As we introduce the five articles in the second part of the Hau special section on “Movement, faith, and home in Muslim communities in the diaspora,” the timeliness, and continued relevance—but also our immediate powerlessness—in simply documenting, understanding, and analyzing concepts of home and home-making and all this entails for Muslims who have left their homes or cannot be fully at home in their home places is made grimly clear to us in this seventh month (as we write) of the latest war in Gaza. Over thirty-four thousand Palestinians, the majority women and children, have been killed, tens of thousands more physically injured, and some eighty percent of the country’s population has been displaced (Norwegian Refugee Council 2023). The toll the war has taken on children is particularly high. According to a recent article in The Lancet over half of all children in Gaza had PTSD even before this latest conflict (Taha et al. 2024). The situation has considerably worsened since October 2023, as UNICEF State of Palestine Chief of Communication Jonathan Crickx reported in February 2024: “Before this war, UNICEF was considering that more than 500,000 children were already in need of Mental Health and Psychosocial support in the Gaza Strip. Today, we estimate that almost all children are in need of MHPSS, more than 1 million children” (UNICEF 2024).

The infrastructure of Gaza has been destroyed, hospitals and schools have been razed to the ground, and basic amenities no longer function (World Bank, European Union, and United Nations 2024). The WHO reports that children are dying from starvation (Wright 2024). Even if survivors could return to their neighborhoods, they would find no homes to return to. Before this latest conflict almost seventy percent of Gazans were refugees and some sixty-five percent were under the age of twenty-five (UNWRA 2023). As of today, over one and a half million people, more than half the population of Gaza, have again been displaced and there are reports that the Egyptian authorities are building a high-security walled enclosure to contain refugees who might have no option but to flee Gaza altogether in the coming days or weeks (Michealson 2024). In 2022 Human Rights Watch described Gaza as an “open-air prison” (Human Rights Watch 2022) and at this point in time the likelihood is that the people of Gaza, many already refugees, may be displaced from one open-air prison to another (UNWRA 2023). What has struck us, however, both reading and watching available media and speaking with colleagues and friends who have more direct knowledge of conditions in Gaza, is how, no matter how difficult the material conditions are and continue to be, families are doing all they can to stay together, to reproduce and maintain the semblance and routines of home, to bury their dead with as much dignity as possible, and to provide as secure a space as is possible to family members in these most extreme of conditions. Home is something everyone, even in the most dire of circumstances, carries with them, an imaginary of belonging even when the material conditions do not make it possible to recreate home in a new place as one would wish to.

And the current desperate plight of the citizens of Gaza cannot but lead us back to a consideration of (forced) movement, migration, and exile which is often conceptualized by Muslims as hijra, a historico-religious event deeply ingrained in the religious sense-making many of our interlocutors use to understand, reproduce, and in some cases to accept, their homes away from home in the diaspora (Fadil, Moors, and Arnaut 2021). In this special section Marzia Balzani, Liza Dumovich, and Nina ter Laan explicitly engage with their interlocutors’ understandings and use of the term “hijra” (in Dumovich’s case as hicret), and in their article Humayun Kabir and Keiko Sakurai discuss the marginalization of the muhajir (migrants forced to flee because of their faith) in Bangladesh. Whether the hijra is chosen (in the case of Dumovich’s interlocutors, at least in the period before 2018 and the Turkish government’s anti-Gülen movement measures) or forced (for many in the cases of Balzani, and Kabir and Sakurai), hijra serves as a resource to draw on, allowing people to find meaning and purpose in establishing homes in new places even when the decision to move may have been imposed rather than chosen. And in all cases, making home also means establishing places of collective worship and in some instances also a place from which to proselytize, which is one of the reasons for Muslims to accept life as a minority faith group in a non-Muslim land in the dār al-harb (abode of war) (Balzani, Dumovich, this issue).

Home-making requires an effortful organization of space and place, an ordering that makes community possible, as well as the capacity to conceptualize and materialize home from whatever one has and can draw on in the diaspora. Memory, of what one has left behind, often combined with nostalgia felt as loss and longing (Seremetakis 1994), are resources mined for home-making in the present and for the future. Ter Laan’s interlocutors draw on memory and affect to make good Muslim homes in Morocco, taking from their home countries some elements, such as a taste for understated furniture and particular foods, while selectively choosing from their new home aspects which align with their understanding of what it means to be a good Muslim rather than what they perceive to be the less worthy culturally-inflected Moroccan Muslim way of life and home-making. In the process they make homes which are neither those that were left behind in Europe, nor entirely Moroccan. And here the creativity and work that is required to make and maintain home becomes apparent. Home-making, sense-making and the embodied affective nature of this never-finished enterprise require constant effort, an intellectual as well as material flexibility to revise and adapt when needed, and the production of narratives that can continue to serve and offer both the personal and social meanings that make it possible to carry on and even seek to improve on existing circumstances (Douglas 1991; Lefort 2022).

