Of Hajj and home: Roots visits to Mecca and Bangladesh in everyday belonging

Muslim religiosity and South Asian ethnicities are at times experienced as rival forms of affiliation, especially for the second generation born and brought up in the West. In this article, I investigate the role of ‘roots visits’ to Bangladesh and pilgrimages to Mecca in shaping ethnic/religious affiliations of young second generation Bengalis in London’s East End. Building on Glick Schiller (2004), I argue that Bengali translocal ways of being (travel to Bangladesh) have become untethered from Bengali translocal ways of belonging (self-identifications), due in part to the more critical stance on Bengali culture propagated by deculturated Islamic institutions in the East End and to young people’s perceptions of their social class difference from Bangladeshi locals. While second generation youth who travel to Bangladesh tend to express a distancing from their ‘roots,’ those who travel on hajj or umra find that this bolsters their sense of rootedness in translocal Muslim belonging

Memorization and focus : important transferables between supplementary Islamic education and mainstream schooling

This article presents the results of a participative study, involving a group of 27 British Muslim students aged 15–18, who were given the opportunity to reflect on the implications of having participated in two different ‘traditions’ of education: that is, Muslim supplementary education (in its various forms) and state mainstream schooling. The project was participative in that school senior managers had invited the researchers to carry out the research as part of their constant striving to identify the conditions under which students learn best. Both the design and outcomes of this research programme are presented and discussed in this article. One of the main findings is that the students experience the skills of memorization and focus as positive transferables. The findings will be discussed in terms of the concept of liturgical literacy