Paper short abstract:

The paper describes the experience of migration of an Egyptian Sufi leader. It explores how, by mobilizing religious notions and practices, he recomposes his disrupted subjectivity and, eventually, inscribes himself in the social environments he encounters.

Paper long abstract:

In the paper I explore the experiences of migration from Cairo to Baghdad and Rome, of Safwat, an Egyptian Sufi leader, by putting in critical dialogue my field-notes with Safwat's personal narration. I describe how, through religious notions and practices, Safwat reconfigures his disrupted subjectivity and the social environments he encounters.

In his narration Safwat mobilizes the notions of zahir and batin to provide his migration with an ethical horizon that makes sense of his continuous movements and his social exclusion. On the level of his body experiences he reconfigures his emotional and physical experiences of displacement through the practice of the hadra and the awrad -respectively collective and individual Sufi rituals. Safwat so transforms his body from the site of displacement to the protagonist of his religious self-reconfiguration.

At the same time, by drawing on this new body-awareness, he inscribes himself in the new social environments, such as the Italian branch of the brotherhood he belongs to, where he arrives in 2001 following his need for a job. Drawing on all his experiences and on the new configuration of his subjectivity, he establishes his authority and emplaces himself among the Italian brothers, creatively confronting his economic dependence and his social exclusion. By teaching the religious rituals he subverts the Italians' body codes and undermines the Italians' knowledge of Islam and, as a consequence, he re-orients his position within the social hierarchy of power in the local branch.