Paper short abstract:

Interfaith initiatives in London address a wide range of social and community issues, seeking to establish religious actors as crucial agents for the production of post-secular pluralist coexistence. The paper explores interfaith activities and their contribution to shaping the shared urban future.

Paper long abstract:

Since the 1980s, interfaith initiatives in the UK have expanded into the realm of civil society, seeking to establish themselves as key interlocutors for politicians and community leaders managing religious coexistence. Interfaith engagement initially focussed on the niche practice of formalised dialogue — theological discussions exploring scripture religious truth — and addressed Jewish-Christian relations and new forms of diversity in the wake of post-empire immigration to Britain. Whereas issues of race and culture dominated British postwar debates on the ramifications of diversity, the Rushdie Affair in the 1980s revealed the impact that religious identities and faith practices were having on urban conviviality. In response, interfaith initiatives intensified their commitment to shaping public and community life in the post-secular British capital, both illustrating and seeking to capitalise on the ongoing importance of religion.

Today, interfaith initiatives prosper. A focus on social action and advocacy — in fields as wide-ranging as housing, LGBTQ, refugee support, homelessness, discrimination, or public education — brings young people into the field, as well as previously sceptical secular humanists. Such wide-ranging activities illustrate the dynamism of grassroots interfaith engagement in London, and highlight interfaith practitioners' contribution to debates about living with religious difference and confronting its implications. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in London in 2017/18, this paper explores the role of interfaith initiatives in shaping innovative forms of conviviality and pluralism from the bottom up. I illustrate the importance of religious actors in post-secular London, and examine how interfaith practitioners conceptualise the shared urban future.

Paper short abstract:

The Guinean population living in Greater Lisbon is marked by a high degree of religious plurality, even within the same families. This paper will present an ethnographic portrayal of Guinean transnational families, focusing on the practicalities of religious coexistence in this context.

Paper long abstract:

The Guinean population living in Greater Lisbon is marked by a high degree of religious plurality, reflecting the diversity of the religious landscape in contemporary Guinea-Bissau (Sarró and Barros 2016). Although Catholicism and Islam are the main religious affiliations in this context, many migrants of both groups recur to traditional religious specialists on specific occasions, such as life-cycle events and states of affliction (Carvalho 2001; Quintino 2004; Saraiva 2008). In this pluralistic environment, Evangelical Guineans form a minority group, which differentiates itself from Catholics and Muslims by professing a stricter rejection of what they call "animistic" practices and by creating relatively distinct social networks. Nonetheless, Catholicism, Protestantism, indigenous religions and, to a lesser extent, Islam, may coexist within the same families. Moreover, due to the shortage of low-cost housing in Lisbon area, it is common for members of the same family, but with distinct religious faith, to live under the same roof. Therefore, within these households, kinship bonds and norms both intersect and clash with religious practices and memberships.

Having as starting point my fieldwork among Evangelical Guineans in Lisbon, this paper will present an ethnographic portrayal of Guinean transnational families, focusing on the practicalities of religious coexistence and cohabitation in this context.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses how the yearly Hosay festivities function as a transnational representation of religious belonging and how the local practice of 'liming' provides affective tools for conviviality that enables Trinidadians to relate to the wider superdiverse Trinbagonian society.

Paper long abstract:

This paper draws on existing scholarship on Islam in the Caribbean as well as ethnographic data from Trinidad and argues that Islam is situated in a dialectic field of socio-cultural creolization and narratives of religious purity. Its multi-ethnic histories include local practices from Sunni and Shi'ia Muslims from both, West Africa and South Asia. In Trinidad, these superdiverse religious histories fuse with the political realities of the postcolonial nation state, which is promoting diversity and unity.

To contextualize my findings, I will refer to the annual Shi'ia Hosay festivities in the cities of Port of Spain and Cedros and illustrate how Islam is oscillating between notions of the pure and the creolized. I argue that the commemoration of Hosay functions as a transnational representation of ethnic and religious belonging that places Islam in the political framework of the postcolonial Trinbagonian nation-state. The local practice of 'liming' is the discursive tool that 1) is a local practice of conviviality that helps to facilitate this representation of cultural-religious difference in the public sphere, and 2) provides the affective-relational tools to connect different Muslim schools to the divers religious landscape of Trinidad.

Paper short abstract:

Interviews of elderly Greek and Turkish Cypriots who grew up in the former mixed villages of Cyprus reveal that cross-religious milk-kinship existed through the widespread practice of wet-nursing. Such relationships were common prior to nationalism and conflict which saw the division of the island.

