Global Ummah: Negotiating Transnational Muslim Identities

Abstract

Post-9/11 culture plays a significant role in redefining diasporic Muslim identities due to an inability or unwillingness of some diasporics to be fully accepted among host or home communities. This situation fosters feelings of alienation, exclusion, trauma and melancholy in such diasporics and deprives them of any sense of belonging. As a result of these pathologies of dislocation, diasporic identities are increasingly constructed on the basis of an imagined space that is not only geographically diverse, but also free from cultural artefacts of indigenousness. Since 9/11, Western public discourses have been raising questions over potential links between radical Islam, terrorism and Muslims, particularly because the terrorists who were involved in attacks on the World Trade Centre and the 7/7 London bombings were Western-educated Muslims. In this chapter I argue that it is largely due to the nature of emerging public narratives about the “war on terror” that second-generation diasporics in Britain — alienated from their cultures of origin and yet proud of their Muslim identities — are renegotiating their identities by affiliating with a global ummah.