Homeland and Heartland: Conceptualizing the “Muslim” “Diaspora”

Abstract

Arguing for more conceptual specifi city regarding the term “Muslim diaspora,” this article identifi es two confl ation problems in the scholarship on Muslim immigrants. First, the immigrants’ “Muslimness,” which refers to the signifi ers, thought-processes, discourses, and actions that others perceive to be associated with Islam, is often confl ated with the immigrants being “Muslims”—i.e., members of a discrete, bounded group supposedly diff erent from non-Muslims. Second, Muslims’ transnational engagements—meaning, their cross-border ties between exclusively the sending and receiving countries—are often confl ated as being diasporic—connections targeted towards other Muslims abroad motivated by a sense of religious solidarity. Consequently, researchers have been largely unable to distinguish Muslims’ religious performance from an ethnic one and have taken Muslims’ immigrant transnationalism as evidence of an emerging “Muslim” “diasporic” consciousness. This article parses existing scholarship on Muslim immigrants in the West and off ers a new way of conceptualizing “Muslim diaspora” to move past these ambiguities. It off ers the concept of “heartland”—distinct from immigrants’ “homeland”—to better distinguish Muslims’ religion-based diasporic expressions from their ethnicity based transnational ones