Despite having become deeply assimilated into her husband’s country, it was only many years later—when she witnessed her party-going Muslim friends consume alcohol, smoke hashish and still make time to catch up on their missed salaat (prayers) at the end of each day, and when she saw an Islamic revival take place in Morocco—that Nada realised living in Europe for so long had caused her to lose her identity. This eventually sparked a spiritual awakening:
When I visited Morocco and saw others praying it woke me up. I realised that I’m Muslim by name only. I saw some of my cousins and my friends stop drinking alcohol—stop everything, and fast and start praying during the month of Ramadan. This was a sign for me that I also have to start.
Iman’s search, which began during her childhood in her native Denmark, demonstrates how her ‘free-floating’ feelings caused her to think about her parents’ answers to certain existential questions:
They told me when you die it’s like you’re going into a long sleep and never waking up. I couldn’t accept that this is all for nothing, that there’s no purpose behind anything. It just didn’t make sense.
Reinterpreting this memory using Salafi discourse, Iman spoke of how she feared losing the fitrah (innate disposition) towards her Creator that she had as a child and began a physical and spiritual journey to fill the hole where she felt ‘something was missing’. During her adolescence, Iman spent a few months in America, believing what she was searching for might be found there. This proved unsuccessful, so she moved to London, but still felt a void in her life:
When I moved to London, I still had this feeling that I was searching for something. I actually went to a Catholic church and I tried to pray there just to see if it’s the right religion, because I thought it was the one that made the most sense so far.
Iman’s search ended when she found Salafism, although she noted the irony of ultimately becoming a Muslim because of the anti-Muslim attitudes to which she had been subjected for so long. At school, her religious education teacher had tried his utmost to discredit the religion by showing the class a newspaper article “about a Turkish man who killed his female relatives as a warning that ‘Muslims are dangerous’”, illustrating the effects of the institutionalised anti-Muslim hatred present in parts of mainland Europe[1].
Similarly, Farida always felt a ‘natural’ tendency towards religion, prayer and thinking about the Hereafter. However, it was not in Somalia, where she was born, or the other Muslim countries in which she had lived that she felt such a strong pull towards religion. Rather, a “shift from a racial to an ethno-religious understanding” of her identity became more pronounced once she came to Europe (Zempi and Awan 2019:164) and emerged as a result of being made to feel like an ‘outsider’. The hardships Farida faced when trying to fulfil the basic pillars of Islam in Denmark contributed to a more intensified religious experience:
Whenever we tried to pray, they’d said: “No, this isn’t a place for praying, it’s a place for studying! You have to wait until you go back home. You aren’t allowed to pray here.” So, we used to make the excuse to use the toilet, sneak into empty classrooms, and hide and pray there quickly. In the winter when the prayers came in close together, it was hard upon us.
[1] For more information on the prevalence of anti-Muslim incidents occurring in educational institutions, see TellMAMA (2016), page 38.
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