arriving in the UK as an asylum-seeker, she had experienced an emerging desire to learn more about islam and what she referred to as ‘the self within religion’ and to interact more with other Muslim women than before. this need to activate the origin of her religious belief and identity was directly related to her own experience of

6 For an overview of the project’s methodology, see Dawn chatty, ‘introduction’, in Chatty (ed.) Deterritorialised Youth, pp. 1–34.

7 the following section draws upon Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh, ‘Asylum-Seekers and Refugees’, pp. 305–10. All the names in this section are the pseudonyms used to protect interviewees’ anonymity and confidentiality. Between 29% and 35% of all individuals submitting asylum applications in the UK in 2006–9 originated from Middle eastern and north african countries, a large proportion of these Mena asylum-seekers being Muslim by birth and/or self-identifying as such (ibid., p. 296–7); throughout 2002 and 2008, the majority of unaccompanied minors applying for asylum in the UK were from iraq, afghanistan, iran and somalia, all of which are Muslim-majority countries.

8 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh, ‘Asylum-Seekers and Refugees’, pp. 305–7.



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displacement and alienation in her new host state. By invoking this personal bond with Islam, she not only established a firm connection with other Muslim women in oxford but also provided her daughters with access to this spiritual and social reference-point. part of the rationale behind nadia’s desire was her recognition that she is her daughters’ principal source of knowledge about Islam given her family’s multi-faceted separation from friends and family and her family’s community of origin. For her, an in-depth engagement with islam offered a productive means of equipping her daughters with the relevant knowledge to enable them to make decisions concerning their own femininity and womanhood in the UK (originally their country of asylum and now their country of nationality).

In turn, Um and Abu Omar clearly described how difficult it was to raise their four children in the UK, with Um omar in particular outlining her fears regarding their linguistic, cultural and religious losses in contexts of discrimination and violence in oxford: ‘things are hard. there is racism and i am very concerned about my children. They are attacked and insulted, both at school and on the street.’ the couple’s concern for their children’s future was palpable throughout the interview, forming the central feature of the discussion. Indeed, the significance of cultural and religious continuity featured strongly in many of the interviews with Palestinians in Oxford and Manchester, with Abu Omar in particular seeking reassurance from one of the researchers (Qasmiyeh) that his children are ‘doing alright now’ and ‘will be alright in the future’.

such concerns appeared to be related to abu omar’s sons’ reluctance to return to the family’s former ‘home’ in the palestinian refugee camps in syria, and their difficulty communicating in Arabic, both of which points were asserted by Mustafa (14) and Hussein (16) during our interview.9 They stressed that they disliked arabic-language television and preferred rap to arabic music, although the eldest, who intends to be a music producer, indicated that he might consider using arabic music ‘as a sample’ in one of his songs. however, despite this self-perceived distance from arabic culture and language, the teenaged boys eloquently discussed the need for the British public to reject mainstream stereotypes about

9 the teenagers were introduced to us by their parents, who were both present throughout the interview. We explained the aims of the project, answered their questions and obtained their informed consent in addition to that of their parents. hussein and Mustafa appeared fully relaxed in our presence, asked us several insightful questions about the project and commented on each other’s answers. For methodological and ethical issues surrounding interviewing youth in a participatory fashion, see Jo Boyden, ‘conducting Research with War-affected and Displaced children: ethics and Methods’, Cultural Survival Quarterly (Summer 2000): 70–2; Sonja Grover, ‘Why Won’t They Listen to Us? on giving power and Voice to children participating in social Research’, Childhood 11/1 (2004): 81–93; Samantha Punch, ‘Research with Children: The Same or Different from Research with adults?’, Childhood 9/3 (2002): 321–41.



