Religion and Diasporic Dwelling: Algerian Muslim Women in Ireland

Abstract

This article will look at the different conceptions of ‘home’ as narrated by Algerian Muslim women living in Ireland. It explores the dynamic processes of their self-identification(s) and their different forms of (re)creation of diasporic home(s) influenced by their religious, cultural, social and economic environment. I will use Thomas A. Tweed’s notion of ‘crossing and dwelling’ to analyse these essentialized identity constructions that become manifest in Tweed’s four ‘chronotopes’: the gendered body, the domestic home, the imagined homeland and the transnational and global cosmos. The conscious or unconscious negotiations and implications for belonging to a specific identity or community that can be observed among Algerian women in Ireland will be examined, together with the different pre- and post-migratory social, political and religious factors that influence such negotiations. This ethnographic study is the first of its kind and fills a gap in the study of Muslim migrants in Europe.