Paper long abstract:

First-hand narratives of elderly Cypriots from former mixed villages show that close, rather than superficial, relations existed between Greek (Christian) and Turkish (Muslim) Cypriots at both community and personal levels. Many genuine friendships existed and, in many respects, the two groups lived as a single harmonious and integrated community. The most striking example, described by twenty-six interviewees, of personal level relationships that existed in Cyprus throughout the century leading up to the 1974 war, is the practice of cross-religious milk kinship. The joining together of two families of different religions through the practice of wet nursing demonstrates a level of real intimacy between Christians and Muslims. It appears that the religious meaning understood by Turkish Cypriots grew into a shared cultural practice adopted by Greek Cypriots - as a form of cultural appropriation. Milk kinships survived decades of conflict and division in Cyprus. When the checkpoints between the North and South of the island opened in 2003, after 29 years, many of Greek and Turkish Cypriots reported visiting, or being visited by, their milk mother or milk siblings from the 'other' group.

Paper short abstract:

Based on an ongoing ethnography about the construction of a new square in downtown Lisbon, named the Moorish square (in which a previously established mosque will be relocated), the objective of this paper is to address the relation between religious diversities and urban economies and regeneration.

Paper long abstract:

Based on an ongoing ethnography about the construction of a new square in downtown Lisbon, named the Moorish square, the objective of this paper is to address the relation between religious diversity, cohabitation and urban economies and regeneration.

This new project was announced in 2011 and includes the relocation of the Baitul Mukarram mosque which was created in 2002 by a group of Bangladeshi entrepreneurs that got together in the Islamic Community of Bangladesh (ICB). This relocation is the result of twelve years of negotiations between the ICB and the Lisbon City Council (LCC), over issues of safety, well-being and adequacy. Furthermore, it is part of the recognition of a new place and visibility for Islam in Lisbon, an older claim that is finally attended, and a major good deed for all Muslims, independently of their backgrounds. Simultaneously, for some segments of the Lisbon city council, the new square and mosque are part of a larger process of building a religiously plural/diverse urban landscape, the arguments of which mobilize references to the Al-Andaluzian and the Moorish heritage, while projecting the urban regeneration of an area of the city that was until recently perceived as rundown and at risk from a social point of view.

Thus, overall, this paper will show how a project for the construction of a new square in downtown Lisbon reveals the complex relations between religion as heritage and practice and its connections with the political economy of urban diversity.

Paper short abstract:

We look at how Portuguese Muslims from a South Asian background create spaces of conviviality that temporarily suspend traditional antagonisms between divergent doctrinal sensibilities. These ephemeral continuities stress how conviviality can also be relevant to the domain of intra-faith diversity.

Paper long abstract:

As in most countries of the South Asian Islamic diaspora, the religious landscape of Islam in Portugal is largely structured according to adherence to two major doctrinal orientations: a scripturalist inclination, strongly influenced by the deobandi school of thought and in accelerated expansion during the last decades; and a charismatic Islam where orthodoxy is legitimized by costumary knowledge transmitted across generations and from master to disciple - usually associated with the barelvi movement and with practices compatible with Sufism. If doctrinal discrepancies between these orientations can, and do, provoke frictions and tensions between members, the diasporic and minority condition of Muslims in Portugal - as well as the delicate status of Islam in the post-9/11 world - facilitate the creation of contexts of continuity between barelvis and deobandis where these antagonisms are temporarily suspended. Drawing on ongoing ethnographies in Almada and Odivelas - two satellite-cities of Lisbon where barelvi and deobandi mosques stand just a few meters from each other - we will explore how "spaces of conviviality" arise from, on the one hand, institutional strategies to display Portuguese Muslims before society at large as a united and internally pacified community, and, on the other, practical needs to create instances of cooperation at the level of daily practices transversal to both doctrinal orientations. In these circumscribed social contexts (marriages, cross-doctrinal religious celebrations, shared business enterprises) real or imagined affinities are underlined, differences are diluted or trivialized, and fracturing issues are carefully avoided.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I discuss my ethnographic research about Muslim girls who play urban street football. I argue that the study of religious diversity in urban spaces should include and combine both religious and non-religious or secular practices of conviviality, like street football.

Paper long abstract:

In contemporary Western-European cities, religious diversity and street football are both characteristics of urban life. Based on ten months of ethnographic research among young Muslim residents of the Schilderswijk, an urban neighbourhood in the Netherlands, this paper discusses how to study religious diversity in relation to girls' football in urban spaces. I argue that conceptualisations of "everyday Islam" in the anthropology of Islam and religion fail to capture the urban experiences and practices of 'religious but not so religious' young residents of the Schilderswijk who play football together. I show that the football players have diverse experiences and strategies of playing football on urban playgrounds, which include but also exceed the category of "Islam". I argue that their practices should not be analysed as "everyday Islam", but best understood through the concept of religious super-diversity (Becci, Burchardt, and Giorda, 2017), which provides a perspective that combines both religious and non-religious practices in urban life. Religious superdiversity emphasises the lived religious and secular experiences of young people in urban spaces beyond taking "Islam" as primary category of analysis, and it therefore provides an innovative approach to religious diversity and conviviality in urban spaces.