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Muslim Diaspora in the West:
Negotiating Gender, Home, and Belonging

Haideh Moghissi and Halleh Ghorashi, eds.
Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2011. 228 pages.

This excellent edited collection unpicks and disputes multifarious and intricate
processes that underpin the homogenization, otherization, and vilification of
immigrants from Muslim-majority countries, Muslim citizens, and individuals
with a Muslim cultural background in the group of countries known as “the
West.” It does so through presenting a selection of essays that offer an insight
into the localized, day-to-day realities of people whose lives are currently de-
fined by their link to Islam. The focus on gender, home, and belonging em-
phasizes the particular challenge faced by Muslim women: Their bodies are
the battleground for the ideological wars fought by western governments on
the one hand, and by political Islamists on the other (pp. 30-31). 

At the same time, media outlets and governmental policies portray and
essentialize all Muslims as a single, uniform community defined exclusively
by their Muslimness, thereby ignoring any of their differences based on “na-
tional origin, rural-urban roots, class, gender, language, lifestyle and degree
of religiosity, as well as political and moral conviction” (p. 2). As all of the
essays demonstrate, these concerns about representation remain valid, despite
the critiques of historical and contemporary orientalism published by Edward
Said over thirty years ago notwithstanding: Orientalism (1979) and Covering
Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of
the World (1981).

The collection is a result of two conferences held in Toronto (2006) and
Amsterdam (2008) to discuss these issues. It is organized around four themes:
discourse, organizations, and policy; sexuality and family; youth; and space
and belonging. The first theme is represented by different perspectives from
the Netherlands, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Halleh Ghorashi
analyzes the disempowering effects of supposedly “empowering courses” for
immigrant women of Muslim backgrounds and indicates how women them-
selves critique the terms on which such courses are delivered. Fauzia Erfan
Ahmed writes about the deteriorating situation for female American Muslim
community leaders who are forced into silence despite a long history of female
leadership since the time of slavery. Cassandra Balchin’s chapter focuses on
Muslim women’s refusal to cede the discourse of their legal rights to both the
governments and to patriarchal males within Muslim communities, who are

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favored as consultation partners by British policymakers operating within a
multicultural framework. 

The second theme, sexuality and family, is discussed in the context of Swe-
den, the United Kingdom, and Canada. Anne Sofie Roald considers a poten-
tially problematic situation regarding religious marriage and divorce in Sweden,
where the former is conducted by religious associations but the latter is admin-
istered by the state. Fataneh Farhani provides a detailed cultural analysis of ac-
counts of Iranian-born women living in Sweden, identifying such themes as
the experience of exoticization/eroticization by Swedish lovers, dilemmas re-
garding intimate relationships with Swedish men, and sociocultural compar-
isons. Vida Nassehi-Behnam’s chapter documents United Kingdom-based
Iranian women’s successful strategies related to relocating and gaining financial
independence. She indicates that women’s improved status within the family
and the community has resulted in more egalitarian relationships in both.
Haideh Moghissi, in her chapter on Canadian Muslims, comes to similar con-
clusions: a family’s economic situation conditions its process of adjustment
and, consequently, impacts on intra-family relations. 

All three chapters contributing to the third theme, youth, discuss issues
faced by contemporary Muslim youth. Thijl Sunier, who looks at Dutch Mus-
lim youth, challenges the tendency of portraying young Muslims in Europe
through the lens of an identity crisis. Instead, he argues that they are agents of
their own religious experience within the context of a post-9/11 politicization
of religious issues. David Thurfjell’s discussion of Muslim youth contends
that they are forced to choose between embracing a radical interpretation of
Islam or of abandoning Islam altogether. Sepideh Farkhondeh delivers an ex-
cellent problematization of the lives of young French women with a Muslim
background. She points to a complex interplay between the experiences of
young displaced men and the treatment of women with a combination of
racism, mass unemployment, and violence as a background. 

The interlocked concepts of space and belonging are the basis for the
fourth and final theme. In their compelling chapter, Marjo Buitelaar and
Femke Stock maintain that Dutch Muslims face an identity dilemma: they are
not considered fully legitimate citizens in either the Netherlands or in their
homelands, which leads to their alienation and ambivalence about belonging.
Martin de Koning complements this picture by indicating a great deal of
hypocrisy in the Netherlands’ public attitude toward Islam, and more widely
in Europe, in that only Muslims are constructed as incompatible with “Dutch
values” (which presumably include secularism and democracy) on the basis
of some imams’ controversial views on such issues as homosexuality, despite
the fact that orthodox Protestants are equally vociferous about them. In the

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final chapter, Jacqueline Ismael and Shereen Ismael examine the experiences
of Iraqi immigrants in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, France,
and Jordan. They focus on those who left prior to the 2003 invasion and doc-
ument how Iraqis in the diaspora construct their memories of home through
folk culture. 

The publication conveys the complex experiences of Muslims in “west-
ern” countries where they constitute a minority by providing detailed, analytic
accounts of their lived realities, the challenges they face, and, often, how they
manage and overcome their difficulties. Many chapters, for example
Farkhani’s, Balchin’s, Farkhondeh’s, Buitelaar and Stock’s, and Moghissi’s,
demonstrate clearly that Muslim women who participated in their research
effectively defy the stereotype of silent, passive women who are prevented
from exerting their agency by patriarchal religious men; however, these essays
are careful and nuanced in that they identify creative and original strategies
developed by these women to negotiate their multi-layered identities. 

As the co-editor Ghorashi writes, the chapters encourage the reader to
“reflect upon the process of inclusion and exclusion in our societies” (p. 215),
for they provide an insight into not only experiences of Muslims in the “West,”
but draw the reader’s attention to contradictory tendencies in “western” soci-
eties, in particular their continuing self-perceptions as cradles of such Enlight-
enment values as tolerance and the freedom of speech and religion on the one
hand, and, on the other hand, their discrimination and hostility toward the
Muslim “other.” 

Anna Piela
Research Assistant, School of Education

University of Leicester, Leicester, United Kingdom

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