Home is where the past, present, and future come together; in response to the present, the past is a resource which is explanatory, contextualizing and also always new, available to guide particular courses of action, particular ways of making sense of the present and shaping the future, often in ways that suggest hope, order, meaning. Such pasts, however, are not infinitely open and some constraints, some limits to how the past can be used as a resource in the present, are inevitable. Balzani and Kabir and Sakurai in particular make the case for connecting the position, choices, and home-making strategies of their interlocutors in the present with their historical past migrations and the narratives that come from these. For both the Ahmadiyya studied by Balzani and the Shia in Kabir and Sakurai’s article, migration was not always chosen but imposed, often in difficult circumstances. This shared history of struggle at the level of individuals is reimagined and reexperienced as part of a divine plan, a necessary stage transforming what might otherwise be a capricious political event or series of events into an ordered collective narrative that can be turned to one’s advantage, that can make sense of suffering and so render it bearable, even positive. One never really leaves a home behind, it is simply experienced differently and reincorporated into new homes in new places.

Without wishing to repeat what we have already stated in our introduction to the first part of this special section (Hau 14 [1]), here we briefly note the importance of the relational aspects of home-making (Strathern 2020), that home extends from the intimate spaces of a family to incorporate the strategic and effortful work required to make neighborhoods and communities home spaces. The labor required to establish places of worship, to access foods from home, to provide acceptable education for children, all of this has to be worked for. In Europe, in a context where Muslims are often viewed with suspicion (Balzani, Mapril) home-making, and in particular making a visible home through the construction of mosques and Islamic centers requires careful negotiation, and for minority Muslim communities such as the Shia in a majority Sunni Muslim state, it may mean having to seek alliances further afield to establish home locally in the face of local hostilities and opposition (Kabir and Sakurai). José Mapril’s work in Lisbon, the capital of Portugal, demonstrates the value of fieldwork which has been ongoing for more than two decades and the attention to the details of the shifts in political positioning of Muslims in Europe as they try to establish community places of worship that this makes possible. His work, careful to contextualize negotiations, the responses to moral panics, and the place, or lack of it, of Muslims in contemporary Europe has much to tell us about how complex making place and establishing home as a minority faith group can be.

In the introduction to the first part of the special section, we briefly discussed the articles featured in that issue of Hau to highlight the interconnections across the articles and cases presented as well as to show where and why they differed. The articles included in the first part of were: “Home in exile: Palestinianness as moral subjunctive destination,” by Leonardo Schiocchet; “Can the umma replace the nation? Salafism, home-making and the territorial nation-state,” by Zoltan Pall; “The Egyptian communities in Milan: Ideas of home, home-making, and care at the time of COVID-19,” by Marta Scaglioni and Eslam ElBahlawan; “Facets of charity: Muslim ethics, postcolonial dynamics and community-making in Portugal,” by Raquel Carvalheira; and “‘Today, we teach the kids where we are from’: Event filmmaking and diasporic home-making among Indian Muslims in North America,” by Sanderien Verstappen. In this introduction to the second part of the special section, we present the remaining articles, by Marzia Balzani, Liza Dumovich, Humayun Kabir and Keiko Sakurai, Nina ter Laan, and José Mapril. While we focus here on this latter set of articles, we note parallels and connections across the two parts of the section and encourage readers to consider them together. Although we have not particularly highlighted it, the role of women in home-making, for example, is as crucial in Scaglioni and ElBahlawan (preceding issue) as it is in ter Laan (this issue) and the importance of class, access to forms of social mobility and the value of social dignity are explicitly raised in both Schiocchet (preceding issue) and ter Laan (this issue).