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islam and concluded by stating that they were ‘proud to be Muslim’.10 this is a sense that they explained as having developed both as a response to their personal experiences of racism, on the one hand, and their friendships and identification with other Muslims from their community (unlike many of the adults interviewed as part of the research project, who did not, for a variety of reasons, have such friendships) and the supportive role played by their parents, on the other. They explained that they had experienced an ‘intensification’ (taṣā‘ud) and increased awareness of religious belief and practice since their family had applied for asylum in the UK. Such a change was identified as being a ‘conscious one’, prompted by a desire to learn more about their own religion, in part to compensate for and defend themselves from what they defined as ‘ignorant attacks’ on Islam in general and on themselves and their families as Muslims more precisely.

Personal and collective transformations in religious practice and identification may result from a multiplicity of intersecting and at times conflicting factors through diverse processes and stages of migration.11 such changes may be instigated by the political and social environment in which individuals are currently located or migrating through: their real or imagined visibility leading to their hiding or modifying (in different respects) their approaches to Islam. While individual descriptions of religiosity and practice may, of course, reflect personal feelings and preferences, they may in addition be determined not only by the identity of the listener or interviewer but also to a large extent by the national and international realities framing the topic under consideration. in this sense, interviewees can be positioned as both research participants and ‘spect-actors’ (following Boal12) of the broader political landscape: in the current context, where Muslim identity/identities and practice(s) have become so driven by politics, words may be dependent on external factors as much as, if not more than, internal ones. in this respect interviewees’ explicit and vocal disengagement from religion could be interpreted as a strategy to resist being categorized by others according to one’s religious identity, while publicly embracing religious identity and practice may equally be a mode of resistance against islamophobic attitudes and policies.13

Razak, who left Afghanistan as a 14-year-old unaccompanied minor and who at the time of our interview in 2006 was in his late-teens sharing a flat with other male Afghan asylum-seekers and refugees in Oxford, was in a situation diametrically

10 Regarding social location, see harriet Bradley, Fractured Identities: Changing Patterns of Inequality (Oxford, 1996); Hemming and Madge, ‘Researching Children, Youth and Religion’.

11 elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘When the self becomes other: Representations of gender, islam and the politics of survival in the sahrawi Refugee camps’, in Dawn chatty and Bill Findlay (eds), Dispossession and Displacement: Forced Migration in the Middle East and North Africa (Oxford, 2010), pp. 171–96.

12 augusto Boal, Games for Actors and Non-Actors, trans. A. Jackson (London and New York, 1992).

13 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and Qasmiyeh, ‘Asylum-Seekers and Refugees’, p. 303.



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opposed to that of Abu Omar’s children. When asked whether religion played a role in the way that refugees experience living in the UK, Razak awkwardly admitted that he is Muslim but does not practice. he explained:

When i lived in afghanistan, my mother used to tell me to pray. she would tell me to pray and i would. if i were at home now, with my mother, she would tell me to pray and i would. But now, here, i don’t.

Razak went on immediately to recount a story about his experiences one night when he had ‘lots to drink’, a key event which he appeared to use to represent his distance from islamic practice. the explicit juxtaposition of his absent religious practice, connected to the absence of his mother, with his account of his night out drinking is noteworthy. Qasmiyeh and I interpret this in relation to his age upon leaving afghanistan and his related dependence on, or desire for, external cultural and religious reference-points.14 In Razak’s account, his mother is identified and depicted as the transmitter of religious belief or, perhaps particularly, religious observance,15 who is now absent from his life as a result of their separation. this parallels nadia’s view of herself as the source of her daughters’ religious knowledge and practice, and Abu Omar’s concerns regarding the family’s success or failures in ensuring that his children ‘will be alright in the future’.

