HoLi · 'House of Light': home and piety in the Gülen Movement

'House of Light': home and piety in the Gülen Movement

In the Social Sciences, the concept of “home” has been considered a tool to explore the different ways in which people “make home” and feel “at home in the world”. Home is a multidimensional idea that can evoke a wide range of meanings and provide various senses that are particularly critical to the experience of feeling at ease in an unpredictable and often complicated world, particularly in situations of forced migration. Research on Muslim diasporic communities has shown that the Islamic concept of “hicret” (migration in Turkish) is a useful framework for understanding how practicing Muslims experience migration and create a Muslim space of their own wherever they settle. Although important works have discussed how committed Muslim migrants envision and experience hicret, less attention has been given to the roles of women in religious migration and homemaking in exile, as well as the effects of exile on their subjectivity and social trajectories. In the last thirty years, there has been an increasing interest in female migration; however, ethnographies that focus on pious Muslim women remain scarce in academic literature. This lack may be attributed to the limited access researchers have to the private lives of pious Muslim women. This research project aims to fill this gap and contribute to the anthropological understanding of the ways in which pious Muslim women experience exile and the resulting effects on their individual trajectories and social practices. The overall scientific objective of this research project is to understand how certain forms of interpreting and practicing Islam influence the experiences of exile and homemaking among committed Muslim women in Europe. This has been achieved through the following sub-objectives: 1) to explore how committed Turkish Muslim women migrants experience Islam in the secular contexts of Belgium and the Netherlands; 2) to investigate the role of religious significations of hicret (migration) in these women’s experiences of exile; 3) to conduct a comparative analysis of committed Turkish Muslim women migrants in Europe and those in South America; 4) to challenge and deconstruct misleading perceptions of Islam and Muslims, particularly concerning Muslim women, that exist within European society. This project will contribute to ongoing debates on the relationship between forced migration and homemaking, with a specific focus on how Islamic beliefs and practices shape individuals’ sense of home, viewed from a gendered perspective. Additionally, by engaging with the concept of hicret, this work will deepen scholarly understanding of how forced migrants make sense of exile and build a home where they can develop daily routines that reflect their ethics and worldview. HoLi will provide a theoretically informed, in-depth ethnographic account of the processual and performative dimensions of homemaking among Turkish Muslim forced migrants in the European context, focusing on the role that Islam plays in shaping their sense of exile, as well as of home in a situation of forced migration. It will consider intersectional aspects of experiences of exile, that is, how migration and homemaking intertwine with religion, gender, class, education, and ethnicity. To this end, I will conduct fieldwork through participant observation and semi-structured interviews on experiences of exile and homemaking among Turkish Muslim women forced migrants in Belgium (in the Flemish area) and the Netherlands (The Hague and Amsterdam and its surroundings).

Data: CORDIS, © European Union