Religion and Migration: Stories from African Lisbon

Scholars of migration have relied primarily on political and economic frameworks for understanding people’s motivations for migration and the daily lives and experiences of migrants. Far fewer have examined religion’s role in the migration process: How do religious beliefs, practices, and identities inform the decision to migrate, shape migrants’ lives, and orient (and re-orient) migrants’ relationships to themselves and others across homeland and host country? In this paper, I explore the religious lives of Muslim migrants from Guinea-Bissau living in Lisbon, Portugal. In highlighting stories from transnational anthropological fieldwork that I began in the late 1990s and have continued to the present, I highlight the shifting nature of diaspora and belonging as Guinean Muslim migrants remake themselves and their faith in Europe. In Lisbon, they encounter two new diasporas: one formed by migrants from Portugal’s other former African colonies and another that includes Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia. Members of this latter group have presented Guineans with a new model of Islam and a novel way of thinking about religion. I show that belonging to – and exclusion from – these two new diasporas have led Guineans in Lisbon to question and revise what it means to be an ethnic person (Fula or Mandinga) and practice a global religion. This process is sparking debates over ritual practices and highlighting tensions and divisions along gender and generational lines. I argue that religion is key to understanding migration as Guinean Muslims remake themselves and their faith in African Lisbon.