José Mapril

The Dreams of Middle Class: Consumption, Life-course and Migration Between Bangladesh and Portugal

In the past 20 years, Bangladeshi migration to Southern European countries has gained an increasing importance. Portugal is no exception, and today more than 4,500 Bangladeshis live in the country. One of the more interesting facets of this population, though, is their educational and economic profile. They come from what has been roughly summed up as the ‘new’ Bangladeshi ‘middle classes’. Their families are both rural and urban, have properties, and own businesses. Other members of their domestic units work in NGOs, and private and state owned companies. Simultaneously, they have considerable educational backgrounds, with college and university degrees, and most are fluent in English. But what was their motivation to come to Europe in the first place? And what does this tell us about the young Bangladeshi middle class? For these young Bangladeshi adults, it is through geographic mobility that one can earn enough economic capital to access the ‘modern’ and to progress in the life-course. By remaining in Bangladesh, their access to middle class status and adulthood is not guaranteed and thus migrating to Europe is seen as a possible avenue for achieving such dreams and expectations. The main argument in this paper is that migration—as a resource and a discoursive formation—is itself constitutive of this ‘middle class’.

“Maulana Says The Prophet is Human, Not God”. Milads and hierarchies among Bengali Muslims in Lisbon

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out among Bengali Muslims in Lisbon. It specifically examines a ceremony, called milad that is performed on certain occasions such as the opening of a shop or the inauguration of a house. What it is intended to argue is that milads are a good metaphor to understand current debates among the Bengalis about what Islam “should be” and what, as a Muslim, one should do. Based on this ethnographic exercise, it is argued that the modernization rhetoric on social change and transformations in religious practices and religiosity, that is currently prominent in migration and religion studies should be substituted by a phenomenology of Islam in the context of migration.

Sites and Politics of Religious Diversity in Southern Europe

Moving beyond the current media verves, this book debates, from a critical perspective, case studies on the sites and politics of religious diversity in Southern Europe.

Introduction: Secularities, Religiosities, and Subjectivities

What has become of secularism following the so-called postsecular turn? As a consequence of the demise of modern twentieth-century secularization theory (as per Peter Berger’s ‘sacred canopy’), we live in an interesting intellectual moment in which the so-called postsecular (understood descriptively rather than theoretically, see, e.g., Habermas 2008; Mavelli and Petito 2012; Wilson 2012; Rosati 2015) coexists with the secular, which in turn has become pluralized and historicized (see, e.g., Taylor 2007; Agrama 2012; Burchardt and Wohlrab-Sahr 2013). On the other hand, if, as Habermas argues, the secularist paradigm has learned to cohabitate with the religious, we also witness the conflictual anti-religious stance of ‘new atheist’ movements, which claim a ‘scientific’ argument for the removal of the religious from the public sphere (see Oustinova-Stjepanovic and Blanes 2015). This cohabitation of the secular and the postsecular is revealed, as the new atheism example above shows, mainly through political dialectical processes (see also Jakobsen and Pellegrini 2008; Sullivan et al. 2015). This in turn makes us, editors of this volume, feel that (1) those political statements overshadow the subjective and inter-subjective dimensions of secularity, making it difficult to pinpoint concrete sites, agents, and objects of expression; and (2) for that same reason, they tend to obscure rather than illuminate the pragmatics and empirical dimensions of secularism. We argue that one such move toward the concrete and the subjective will allow us to know more about the plural, heterogeneous, and processual character of the secular/religious conundrum, and thus move beyond the monolithic, immobilized configurations that often flourish in the public sphere.

A Past That Hurts: Memory, Politics and Transnationalism between Bangladesh and Portugal

This chapter explores the relation between mobility and the politics of memory. Focusing on the debates among Bangladeshis in Lisbon, Portugal about the role played by a political party and its main leaders during the Bangladeshi liberation war in 1971, the aim is to reveal how the struggles for a hegemonic narrative of the past are fought out in a transnational context. These heated debates in Lisbon began in 2003, but reached a recent climax influenced by the International Crimes Tribunal in 2009 and the Shabhag protests in Bangladesh. ‘A Past That Hurts’ concludes that due to mobility, in this case migration, the convergence of past and present in everyday and political life is enhanced.