‘You Won’t Find Religion Here’: The (In)Visibility of Muslim Responses to Situations of Mass Displacement

Abstract

This article considers why despite mass displacement significantly affecting people from Muslim majority countries, Islamic understandings of refuge, protection and assistance remain de-centered and made peripheral in formulations of asylum and refuge. The paper begins with an interrogation of how knowledge production on Muslim life-worlds a priori gives emphasis to certain essential characteristics identified as Muslim. It is argued that this collapses understandings of the diversity of being and 'doing' Muslim in ways that make less visible everyday lived experiences attuned to the materiality, affect and emotion prompted by readings of Islamic tradition in displacement settings. To do so, I draw on Syrian experiences of displacement in Turkey and Greece to parse out the implications of this (in)visibility for Muslim responses to mass-displacement and question whether they can be substantively different to modalities of humanitarianism and development anchored in liberal European ontologies. It is argued that by being attentive to the structures of feeling prompted by Islamic traditions pertaining to refuge and protection reveals ways of being and doing Islam outside of statist readings of humanitarianism. Here, the Islamic tradition of jiwār (a right of and to neighbourliness) provides a decolonial vocabulary to respond to state-defined patterns of hospitality rooted in European knowledge production.The author would like to thank Nermeen Mouftah and Abbas Barzegar for their invaluable comments, patience, and support in the drafting of this article.