Description
Most studies on second-generation Muslims explore local or national factors that lead to the prominence of religious identity over national identity, while others use a transnational lens to capture how identity formation is influenced from within a transnational space. This paper instead takes the global system as the unit of analysis and explores how processes of globalisation are shaping second-generation Iraqi Shia identity in the UK diaspora. While Muslims in the West have been positioned within an external clash of civilisations narrative in the Western public imagination, problematising their place in Western society, they are also said to experience an internal clash of identity and belonging in diaspora. The assumption is that Muslims have to choose either Islam or the West, or the identities of either their former homelands or countries of settlement to fit in. This paper argues that these tensions do not reflect the realities of lived religion in globality. Instead, I argue that globalisation creates the means by which social identities are chosen from a diverse array of worldly inputs allowing individuals to invent their own places and spaces of belonging both materially and imaginatively. 1.5 and second-generation Iraqi Shia negotiate being a Muslim in the West and an Iraqi living in diaspora through their glocalised Shiism which allows them to belong in multiple places and spaces. Their chosen religious identity is however is not fixed but selective, fluid and changeable, and always in process as it interacts with global media, events, transnational networks and local contexts. delineating individual and alternative cartographies of belonging (Levitt, 2003, p.861).
