Sabine Damir-Geilsdorf

Between regular and irregular employment: subverting the kafala system in the GCC countries

Abstract The focus of this paper is on the strategies of migrant workers and employers to circumvent or subvert the kafala (sponsorship) system in the Arab Gulf States. While the kafala system provides individual and corporate sponsors with both near-exclusive power and legal responsibility for their employees, a range of informal practices has emerged, among them is the so-called ‘free visa’. We argue that the irregularities analysed in this paper are one aspect of the broader frictions between the restrictive kafala system and the need for a more flexible labour force in most Gulf States. Furthermore, both the migrant’s and the employer’s sides must be considered in order to understand the sustainability of these alternative practices, which often are at the margins of the law, and thus entail a number of risks for both parties. Finally, we draw attention to the fact that many employers are non-nationals, and that their perspectives and interests may differ from those of nationals.

Who are “the” Salafis?: Insights into lifeworlds of persons connected to Salafis(m) in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

This article explores the lifeworlds of so-called Salafi(st)s in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, by examining the ways their beliefs impact upon their everyday lives, identities, and religious practices. Based on participant observation, informal talks, and in-depth interviews conducted with persons visiting mosques ascribed to apolitical “puristic Salafism” ( salafiyya ʿilmiyya ), the article is intended to shed light on their ways of life, convictions, and everyday practices by presenting four case studies. The subjects of our case studies show a highly heterogeneous and individual synthesis of personal guidelines for conducting what they call a “good Muslim life”, according to their translation of the role model of the salaf ṣāliḥ (“the pious ancestors”, i.e. the first three generations of Muslims) as well as a heterogeneity in their emic identity ascription and definition of what Salafism means to them.

Re-presenting and Narrating Labour: Coolie Migration in the Cariibbean

“Yet if we have become overly visible, contemporary hypervisibility traces its roots to the singularly modern belief in appropriating and desire to appropriate the world by means of the gaze. The modernization of cultures and societies was linked to an increasing secularization of the invisible. [...] Their use of a visual rhetoric that defines scenarios, excludes or includes protagonists, and, most crucially, evokes pedagogies of the gaze allows us to glean signs of becoming, modes of making visible imagined modernities and communities.” JAGUARIBE/LISSOVSKY 2009: 175-176