Throughout his interview, Razak indicated that, as an unaccompanied minor, he had lived with a British host family whose house he left when he turned 18 and that, since moving in with other Afghan young men, it was ‘difficult to decide which culture to use’. He stressed that it took him ‘about four months’ to establish what form of cultural conduct was appropriate in each context, what he could/not or should/not do, when and with whom. he referred to the correct usage of the handshake as a form of greeting, as the key cultural cue that he had failed to master. implicit throughout his interview was the notion that he was ‘too young’ when he left Afghanistan to have a firm memory or independent understanding of ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ modes of behaviour, covering all aspects of social and religious life. Unlike Um Omar’s teenage daughter, who recently approached her mother with questions about whether it was haram (prohibited in Islam) or halal (permitted) to hold hands or to kiss a boy, Razak demonstrated that he did not have a readily accessible mentor to help him determine acceptable behaviour and that he often felt both culturally and religiously ‘lost’ as a result.

14 ibid., p. 307.15 on parental transmission of religious observance, see leslie J. Francis, The Values

Debate: A Voice from the Pupils (London, 2001); William K. Kay and Leslie J. Francis, Drift from the Churches: Attitude Toward Christianity during Childhood and Adolescence (Cardiff, 1996); Scott M. Myers, ‘An Interactive Model of Religiosity Inheritance: The importance of Family context’, American Sociological Review 61/5 (1996): 858–66.



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Educational Migrants or Separated Children in Havana: Peer-Networks versus Families

in contrast with the children and adults who had sought asylum in UK cities from across the Mena region, since the 1960s over 10,000 Mena children and adolescents have left their ‘homes’ to complete their primary, secondary and tertiary studies in cuba, including refugees who left their desert-based or urban refugee-camp homes and citizens who left their families and cities or towns of origin.16 the presence of both refugee and citizen children and youth in cuba raises key questions (which cannot be explored in detail here) regarding the connection between age, agency and decision-making processes underpinning strategies of educational migration. While Mena adolescents and young adults clearly played significant roles in deciding whether to accept their secondary and tertiary level scholarships, the youngest children who travelled to study in Cuba have primarily been (approximately 4,000) Sahrawi refugee children who left their home camps as young as 11, soon discovering that they would not be able to return to their home refugee camps on an annual basis as they and their families had been informed, due to a range of material and political challenges.17 For many of these refugee children, it was over 10 years before they would see their families or home communities again, leading us to ask whether they and their families were in a position to make an informed decision regarding these children’s educational and migratory trajectories and whether, indeed, these children should be conceptualized as ‘separated children’ during their time in cuba (by virtue of being separated from their parents, siblings and broader community of origin) or as ‘educational migrants’ living with their peers in boarding schools and accompanied by sahrawi adults who acted as monitors and guardians during their time in the caribbean. While a diversity of responses was offered in this regard by students interviewed in cuba and by former graduates and their family members interviewed in the camps in algeria,18 all interviewees and their families recounted the pain of being separated at such a young age and the challenges which they believed had arisen as a result both of their separation as children and of the period spent in the educational city of havana.

one male citizen interviewee, a yemeni doctor in his early thirties who had studied in havana for six years at the time of our interview in 2006, outlined what he considered to be a ‘typical’ trajectory of a Muslim student arriving and studying in cuban educational cities such as havana:

16 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘education, Migration and internationalism’; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘paradoxes of Refugees’ educational Migration’.

17 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘education, Migration and internationalism’; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘paradoxes of Refugees’ educational Migration’.

18 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘Representing Sahrawi Refugees’ “Educational Displacement” to cuba’; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘education, Migration and internationalism’; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘paradoxes of Refugees’ educational Migration’.



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his [sic.] arrival is a massive shock. When he sees another Muslim drink, kiss a woman or go dancing, he says ‘you can’t do that! What are you doing? it’s haram to drink!’ The student who’s been here for longer will respond by saying ‘it’s normal here!’ this leads to a change in the newly arrived student, who becomes not only tolerant but also enacts these forbidden activities.19

He continued by suggesting that, after an initial shock and subsequent enactment of these forbidden activities:

they will eventually develop a deeper understanding of islam. … as they grow older, they will mature and will understand this and grow closer to islam. they will see how life works in Cuba: relationships, marriage, divorce, child-rearing … and they will return [to islam].

as a mature student broadly supportive of the educational migration of Muslim Mena students to cuba, this interviewee’s account of the development of students’ return to islam resonates with the above-cited palestinian refugees’ references to the intensification of their understanding of Islam and of the position of ‘the self within religion’ in the context of seeking asylum in the UK.

