Imagining an ideal husband: Marriage as a site of aspiration among pious Somali women in London. AbstractThis article is about "marriage talk" and the forms of imagination and aspiration that it entails. It draws on discussions and debates about ideal husbands among young Somali Muslim women in Britain who, in recent years, have begun practising Islam. Through these debates, these women draw on various different discourses, values, norms and ideals to re-think and re-imagine themselves in relation to multiple others, including kin, friends and God. Marriage, I argue, is a site of aspiration (Khan 2012), as it engages the ethical imagination-the means and modes by which individuals re-imagine relations to self and others (Moore 2011). By reflecting on, discussing and imagining a future spouse, these young women draw on different forms of knowledge in relation to enlarged visions of self and other. I demonstrate that analyses of the complexly constituted Muslim subject (Schielke 2010a, Deeb and Harb 2013) need to pay attention not only to the coexistence of multiple moral registers or rubrics, but also to how these connect to the ways in which individuals imagine new ways of being. The article brings to the fore the importance of intersubjectivity and shines light on the processes of imagining and aspiring, which are crucial for an understanding of the complex lives of young women who turn to practise Islam.

This article is about a campaign that was initiated by Somalis in London in 2013 against Barclays Bank's decision to shut down the accounts of four Somali remittance companies in the UK. It explores how young Somalis mobilized politically around the issue, and how, in the process, they created and reified a particular 'imagined community'. By drawing on multicultural notions of community, and development idioms of diaspora engagement, they fashioned themselves around a notion of 'good diaspora' based on generation, pan-Somali unity, and ideas of 'professionalism'. In so doing, they were able to mobilize politically as both national and transnational actors, but were also confronted with some of the limits of the 'good diaspora' identity category. This article establishes a dialogue between the literature on diaspora engagement and that on migrant political mobilization by exploring how young Somalis navigate across these different national and transnational conversations, discourses and social categories.

This article is about a new publicly visible generation of female Islamic authorities in the UK and the ways in which they make sense of what it means to be a female authority within largely male-dominated structures of knowledge production. These authorities are setting up their own institutes and emphasising the importance of drawing from within the Islamic tradition while contextualising it in the British context. On the one hand, they stress their unique ability as women to provide personal and collective guidance, based on relationships of empathy and care, that addresses the needs of Muslim women in Britain. On the other hand, they recognise the limitations of presenting guidance as ‘women’s work’, and they seek to pluralise their roles or to present gender as irrelevant in their work. By navigating between accepting, pluralising and transcending female modes of authority, they carve out legitimate spaces for themselves as female leaders while developing and imagining new understandings of Islamic knowledge and plural models of pious leadership. I argue that these multiple ways of making sense of their experiences move us away from theorising female religious leadership solely through binary tropes, such as liberal/orthodox Islam, resistance/compliance, enabling/constraining, which continue to shape research in the field.

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