Book Review
Book‘s
name: Muslim in motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora
Author:
Nazli Kibria
Publisher:
Rutgers University Press (May 19,
2011)
“Muslim in motion: Islam and National
Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora” is famous book of Nazli
Kibria which is about Bangladeshi diaspora who are living in the United States, great Britain, the
Gulf States, and Malaysia. Kibria (2011) use ethnographic method and gives a deep description
of the experiences of Bangladeshi Muslim in a different national context.
She writes,
“My friend spoke
of noticing how Bangladeshis who went abroad often became highly religious,
indeed ‘fundamentalist’ in their orientation. They found it puzzling and
counterintuitive. It was, moreover, a trend that held true across class lines,
among not only the rural impoverished Bangladeshis who traveled to Saudi Arabia
and Kuwait on labor contracts but also the urban, middle class Bangladeshis who
were going to Australia, Canada, and the United States.”
She
observes that during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries the remarkable
worldwide trend is the spread of Islamic movements that recommend a greater Islamic
revival and emphasizes religion identity in the lives of Muslims. Her book is
about the connection of international migrations to these religious identity
development. She claims that Bangladeshi Muslim migrants and their families
show up establish their community life and develop an identity in the foreign
world. In all of these national context, she finds that Islam is major
negotiations of cultural and transnational affiliation, significantly following
9/11, they choose the religious identity rather than Bangladeshi self-identification.
Kibria’s observation to the several assumption of Islam as a source of identity
practically troublesome. Because the representations of Islam and Muslim lives
after terrorist attacks, a negative stereotypes has been appeared to
realization about Islam and Muslim. She also indicates another factors: the appearance
of revivalist Islam, globalization of labor flows, U.S. led war on terrorism,
the experience of marginality in the host countries. In their host country,
second generation Bangladeshi Muslim migrants faced with stereotypical and
racialized realization about their origin, have found
in Muslim identity with which to take a stand against racism and discrimination.