Many students reflected the pattern of returning to Islam over time when they recounted their experiences of living in cuba, although these explanations varied significantly, since the period of time spent in Cuba by the different interviewees ranged from two months to 18 years. one palestinian student from the occupied territories recounted his experience of living in cuba for over 10 years, having arrived in his early-twenties:

I admit that I became lost. … I was lost spiritually. I used to go out drinking, dancing, and even ended up marrying a Cuban woman. But that didn’t work, and we divorced. i gradually grew closer to islam again and am now a fully practising Muslim. i am at peace with myself now.

Most of the students interviewed, however, considered that doing some haram things (in the present or past) did not mean that they were no longer Muslim – they maintained a distinction between haram and halal activities, even if the content of these concepts varied from their peers’ and parents’ interpretations.

For two of the students interviewed, however, transgressions of any kind were viewed very seriously, and they did everything in their power, as they saw it, to bring the younger students in their teens and early-twenties back to Islam. in individual and group-based interviews, a reasonably high degree of tension emerged between some students over the precise meaning of religious identity and practice as educational migrants in cuba. While it was broadly recognized

19 all cuba- and Madrid-based interviews cited in this chapter have been translated from spanish by the author.



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that ‘friends and peers are integral to the lives of most children and young people’ and can ‘affect religious identity in terms of how religion is experienced … or the extent to which young people conform to social and religious norms within particular communities’,20 a young Syrian student who had lived in Cuba for five years explained to me:

I think that religion is a personal matter and you shouldn’t be judged by others for how you behave. that is a matter between you and allah. you also shouldn’t judge others – if they want to drink or have a relationship, that’s the other person’s choice. I think it’s very problematic when others judge you or when you believe you must behave in a certain way to be viewed in a positive light by others.

As demonstrated in these brief interview extracts, interviewees identified educational migrants’ age (purportedly reflecting their level of maturity) and stage of lifecycle as key factors influencing MENA children’s and youths’ experiences of separation not only from their families but also from islam whilst in the Educational City. While some accounts reflected on the personal nature of educational migrants’ religious belief and practice and their disengagement from peer pressure and external judgment, others presented a linear trajectory through which children and adolescents would become adults and complete their return to islam, effectively embodying a return migration to religious identity and practice over time.

Inter-Generational Dynamics and ‘Maturity’: From Child to Adult

a question regarding students’ plans to marry and have children led to responses which indicated some of the difficulties that students and former-students had experienced during their time in cuba. Finding a marriage partner was one issue about which unmarried male students in their twenties and thirties often felt ambivalent, claiming that ideally there should be no difference between marrying a cuban or a Middle eastern woman but tending to favour the latter nonetheless. they stated that they did not believe that marrying a Muslim woman would necessarily be better than marrying a Christian (or secular) woman, although they did feel that a common cultural understanding would be important for rearing children in the future. one reason presented by several students for not marrying a cuban woman was that Mena students do not want to remain in cuba, and they assumed that cuban women would not want to move to the Middle east. they were concerned that if they had children with a cuban woman, the mother would be responsible for raising these children, and they did not wish their children to be brought up in a non-islamic fashion and in a non-Muslim environment.

20 hemming and Madge, ‘Researching children, youth and Religion’, p. 42.



