Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the role of the sanctuary (dargah) of Nova Sofala, Mozambique, in a vast transnational network of resources mobilized by the Al Qadriyah mosque, in Lisbon, exploring post-colonial continuities, Islamic normativities and religious subjectivities in the "peripheries of charisma".

Paper long abstract:

Drawing from a multi-sited ethnography in Portugal and Mozambique, this paper examines the transnational links that connect the congregation of the Al Qadriyah mosque, a small place of worship aligned with charismatic, sufi-inspired, Islam in the outskirts of Lisbon, with "places of power" located in Mozambique, where most of its congregation originates. It focuses, more specifically, on the dargah (the tomb of a Muslim saint) of Nova Sofala, near the Mozambican city of Beira, and explores the way in which this place has been historically constructed as a source of spiritual power and mobilized as a legitimizing element of charismatic muslimness. If, on the one hand, the dargah of Nova Sofala has played a central role in the intra-religious debates in Mozambique around the "correct" way of being Muslim, the controversies about its status and legitimacy also illuminate the relationship between Islam and the Mozambican (colonial and post-colonial) state apparatus, as well as the diasporic dynamics that shaped the implantation of a Muslim community in Portugal. In this study, ethnographic data on the pilgrimage to Nova Sofala, as it is exists today, intertwines with the memories of my interlocutors in Lisbon, elucidating the role of the dargah in the construction of their religious subjectivities. Thus, for many Muslims of the Al Qadriyah mosque, the dargah of Nova Sofala now appears as a remote anchor of a charismatic Islam that, in Portugal, continues to occupy an ultra-peripheral place, but also as a catalyst for an ambiguous relationship with the colonial past.