ISLAM IN OUR MIDST

American and global audiences have been inundated with stereotypes and misperceptions about Islam, particularly since 9/11. There is an urgent need for a better and more nuanced window onto the worlds of Muslims in the West. In this international collaboration, Trinity College in Hartford, CT and Visual Art in Trinidad and Tobago is using this website as a platform to confront western anxieties about Islam, Islam in Our Midst addresses important themes about Islam and modernity—such as multiculturalism and Muslim-non Muslim relations, the challenges of race, and gender diversity within Muslim communities, and the struggles Muslims living in Muslim minority societies face in creating Muslim Identity and belonging in a world that is increasingly hostile toward the faith.  By focusing on the rich and diverse traditions of Islam in the twin-island Caribbean nation of Trinidad and Tobago, Islam in Our Midst shifts attention away from the United States. However, the lessons derived from exploring Islam in Trinidad and Tobago are relevant to a broader audience and for other multicultural societies where Muslims and non-Muslims live side by side.

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Why Islam in Diaspora?  

Islam in diaspora captures the contemporary challenges to Muslims and Muslim communities seeking to situate themselves vis-a-vis others. Immigration and diaspora bring diverse populations together in new social environments, generating challenges around interculturalism (interaction and exchange among “culturally distinct” groups) and multiculturalism (attempts to shape how “culturally distinct” groups learn about and interact with each other).  It also presents the challenge of how to retain or preserve identities around heritage culture or traditions and how to accommodate the new.  While religious identities and practice have remained salient in modern, post-secular societies, Robert Putnam and others have questioned the potentially divisive impact of religious (and immigrant) diversities on the fabric of community life.  Still they argue that under the right conditions supporting equality and cooperation rather than seeing one religious faith(or culture) as exclusively correct, contact across diverse groups can increase acceptance of others.

 

            The diaspora experience(or life outside perceived homelands) generates new ways of seeing one’s traditions and new conditions for redeploying or revising it, as those in diaspora create new identities and conceptions of the self.  Today many Muslims (observant or not), wedged between the twin global pressures of increasing Islamophobia on the one hand and the revival of Islamic traditions that encourage conformity in belief and practice, are confronting new challenges in their interaction with non-Muslims and in the creation of spaces of identity and belonging for themselves. While people may find it difficult to understand how reengaging “tradition” (especially religious tradition) can hold appeal for individuals in what has been anointed a post secular age, turning to one’s religious or cultural traditions or communities (in what some have called “re-traditionalization”) can provide a moral compass and “imagined communities” of support in local contexts in which they may find themselves otherwise excluded. Establishing global connections or reference points through Islamic heritage can provide new ways of positioning oneself and one’s community.

 

            However, Muslim groups themselves, especially in diaspora, are also confronted with an increasingly culturally and ethnically diverse ummah(Muslim community). In the late 20th century, the Moroccan sociologist Fatima Mernissi suggested that gender and diversity (which may include the cultural, racial and generational) posed the biggest challenges to Islam (and the Muslim “establishment”).  Re-engagement with “Heritage Islam” (or the believers’ conscious reassessment of authoritative religious traditions and texts in order to define and create their relationship to this heritage) is especially complicated for women, whose behavior and practices have become emblematic of their communities, as they struggle for subjecthood and agency.

 

            Muslim women can find themselves at the interstices where non-Muslims’ stereotypes of the “Muslim woman” converge with insiders’ orthodox notions of pious women’s modesty, dress, and behavior. While many Muslim women embrace ‘re-traditionalization’ of their lives and find sources of empowerment and status through conforming to ideals of modest life, other practicing women, especially younger generations, approach the new piety from what Bayat has called a post-Islamic perspective, which merges commitment to individual rights with faith practices in an Islam that is itself increasingly secularized through the focus on individual practice.  This has contributed to the emergence of growing contestation over how to define what are “cultural traditions” (that may have been accommodated to a multicultural context) versus religiously sanctioned traditions in Islamic practice.

 

            Why Islam in Trinidad?

Until recently we did not pay much attention to Muslims living next door, in the Caribbean and Latin America.  However some of the fastest growing Muslim communities (primarily through conversion and immigration) are located in this region. While Muslim diaspora communities have been resident for more than 150 years, Trinidad and Tobago presents a microcosm of contemporary Muslim diversity in diaspora as well as the many challenges facing Muslims in fashioning their identities and relationships with non Muslims.  And, while the nation has already confronted many of the political challenges surrounding revival and revitalization of the faith—the assassination of an Ahmadiyya missionary in 1985, an attempted coup d’etat by the Jamaat al Muslimeen in 1990, an hijab incident in 1996, and Muslims joining ISIS since 2014, Muslim citizens remain an integral part of intercommunity life. Imagine seeing front-page greetings to Muslims from the Prime Minister on the occasion of EidulFitr (marking the end of Ramadan).

