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.