Muslim Mobilities and Everyday Aspirations in Istanbul
Open Access DepositedCultivating the Umma
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Over the last two decades, the Turkish government has extended its influence across the Global South and positioned itself as an inheritor of a storied Ottoman-Islamic legacy. Concomitant with its growing economic and political influence, millions of Muslim migrants—refugees, political exiles, expatriates, labor migrants, tourists, and international students—have found their way to Istanbul. Cultivating the Umma draws on 16 months of ethnographic fieldwork in the city to investigate these multiple, overlapping circuits of mobility and to explore how Muslims of varied ethnic, racial, and ethnonational backgrounds intersect within the city. It takes the umma—the global Muslim community—as an aspirational horizon of belonging, and explores how this formation comes into focus not despite differences but often through them. Focusing on the practices and networks that animate Islamic lifeworlds in the city, this dissertation traces how global imaginaries like the umma—rather than existing at the lofty and ideational realm—are grounded in the friction and intimacy of everyday encounters, and how the seemingly non-locatable and global is felt, enacted, and made meaningful in hyper-local ways. These transnational encounters unfold under conditions circumscribed by racialized border regimes and nationalistic divisions, yet they remain continually oriented toward other possibilities, especially as migrants encounter a cityscape etched with reminders of a shared Islamic past. The project develops the concept of everyday aspirations to describe the quotidian and often embedded practices through which individuals orient themselves toward alternative configurations of sociality and politics, gesturing beyond the present toward other possibilities.
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