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however, in addition to palestinian students from gaza and around the Middle east who can apply for scholarships through the palestine liberation organization (and its component factions and groups), many of the students currently in Havana are the children of palestinians who themselves studied in cuba during the 1970s and 1980s and were amongst those who married cuban women during their studies. indeed, following a recent agreement developed in the early 2000s, palestinian students who married cubans are now eligible to send their children to complete their university degrees and graduate studies on the island, free of charge: this reflects the institutionalization of the trans-generational nature of this scholarship programme. one doctor who was completing his medical specialization in cuba at the time of interview reflected:

My father studied in havana in the 80s, and married my [cuban] mother while he was here. We returned to the Middle east when i was about 4 or 5, but we never went back to Cuba. When I was old enough, my father suggested that I study in Havana, as he knew about the scholarships for Palestinian-Cuban children. … i am happy and grateful to be able to study here, although it often seems that neither the cuban government, nor we ourselves, are clear if we are considered to be cubans or palestinians here.

In addition to reflecting the blurred nature of categorizations – being potentially identifiable as a Palestinian refugee or as a Cuban returnee migrant (returning from Amman to his birth-city of Havana) – this interviewee’s reference to his father suggesting that he study in Havana ‘when I was old enough’ reflects the extent to which age is associated with having the necessary maturity to travel from the Middle east to the caribbean without becoming culturally and religiously lost in the process, a key theme emerging across the other cities referred to in this chapter. he continued:

My father was happy for me to come here now that I am 24, since he knows what Cuba’s like. He wanted to be sure that I wouldn’t let myself be carried away by the Cuban ways, and we know that, for younger students, it’s harder not to be influenced, it’s harder to resist the general flow of things. For the older students, it’s easier to resist, although it’s still difficult.

the issue of maturity and age was mentioned by a range of students, yemeni, Palestinian and Sahrawi alike. When asked whether he would want his own children to study in cuba, a sahrawi graduate answered: ‘When he’s [sic] mature enough and has reason. … When he’s mature enough, he can decide for himself what he wants to do.’ all of the students interviewed agreed that arriving in cuba at a young age is very problematic, generally explaining this in terms of requiring a firm grasp of Islamic and cultural knowledge upon arrival. Referring specifically to those sahrawi children who had arrived in cuba at the age of 11 (while other MENA students have typically arrived in their late-teens and early-twenties),



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a yemeni student framed this in terms of having the tools required to ‘defend yourself’ from certain aspects of cuban society, while the above-mentioned syrian student indicated that:

if you’re 17 or 18, you can get lost easily, but when you’re older, your ideas are fixed, you won’t be dragged along by others or change your mind. If you arrive when you’re 11, you lived as an arab for 11 years, but then you become cuban while you’re here. you lose your arabness. it’s not good to come here so young.

importantly, losing one’s ‘arabness’ and developing the hybrid identity which is referred to in Cuba and in the Sahrawi camps alike as becoming a ‘Cubarawi’ (Cubano + Saharawi) has not been equally evaluated for male and female sahrawi youth who became educational migrants in cuba and returned to live and work in their Algerian-based refugee camp homes following graduation.21 While over 800 sahrawi girls studied in cuba in the 1980s and 1990s, all of my interviewees systematically prioritized sons, rather than daughters, having the possibility of following ‘in their father’s footsteps’.22 More specifically, reflecting on the experiences of a small minority of young sahrawi women who entered into relationships whilst in cuba and returned to their refugee camp homes pregnant,23 several Palestinian and Syrian students reflected that ‘it is not surprising that girls who arrived at such a young age should act like the Cuban women who surrounded them. it’s not really their fault.’ While my female sahrawi refugee interviewees in the algerian-based refugee camps largely celebrated the opportunities which studying in cuba had offered them, they nonetheless recognized that without adult Sahrawi female role-models in Cuba, as girls they had found it difficult to become ‘traditional sahrawi women’ and had rather became ‘cubarawi women’.24

21 the cuban scholarship programme is premised upon the return of all students upon graduation to maximize self-sufficiency in students’ contexts of origin: work and residence permits are not available for foreign graduates in havana, and all sahrawi youth have left cuba upon graduation, returning to the refugee camps accordingly. While the majority of graduates used to remain in the camps, since the mid-2000s an increasing proportion of young men and women who studied in Cuba have left the camps in order to work in and send remittances from Spain (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘Paradoxes of Refugees’ Educational Migration’).

