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.