In this issue of Hau we begin with “Diaspora as home: The global community of Ahmadiyya Muslims,” where Marzia Balzani addresses how Ahmadiyya notions of home as a moral location and refuge, a place one comes to after struggle, is possible only through an initial movement away from home experienced always as loss. For the Ahmadis this loss, necessitating displacement and the subsequent obligation to reestablish a home in new lands, is both a beginning and an end. Migration and exile mark the very beginning of Islam and the loss of home counts among the trials of the Ahmadi Promised Messiah. Migration, exile, and loss of home have also encompassed, since 1984, the experiences of the khalifas of Ahmadiyya Islam and of many Ahmadis who have chosen, or been compelled, to move from their places of origin. Balzani quotes Mary Douglas who notes that “home starts by bringing some space under control” (Douglas 1991: 289). And for the Ahmadis bringing space under control requires an understanding of both past (as colonial and religious history) and future (in prophetic and eschatological terms) to make sense of contemporary migration, dislocation, persecution, and separation from family and homeland. Converts to Ahmadiyyat speak of “coming home” and finding the place they were always meant to be, yet this home space is not an end in itself, rather it is the place from which the world can be changed and from which the faithful can reach out to bring others “home.” From this perspective, life in the diaspora is both one of finding home and one of being in a location from which to work towards the eventual victory of Ahmadiyyat across the globe, both a personal and a collective mission which would be impossible if no one ever left home.

Liza Dumovich, in “A home in the hicret: Morality, domestic space and belonging in a Turkish Muslim community in Brazil,” contends that after the 2016 coup attempt in Turkey, government measures constituted a critical juncture for the Hizmet (Gülen) Movement, a transnational Turkish Sunni Muslim missionary-educational network, pushing members of the community in Brazil to reformulate the way they imagine Turkey, the Hizmet Movement, and their place in the world. Members of the Hizmet Movement mobilized Islamic history and symbols to reinterpret their migratory movement as the fulfillment of their destiny to follow the Prophet’s path. Hicret, the migration of Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622, was in this process morally resignified to sacralize their own migration as a necessary yet transitory moment of suffering.

This transition is characterized by a state of “separation” (ghurbet) from both this world and the next in which the “holy ones” find themselves and where home is where hizmet is performed. Hizmet, meaning “service,” refers to the Movement itself and also to a notion of morally invested service. Similarly to the Ahmadiyya, members of the Hizmet Movement believe that in time the world will surrender to the evident truth of Islam. Until that time, the liminal space-time of hicret, experienced as ghurbet, is inhabited through hizmet. Sacralized and imbued with morality, migration here conveys a strong moral meaning enshrined in the idea of hicret. Through this framework, members of the Hizmet community in Brazil conceptualize home as a space made by, and in which to perform, hizmet, or the global space of hicret. Doing hizmet in the hicret means “propagating Turkish culture” and doing God’s will. Thus, among other things, Dumovich’s article illustrates how changing sociohistorical circumstances may lead to a moral revaluation of mobility.

In the next article, Humayun Kabir and Keiko Sakurai take a more historical approach to understanding home and practices of home-making in their multisited ethnographic work. In “Being Shia in Bangladesh: The intersectionality of ethnicity, language, and transnational connectivity,” they explore the different patterns of acceptance by the majority Sunni Muslim population of two waves of Shia Muslim migration, one during Mughal rule and one post-Partition in 1947, to what was then East Pakistan and is now Bangladesh. Unlike the longer established Shia migrants, the more recent Shia Urdu-speaking migrants, who consider themselves “muhajir” (migrants for religious cause) are demeaned and described in pejorative terms by the Sunni majority Bengalis. Both groups of Shia migrants, however, have repeated a common practice in making home to bridge geographical and historical distance from a culturally significant center by reproducing it in the new location. The minority Shia nobility who settled in Old Dhaka during Mughal rule in the mid-seventeenth century built the Hussaini Dalan imambara (Shia commemoration hall) which reproduces Karbala in a distant site. The Shia commemoration of the martyrdom of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, Hussain, then became a part of the continuing Sunni Muslim commemorative religious practice and so also transformed preexisting Sunni devotional practice. This shared religious practice has, however, in recent years come at a cost and sectarian violence has marred ritual occasions.

The post-Partition Shia migrants have also made their new home in Bangladesh by constructing their own religious institutions wherever they settled across the country. Recipients of Iranian financial support and with religious leaders who have studied in Iran, these institutions in Bangladesh are connected to a spiritual center in a different country. Yet, despite the clear connections with Iran, it is the post-Partition migrants who find themselves negatively represented as collaborators with West Pakistan (now Pakistan) and this hinders the integration of the group in their new home. Language, imagined national and transnational loyalties, or disloyalty, and the boundaries these distinctions produce between groups go a long way towards explaining the reception and acceptance, or not, of the different Shia groups, and the persecution some suffered during the 1971 war between East and West Pakistan. Ultimately what Kabir and Sakurai convincingly demonstrate is that home is never produced in isolation of wider geopolitical and historical factors.