22 on the gendered nature of palestinian and sahrawi educational migration to cuba, see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘education, Migration and internationalism’; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘paradoxes of Refugees’ educational Migration’.

23 as indicated above, all sahrawi male and female students have eventually returned to the refugee camps. on the treatment of unmarried pregnant women returning to the camps, see elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘concealing Violence against Women in the sahrawi Refugee camps: the politicisation of Victimhood’, in hannah Bradby and gillian Lewando-Hundt (eds), Global Perspectives on War, Gender and Health: The Sociology and Anthropology of Suffering (Farnham, 2010), pp. 99–110.

24 Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘Representing Sahrawi Refugees’ “Educational Displacement” to cuba’, pp. 343–4.



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Part-Time Child Migrants in Foster Cities

concerns regarding maturity and being ‘old enough’ to ‘defend yourself’ from belief systems and practices perceived to challenge familial and communal religious codes emerge even more clearly in the final case-study which pertains to the experiences of the more than 10,000 sahrawi refugee children aged between 8 and 12 who leave their desert camps every year to spend two months in Foster cities in spain as part of the holidays in peace programme.25 in this context of short-term migration from their algerian-based refugee-camp homes to spanish cities such as Madrid, these children are neither asylum-seekers, as in the case of Razak and other unaccompanied minors in the UK, nor are they long-term students, as in the case of Mena children and adolescents in havana. Rather, they are simultaneously refugee children, foster children and tourists temporarily hosted by spanish families.26

While such summer hosting arrangements grant sahrawi children and their camp-based families access to numerous services (including health care and educational opportunities) and material goods (including food, money, medicine and toys),27 children and family members in the camps are equally aware of the challenges which may emerge when young children leave their families and are individually hosted by spanish families:28

The children go when they are very young and they do not know what they are seeing. they see customs that are not sahrawi traditions, and they try to copy these. this is the negative aspect.29

adults’ concerns regarding sahrawi children’s exposure to ‘customs that are not sahrawi traditions’ regularly emerged throughout my and saRc interviews, reflecting established concerns about the challenges of ensuring cultural and religious continuity in contexts of children’s and youths’ migration to Foster cities

25 crivello and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘the ties that Bind’.26 Unlike Razak’s British foster family, which fosters unaccompanied asylum-seeking

children until the age of 18, the holidays in peace programme sees thousands of sahrawi children hosted for 2 or 3 months every year, with long-lasting bonds often being created between the spanish and sahrawi families. spanish families regularly visit ‘their’ children in the algerian based refugee camps and at times offer longer-term fostering arrangements to enable these children to complete their secondary and tertiary studies in spain (see Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘When the self becomes other’.

27 crivello and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘the ties that Bind’.28 ibid.; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘When the self becomes other’; Fiddian-Qasmiyeh,

‘Transnational Abductions and Transnational Jurisdictions? The Politics of “Protecting” Female Muslim Refugees in spain’, Gender, Place and Culture 36/5, 875–95.

29 a 25-year-old sahrawi female saRc interviewee, cited in crivello and Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘the ties that Bind’, pp. 110–11.



