Ummah in the translocal imaginations of migrant Muslims in Slovakia

Abstract

This study draws from ethnographic data of a scarcely researched region of Central Europe to show how migrant Muslims in Slovakia confront everyday translocality by reifying a single community of Muslims. This symbolic community is articulated in the concept of the ummah. Muslims in Slovakia are mostly migrants, since formation of a larger “native” Muslim population was historically limited. It will be argued that ummah is an imagined community that translates the political and religious narratives of a global Muslim community into the local group of Muslims and, in such way, enables Muslims to transcend mutual ethnocultural, national and social heterogeneity. Furthermore, this study will show four different ways how the ummah as an imagined single community is reified: (1) ummah as a set of functional networks; (2) ummah as a symbol to interpret migrant experience; (3) ummah as a network of trust; and (4) ummah as a symbol in political narratives.