Return to Mecca: Balik-Islam among Filipino migrants in Singapore

Abstract

Abstract The narrative of the globalization of labour and the demands of the labour market dominates most of the scholarship on Filipino migration, emphasizing their contribution to the Philippine economy via remittances even while these migrants endure difficulties working in forbidding terrain – a companion narrative of sacrifice and endurance. What remains below the surface, however, is the enchantment with the discovery of a new world-view among them. Balik-Islam, the ‘return’ to Islam, is part of the imaginary among Filipinos who have travelled, lived and worked across territories, connecting them to Mecca, both physically and spiritually. While their labour skills brought them to the Middle East and other Muslim-majority countries, their journey expanded into the discovery of meanings beyond their labour value. In this article, I regard Mecca as an imaginary among Filipino travellers who have somehow bridged the connection between their lost Islamic heritage and their labour, the latter allowing them to reclaim this heritage as authentic to their identity. In this article, I discuss the reconfiguration of Mecca as ‘home’, ‘redemption’ and ‘resurrection’ among itinerant Filipinos: first, as a salve to constant dislocations in an impersonal and aggressive global economy, second, as a source of salvation from indulgence in otherwise forbidden behaviour in foreign territories where the codes of behaviour back home have been transgressed (e.g., adultery) and third, as a spiritual resurrection in which a return to Mecca erases the past and provides a new path, a new identity and a rebirth. However, a more instrumentalist view of conversion, one that depicts conversion as part of a rational strategy to ease the tensions in intimate relations between Catholics and Muslims, also forms part of this article. In this latter dimension, Mecca is an ‘absent’ place bereft of spiritual meaning and serves to reinforce the homelessness of the migration experience.