Of Hajj and home: Roots visits to Mecca and Bangladesh in everyday belonging

Abstract

Muslim religiosity and South Asian ethnicities are at times experienced as rival forms of affiliation, especially for the second generation born and brought up in the West. In this article, I investigate the role of ‘roots visits’ to Bangladesh and pilgrimages to Mecca in shaping ethnic/religious affiliations of young second generation Bengalis in London's East End. Building on Glick Schiller (2004), I argue that Bengali translocal ways of being (travel to Bangladesh) have become untethered from Bengali translocal ways of belonging (self-identifications), due in part to the more critical stance on Bengali culture propagated by deculturated Islamic institutions in the East End and to young people's perceptions of their social class difference from Bangladeshi locals. While second generation youth who travel to Bangladesh tend to express a distancing from their ‘roots,’ those who travel on hajj or umra find that this bolsters their sense of rootedness in translocal Muslim belonging.