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and Educational Cities alike. With particular reference to her priorities for Sahrawi refugee youth both in the camps and abroad, a 79-year-old woman interviewed by the saRc team in the camps recommended:

[they] should not give up their religion, [they should] abide by the beliefs and convictions of the older generations and not surrender. We advise them to follow their islamic religion, to avoid schisms among themselves, to unite hand in hand.

equally, a 40-year-old female saRc interviewee expressed her anxieties about the impact of migration on the transmission of religious belief and practice to the next generation:

I wish that this new generation will keep the good qualities of the Sahrawi people, that they keep their religion and the Sahrawi customs, their generosity, and i hope that the new generation will protect these. courage, generosity and justice are good morals, and for protecting our pledge for liberation and the believers if they pledge something, they keep it.

importantly, as indicated by a number of quotations included above from oxford and havana, such concerns are not solely held by the older generations. Young men and women in their teens, twenties and thirties also reflect on their hopes and fears for themselves, their peers and the younger generations. While it may indeed be the case that the younger children ‘do not know what they are seeing’, some children become acutely aware of cultural and religious differences and may decide to reject alien conventions. a 17-year-old girl interviewed in the 27 February refugee camp by the SARC interview team reflected on her experiences of travelling to spanish Foster cities as a child:

I was in Spain many times, but I do not like Spain. The people have very different customs, they do not respect their elders, and they go out without any clothes on, naked [laughs]. … That is very difficult for the Sahrawis to do. I was shocked when I was in Spain, and since then I refused to go back.30

this negotiation of customs and practices and certain children’s rejection of ‘what they are seeing’ parallel the interviewees in havana who indicated that, while they might have accepted certain alternative customs, they had nonetheless maintained a distinction between what they considered to be halal and haram and considered themselves to be Muslim, even if their colleagues and parents did not agree with the precise content of these categories.

30 cited in Dawn chatty, elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh and gina crivello, ‘identity With/Out Territory: Sahrawi Refugee Youth in Transnational Space’, in Chatty (ed.), Deterritorialised Youth, pp. 37–84, at p. 66.



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Conclusions

This chapter has demonstrated the benefits of a qualitative multiple case-study approach in exploring the significance of age, generation and lifecycle in relation to the religion–migration nexus. the case-studies demonstrate the variety of statuses and categories which children, adolescents and their families from the Mena region may embody and be forced to accept, through different processes and stages of migration, including a range of in-between statuses and identities. these include the process of ‘becoming’ Muslim adolescents and adults whilst separated from immediate families and communities of origin and having to respond to a range of externally provided cultural and religious reference-points. Whilst demonstrating both internal and external heterogeneity within and across cases, these multiple case-studies simultaneously illustrate the extent to which individual, family-, peer- and foster-based migratory strategies towards these diverse city contexts may nonetheless be characterized by similarities and common concerns, including fears of losing cultural and religious identities and identifications, of interrupting religious continuity and even the continuity of the family and community of origin itself.

By drawing on qualitative research with children, adolescents and adults in these diverse cities, this chapter has underlined the significance of change and continuity over time and space with specific reference to different ages and stages of migrants’ lifecycles and diverse locations. Rather than viewing children or adults in isolation or focusing solely on the past, present or future, it has provided reflections on on-going experiences of migration, analyses of former child-migrants’ retrospective and prospective decision-making processes regarding migration, marriage and childrearing and inter-generational concerns regarding the present and future. in combining these diverse perspectives, it becomes apparent that child, youth and adult reflections on the dangers of migration are often paralleled by the recognition that children and adolescents often negotiate the meaning and content of religious identity and practice, despite, or perhaps due to, their separation from their communities of origin.

an analysis of inter-generational dynamics underpinning, surrounding and emerging throughout the migratory process requires detailed research not only with child migrants themselves, but also with former child-migrants who are now young adults, as well as with birth-families, host-families and members of their broader communities at ‘home’ and ‘away’. such an approach provides the foundations for child-centred analyses of the development of religious identity31 as a means of understanding how children and adolescents experience and interpret processes of migration but also illustrates the importance of identifying, comparing and contrasting diverse perspectives on the ways in which child migrants and refugees become adults in contexts of migration and the position which religious identity and practice may or may not play in these processes.

31 hemming and Madge, ‘Researching children, youth and Religion’.

Inter-Generational Negotiations of Religious Identity, Belief and Practice: Child, youth and adult...

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