Remaking Islam in African Portugal

"Resonant throughout Remaking Islam in African Portugal, the ethnographer's deeply informed voice is the one we ourselves need to hear, as we, too, face unprecedented, once hardly imaginable predicaments of closeness and distancing in our troubled times. With the benefit of fieldwork over decades across town and country in Guinea-Bissau and in Portugal's capital, Lisbon, and speaking with great intimacy among immigrant Muslim diasporics, Michelle Johnson asks and answers the salient question. How do originally rural African diasporics in a European capital city navigate their unprecedented predicaments meaningfully through the controversial, tentative and yet, with great passion, intentionally faithful re-creation of Islam in the midst of complex, puzzling and unexpected cultural and social diversity? Outstanding, in my view as an ethnographer of divination, is Johnson's chapter on 'Reversals of Fortune,' in which she explores the surprising ambiguities and uncertainties in the quest for explanation of suffering and for healing with Muslim and non-Muslim consultants as diviners and healers."

~Richard Werbner, author of Divination's Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said

"The gripping narratives and nuanced interpretation found in Michelle Johnson's Remaking Islam in African Portugal demonstrates the considerable intellectual fruits of taking a slower more narratively contoured approach to ethnographic research and writing. Twenty years in the making, this book presents important transnational perspectives on ritual practices, identity formation, and gender and generational relations. In so doing Remaking Islam in African Portugal not only reconfigures our knowledge of changing religious conceptions and practices in diasporic contexts, but also extends and refines our comprehension of the human condition. Given the depth of its analytical insights and the grace of its presentation, this is a work that will be read, savored, and debated for many years to come."

~Paul Stoller, author of Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well Being in the World

"Written with great sensitivity and reflexivity, Remaking Islam in African Portugal demonstrates that 'Religious processes are at the core of migratory practices and . . . migration is at the heart of religious issues.' This beautifully written book reveals how the tension between the umma of global Islam and the embodied Islamic practices of specific Mandinga and Fula ethnicities plays out in a proliferation of 'ethnic' mosques in Lisbon and increasing collaboration between mosques and cultural clubs. In new diasporic sites, Guinean men and women use food, naming, mobile phones, and lifecycle rituals to rethink the variable relationships among religion and personhood for men and women, boys and girls in Lisbon and its exburbs. This book is a refreshing welcome addition to scholarly conversations on African diasporas and struggles over belonging."

~Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Broom Professor of Anthropology and Social Demography, Carleton College

"Michelle C. Johnson's Remaking Islam in African Portugal presents a detailed, impressive, and eloquent ethnographic account of the global circulation of Muslims from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal and beyond. The book opens with a discussion of Mandinga Islamic rituals of initiation, instruction, and burial in the African context and their gradual diffusion abroad. The analysis of the impact of  migrants' international contacts and influences from Mecca to Europe and beyond is revelatory and demonstrates how religious ideologies merge with local cultural understandings that transform with global movement and intensive contacts with competing versions of Islam. The lifestyles and livelihoods of Guinean migrants to Portugal morph over time and space in unexpected ways, blazing new trails and avenues for acculturation and adjustment across transnational  borders and networks. This extensive and meticulous ethnographic and comparative study contributes significantly to the evidence about how new social relations and expressions of identity emerge in transnational religious communities. The book is a 'must read' for scholars of diasporic religious change and the global implantation of Islamic communities in a worldwide cultural and economic nexus."

~Bennetta Jules-Rosette, Director, African and African-American Studies Research Center, University of California, San Diego

"Michelle Johnson's new book, Remaking Islam in African Portugal: Lisbon—Mecca—Bissau, is a must-read for everyone interested in the anthropology of Islam, migrations, Mandé peoples or the multicultural urban settings of contemporary European metropolis, boiling with a cultural mesh made of different layers of migrants, tourists and residents sharing the same space. Lisbon is such a city and at his core, in Rossio, migrants from Guinea-Bissau seat, chat and engage in commercial activities. Among them stand the Mandinga, the proud descendants of the first Islamic conquerors of the Senegambia region in West Africa back in the 15th century. Michelle Johnson has been studying Mandinga culture since the 1990s, and follows her friends from Guinea-Bissau to Lisbon in their struggle to reaffirm their ethnic identity and their idea of a global Islam. Being a Muslim in a migrant context and transmitting cultural values to the next generations is an enterprise expressed in numerous ritualized situations. These rituals, from naming a baby to the ultimate step in a Muslim life, the pilgrimage to Mecca, become the anchors of Johnson' descriptions of Mandinga challenges and expectations in a migrant context. This is a wonderful ethnography of the demands and motivations of Mandinga migrants in Lisbon written in the tradition of other great anthropologists—from Malinowski to Victor Turner to Paul Stoller—that, like Johnson, are also talented novelists. A book that is both a pleasure to read and a deep dive into Muslim Mandinga culture."

~Clara Carvalho, CEI-IUL, Center for International Studies

"This insightful ethnographic narrative about the religious challenges of Muslim women from Guinea-Bissau in Lisbon deals with religion, gender and generations in a globalised world. While rooted in profound insights about the homeland, it spells out how Guinean women renegotiate ethnicity and religious identity."

~Jónína Einarsdóttir, University of Iceland

"Michelle C. Johnson's extensively researched, and beautifully written, Remaking Islam in African Portugal is a valuable and significant contribution to the growing body of scholarship on Islam and the contemporary African diaspora in the United States and Europe. Her powerful and eloquently rendered ethnographic descriptions and provocative analysis of the ways in which Guinean Muslims remake ritual practices to grapple with dissonant visions of their taken-for-granted understanding of Islamic knowledge in a new context makes this book an important contribution and an essential read for those interested in the production of Islamic knowledge in diaspora settings in the 21st century. "

~JoAnn D'Alisera, University of Arkansas

"Remaking Islam in African Portugal highlights what being Muslim means in urban Europe and how Guinean migrants' relationships to their ritual practices must change as they remake themselves and their religion."

~Portuguese American Journal

"Grounded in rich fieldwork in both Guinea-Bissau and Portugal conducted across 20 years, this book is an ethnographer's dream. Oozing with gorgeous ethnographic details, the book at the same time tackles all the issues one could hope to think about concerning West African Muslims' lives in Europe. Challenges of racism. Challenges of Islamophobia. Challenges by mainstream Muslims of heterodox practices. All these big-picture issues frame the stories Michelle Johnson exquisitely tells."

~Alma Gottlieb, AlmaGottlieb.com