Islam in Brazil: Local and Transnational Trends in the Making of Diasporic Islam

Last week, the Kevorkian Center was honored to host Brazilian anthropologist Paulo Pinto, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at Universidade Federal Fluminense.

Paulo had done extensive fieldwork among Sufis in Syria and has now undertaken a study of Muslims in Brazil. With regards to the latter, the key questions he presents are: what is Islam in Brazil? how is Islam produced in Brazil?

While this short blog will not recap all his insights, I would like to focus on a few that really struck me. 

Pinto rightly emphasis taking into account local dynamics alongside national and transnational orders in the way of making Brazilian Muslim identity. 

There is a parallel history of Islam in Brazil. A colonial heritage of African slaves that disappears in with end of slave trade due to cut off with African and assimilation to Catholic or African Brazilian religions. 

And the contemporary Muslim presence of Middle Eastern immigrants (mostly Syrians, Lebanese, and Palestinians). But this presence is based on a search for a community in the name of ethnic identity. Muslim immigrants articulate identity as Syrian, for instance, due to a Brazilian immigrate narrative viewing Arabs as undesirable non-Europeans and Islam as less than favorable. 

Between the 1920s-1960s, Brazil witnessed the creation of Muslim charitable societies that ensure social welfare but also places of sociability to maintain Muslim identity. 

The 1960s-1990s witnessed the first mosque (mainly due to funding from Gulf countries and Iran). But Islam is understood as a cultural heritage within larger set of religious norms. Until the 1990s Islam is understood by Muslims in Brazil (or at least institutions) as a Middle Eastern cultural heritage and not a missionary religion. The first conversions start in 1990s and spark fierce debate: Should we accept them? How do we integrate people who do not know Arabic or cultural norms? 

Some preachers argue, for instance, that Brazilian society is not conducive to Muslim life. In 1995, Maria Morara, an engineer from a Catholic university, converts to Islam after traveling to Egypt and Turkey. But a many preachers reject her and she starts a debate with the preachers arguing that Brazil is indeed compatible: traditional, religious, and very family oriented; and Evangelical Churches are not much different from Islam and manage convert millions, and Islam could do the same only if it took seriously the task of tackling Brazilian religiosity. During this era, some communities begin to open up for converts. And in 1997 Rio-based institutions stop being heritage-oriented and begin to see Islam as a universal message for all and accept conversion of Brazilians without Arab or Muslim background. By 2010, half of Brazilian Muslim community is already converts and the figure is 85% in Rio. 

But this is not without internal tension between Brazilians of Arab heritage and simply Brazilians (everybody without Middle East background). For instance, a Brazilian Arab Christian who converts to Islam is considered Arab but any other isn't. So ethnic and heritage-bound identity remains very important. Arab Brazilians righteously argue they have an imbibed (one surmises) Muslim culture and do not need to learn it while converts challenge/retort that they know the actual purpose of Islamic norms and practices as opposed to Arabs who simply reproduce their heritage. A binary between  tradition vs. acquired religion. 

Among converts many identify with Salafi (conservative Islam), a codification of Islam as a way-of-life learned and followed, and more than the sacred texts. Very pedagogical. But born-and-raised Muslims do not see any attraction to Salafism. Instead Islam in often an expressed (occasionally Sufi) cultural tradition (Sufi traditions in Brazil are just traditions removed from pious sentiments. Ex. muwlid (Prophet's birthday), a Sufi holiday opposed by Salafis as antithetical to orthodox Islam). When these traditions and rituals are performed in mosques, such as muwaild, this is where religious differences between born-and-raised Arab Brazilians and converts rise to the fore as the latter exit the mosque in opposition to the intermixing of culture and Islam.

But converts do not deny religious value of some culture aspects, such as Arabic where Islam isn't localized but complement to religiosity. Or living in a Muslim society: Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, India, South Africa, and Pakistan are popular destinations. 

In a related tangent, each Muslim community in Brazilian (meaning regionally) produces a different codification of Islam and Muslim identity because local dynamics connection differently to national and transnational processes. Ex. Rio is different from the tribal area near Paraguay, Brazil and Argentina.

What I found so interesting in the talk is the difference between pedagogical Islam and an Islam that is imbibed through upbringing. An Islam that is simply Islam without necessitating explanation. Islam is culture. Islam is going to mosque on Friday but drinking on Saturday. Islam is a holiday centered around food. As one Muslim recently said, "I don't do Islam correctly, but you don't actually know that...lines between Islam and Afghan culture are blurred." 

