The Mobile Ummah: Belonging and Travel among Muslim Converts in Spain

Abstract

ABSTRACT Converts to Islam in southern Spain struggle to understand their place in the ummah (the global Muslim community). Some converts experience anxiety about their newfound minority Muslim status at home and racialized tensions with Spain’s migrant Muslims. This article asks what it means for converts to desperately want to feel belonging in a global Muslim community and to seek recognition from born Muslims, but also emphatically not to want to belong with Muslim immigrants in Spain. I argue that converts resolve this tension through various forms of global travel that range from pilgrimages to holy Islamic sites to trips to convert Indigenous Mexicans to Islam. Drawing on ethnography in southern Spain, I suggest that the moral geographies of converts’ travel narratives illuminate racialised paradoxes of belonging at the heart of their reimaginings of the ummah and their place in it.