 

            Trinidad and Tobago is a decidedly multicultural, Muslim minority (6-8%), democratic, postcolonial society, where the majority of citizens arrived through the African and South Asian diasporas more than 150 years ago. Maintaining British legal tradition, some would say, affords Muslim women legal autonomy and the luxury of exploring religious teachings and fashioning their own relationship to their religion.  In significant ways, Trinidadian multiculturalism and interculturalism are distinct contrast to that of other diverse societies with Muslim minorities. For one thing, national holidays recognize a variety of religious celebrations (from Christmas to Diwali and EidulFitr) and there is a significant degree of historical sociability (in the form of interaction and intermarriage) among Muslims and non-Muslims as reflected in the life stories of older Trinbagonian Muslims. Thus the reverberations of 9/11 and the “war on terror” have had a more muted impact on Muslim-non Muslim relations.  Yet, the new religious imaginaries, fostered by re-engagement with a globalized Islam and the influences of conservative missionary movements fostering Islamic education have also challenged the historical fluidity of religious boundaries and the hybridity or creolization of cultural forms, reinforcing religious exclusion, and encouraging practices such as full face veiling for women. At the same time they have accentuated the importance of racial justice and inclusion and women’s leadership within Muslim communities.

 

            The translocal circulation of missionaries and scholars (referred to as circuits of piety) has been central to the emergence of contemporary diaspora Islam and has contributed to the creation the different Muslim organizations and affiliations in Trinidad and Tobago. These circuits of piety have also been instrumental in the revivalist movement to re-engage with Islamic heritage. By the early 19th century, the presence of Islam in Trinidad had been established through the arrival of slaves from Africa (who were not allowed to practice their religion. With the arrival of indentured labor from South Asia, however, more formal presence of Islam was established. From the end of the 19th century until the present sheikhs and maulanas have circulated between Trinidad and centers of learning in South Asia, Guyana, North America, and the Middle East giving rise to major Sunni umbrella organizations (such as the Trinidad Muslim League (TML), the Anjuman Sunnat-ul-Jamaat Association, (ASJA) the Tackveeyatul Islamic Association (TIA) and Ahmadiyya groups (whose Islamic identity is challenged). Following the ascent of the black power movement and the conversion (or reversion) of Afro-Trinidadians to Islam, the Shia Mission, the Nation of Islam, and various independent Sunni organizations such as the Islamic Resource Society were created. The latter organizations reflect the informal racial segregation of what should be (in the spirit of Islam) integrated masjids and this has given rise to some tension and conflict within the Trinidadian Muslim ummah and has heightened the struggle over ridding faith practices of cultural traditions and the effects of creolization (sometimes called “de-creolization”), which is sometimes described as the residuals of Hindu influence in South Asian Islam.

 

            To some extent the various Islamic organizations are also differentiated by their views on women and gender relationships.  For example, “nonconformists” like the original TML organization have had women on their highest boards since their founding, and men and women easily interact with each other in most activities, although many women are now in hijab. The Ahmadiyya give adamant support to women’s education, professional development, and gender equality. While the Islamic Resource Society deliberately works to counter what is perceived as Arab patriarchal traditions in Islam, there are no women at the highest administrative level of this group and women signify their membership by wearing hijab. ASJA women include many highly educated professionals and well-heeled members but ASJA maintains separate male and female organizations and a sense of “modest decorum” when it comes to male and female interaction. Even though more of the highest community leadership positions are still held by men, women are important members of these religious congregations.  Women in most (but not all) of the Islamic groups in Trinidad do maintain women’s organizations that are active in charity and community service.

 

            There have been persistent questions about the consequences of new “faith knowledge” and the search for “authenticity” in religious practice for both women’s authority and agency and for relationships between ethnic and religious groups in multicultural and postcolonial contexts. In Trinidad, cultural debate over religious practice and belief is evident in several examples of the renegotiation of relationships inside and outside the ummah—such as the struggles among competing women’s organizations within a single masjid as women’s traditional leadership roles focused on charity and community work are transformed by young women whose authority and status is bolstered by certification in Islamic knowledge from Islamic schools and who are engaging in the dawa of teaching “correct” knowledge to others. It is also evident in the reluctance of some Muslims to visit the homes of non-Muslim friends and family during their religious observances as well as in the recent activities of young Muslims around the “revival of the ummah” to achieve some unity across Muslim organizations and traditions—in what is a potential renegotiation of the flexible and fluid relationships that exists between Muslims and non-Muslims in Trinidad and Tobago.

 

            As westerners struggle to understand Islam in their midst, seemingly everywhere around them, this film series and related materials address many of the public concerns and questions about Muslims by following the story of Muslims living in Trinidad and Tobago, as they face the challenges of creating identities in the narrow space between global fear of Islam and community pressures to express religious identification in ways that reflect or conform to notions of "Heritage Islam”. In this series we also invite the audience to examine more closely the complexities of belonging and identity, racial and religious diversity and gender in a multicultural society. The story of Islam in this twin island nation demonstrates how Islamic identity is negotiated and how Muslims continue to co-exist within the fabric of the wider society despite periodic tensions and shifting relationships at different historical moments.