Nina ter Laan’s article, “‘I feel like we skipped a social class’: The role of social class in the hijra of Dutch and Flemish Muslim women to Morocco,” considers women born Muslim and those who converted to Islam, who have left Europe to make a home for themselves and their families in Morocco. For these women, the negative perceptions of Islam in the West and the discrimination that often comes along with them can be avoided by choosing to make homes in Muslim-majority states such as Morocco. Here, women do not have to worry about how they will be treated when wearing hijab in public space nor do they need concern themselves about matters such as the halal status of food in shops and restaurants. In Morocco, daily life, both cultural and religious, is aligned with their faith which makes raising children as Muslim a less fraught undertaking.

Ter Laan’s work, however, by taking an intersectional perspective, finds that the women whose home-making practices she studied continued to distinguish themselves from others around them as they had done while in Europe when they marked themselves and were marked by others as distinct from non-Muslims. In Morocco, the women distinguish themselves from Moroccan Muslims by their taste in home furnishings which they categorize as more in keeping with an Islamic way of life than the more decorative furnishings favored by locals. This is a marker of distinction in Bourdieu’s terms and the Western tastes of home in interior design reincorporated into the Moroccan homes of the migrant women are understood as a mark of moral distinction (Bourdieu 1984). This is reinforced by the move from European states, where the women and their families were not all particularly affluent by local standards, to the economically more privileged situation in Morocco in which the women now find themselves. Their move was therefore not simply a religiously motivated geographical one but also, even if unintentionally, an upward class move. The new class position in which some of the women found themselves in Morocco countered to a great extent the racialization of Islam in Western states, which is also, often automatically, linked to an assumed lower social class position. A white woman who had converted to Islam in the Netherlands, for example, described how her status had become one of alienated minoritization which the move to Morocco reversed. Her conversion to Islam had taken her “home” from her while the migration to Morocco returned to her a place she could make and call home.

Migration for religious ends (hijra) among the women ter Laan worked with does not allow for any easy escape from the colonial history of Morocco. Here, the continuing coloniality, in a “(post)colonial field” where racial hierarchies can be inverted leads ter Laan’s interlocutors “to embody a Eurocentric Islam in their quest for Muslim authenticity in Morocco.” Class, race, gender, colonialism, and various dimensions of privilege play out in complex ways in the lives of migrant Muslim women who have chosen to make their homes in Morocco.

The final article, “Desiring home: A long-term ethnography of a mosque in Lisbon,” by José Mapril, brings us to Western Europe. The article centers on a project by the Lisbon city council that transformed a prayer room rented by a group of Bangladeshi Muslim entrepreneurs in the early 2000s into the Baitul Mukharram mosque, twelve years later. As it was relocated to the Moorish quarter in the center of Lisbon, the project elicited a heated public debate in Portugal, reproducing “moral panics” about Muslims, Islam, and migration. In this article, Mapril presents the project’s history, questioning which discourses it mobilized and in what ways Portugal can be understood as home for Bangladeshi Muslims today.

Mapril’s article illustrates the frictions between home-making processes and the politics of place production. He argues that, as happened in many other cases in Europe, the Bangladeshi mosque case oscillated between casting Islam “in its proper place” and completely excluding it from the Portuguese public arena. As the original prayer room was viewed by detractors as transgressive of the secular order and a form of sensorial pollution (thus being out of place), relocating it to the Moorish square was to assign it to an appropriate public space. This was a means by which to regulate religion through an urban politics of place evidenced by neoliberalism, gentrification, and tourist amenities, articulating in the process policies of monumental vacuity, spatial cleansing, and expediency of culture. Most Bangladeshis in Portugal have been in the country for decades and possess de jure citizenship status. However, the relocation of the prayer room to a more central and public space and its concomitant transformation into a mosque made public and open for debate anxieties about the presence and visibility of Bangladeshi Muslims in Portugal, constructed in these discussions as “incompatible with the dominant values of Portuguese society.” The relocation project thus served to regulate the material, sensorial, and ethical elements of Islam by imposing on these the secular normative ideals of what it means to be Portuguese, and the negotiation of what “home” means in Portugal today.

Together these articles provide an overview of just how varied the experiences of home-making are today for Muslims from different countries, with different histories of movement, and who have no choice but to engage with different local “others” as they make their homes. All draw on the past, their memories, and imaginaries of home to build the future they would like for themselves and their children and to make the present they live in.