This is the Islam I was brought up in and the one I practice now, and the only Islam I recognize: We live Islam as we live it. And that is the source of our unassailable faith. This is our connection to Allah.

And it is the Islam of 99% of Muslims, Brazil included.

As a corollary, here's an interesting video on the rise of Islam in the favelas of Brazil:

Coming Out Muslim

NYU's LGBT student organization recently held an event titled 'Coming Out Muslim' exploring the intersection between queerness and Islam. In the form of a live-show performance, two queer Muslims, Wazina Zondon and Terna Tilley-Gyado (the latter a convert or revert in Islamic parlance), engaged mostly individually but at times collectively in a verse, sketch and dance interplay seeking to convey their identity as queer and Muslim. The event was not only amusing in its own right but politically significant in presenting an image of the diversity of Muslim "life as lived", to quote the anthropologist Charles Hirschkind, far removed from the silly and prejudicial images on mainstream television.

Wazina, a young Queens native of Afghan heritage, launched the show with a humorous take on 'what made me queer'. Of course, as Wazina related to the audience, being queer is as natural for her as a straight person being straight. As she succinctly put it: Never gave much thought to what made me queer...just found whatever I found attractive...like who you like and move on. But here are the theories:


1) Boy George. Yup, this gay pop artist is at 'fault'.

2) Boys and Hellfire. Her parents' admonition that 'eight minutes of pleasure are not worth an entirety in hell...so stay away from the boys.'


3) Never got the Birds and the Bees talk (ironically now a sex educator at a New York public school). Where did babies come from? You prayed for them. Fear of the immaculate conception made her queer.

4) Never had any girl friends in high school. This is her father's preferred theory. According to her (somewhat disapproving father), because she never got any attention from girls in high school when the first girl (her girlfriend) gave her the time of day, his girl-attention starved daughter became queer.

But, as Wazina concluded, nothing really made her gay…"Allah made me gay." 

Terna, an American of Christian Nigerian heritage, had an amusing anecdote about the Homo-Monster. "Don't go running after people's daughters! Africans don't do that kind of 'thing'!" her mother shouted as she was packing for a trip to Nigeria. Terna assured her mother that she will not, but how absurd the command was. Are all queers lascivious individuals who run around after people's sons or daughters? Queer, Terna noted, has traditionally meant strange and odd, but does it also mean monster. "Am I a monster because I am queer?" she pondered. The "Homo-Monster"?

And what is meant by Africans not doing that kind of 'thing'? Not natural for Africans? Was the continent homo-free until White people started colonizing?

One interesting point of the show was during an intermission when an audio montage was played of stereotypical questions or statements put forth to Muslims in America (or the West in general): 

You don't look muslim...do you wear black because of your religion?...does your mother wear a buuuurrrrkkkkaaaaa?...do you pray five times a day?...what does your family think about the war?...when are you going to do your pilgrimage?...since Afghanistan is in Asia how come you don't look Chinese?…can you actually be gay and Muslim? 

Some innocuous, some ignorant, and some silly. 

Trying to recap the rest of the show may be difficult since it quickly moved from one scene to the next as if streams of thought. So I'll just relate it as such: 

Why my parents don't approve? Is is because of their interpretation of the Qur'an? Or Afghan cultural and norms? Or family's sense of respectability? ... 

I stay in Islam because there is no racism in Umma (Islamic community) and I know there is room for me... Islam has never turned its back on me as opposed to the people who interpret it ...

I don't do Islam correctly, but you don't actually know that...lines between Islam and Afghan culture are blurred. 

I will end where the evening ending: with one of the very poignent aspects of the show when Wazina read from a letter to all her lovers and girlfriends who have sought to offer advice on how she should  address her family's fraught feelings toward her queerness: 

My family is not your struggle...support me without judgement...they won't fall in love with you if you demonstrate 'cultural sensitivity'...they are not for you to rationalize or quantify...my success is unlike the ways you're used to. 

My success is listening to their stories even after they kicked me out of the house...they are so many ways I don't know them...they walked miles across their homeland...living in a world where people only see you by your beard or your suspicious accent …I don't know them. 

Why am I not mad at them? Success is them knowing I am not how they wanted me to turn out and I'm still invited home…sharing space…moving one step further with father…working-class revolutionary spirit…how will (or when) families come together?…love them for all they are and are not just as you love me. 

A performative rebuke to all the essentialist nonsense hurled at Islam...however Muslims make sense of their faith.

The Moos-Lums are Coming!!!

H/T Jadaliyya