Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora by Nazli Kibria (review)

Muslims in Motion: Islam and National Identity in the Bangladeshi Diaspora is a brilliant illustration of how global sociopolitical forces shape international migrants' experiences and aspirations. In this timely piece, Kibria explains how Bangladeshi Muslim migrants and their families in starkly different destinations insert themselves into their host societies by organizing their community life and constructing their identity. Furthermore, she addresses how the image of their country of origin plays out in their endeavors. She particularly looks at how the dynamics of the migrants' national identity as Bangladeshi and religious identity as Muslim inform their strategies for living in the present and their thoughts about the future.

With a succinct overview of the birth of Bangladesh and Islam's place in it, Kibria presents a historical background of international out-migration from Bangladesh that has spawned the Bangladeshi diaspora in the United Kingdom and the United States. In chapters 3 and 4, she addresses the question of these immigrants' reception in the United States and how they negotiate their identities as Bangladeshi and Muslim. She identifies a process of what her respondents call "racism" against Muslims in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, which created a condition in which these migrants felt the need to uphold their Bangladeshi identity as an alternative to their Muslim identity. In addition, the first-generation immigrants experienced class decline due to occupational downward mobility and loss of class-specific privileges and resources upon migration. They strived to regain these entities by maintaining transnational connections to their ancestral communities in Bangladesh. However, Kibria finds them encountering an inevitable obstacle—"the relative invisibility of Bangladesh as a country in America" (41). She argues that because of this invisibility, coupled with the stigma of poverty, political instability, and corruption, these immigrants cannot utilize their national origin to claim a counteridentity like other immigrant groups in the United States such as Chinese Americans or Indian Americans. She examines different types of immigrant associations through which these migrants organize their community life and belonging, and ironically, the immigrants' participation in these organizations reproduces and perpetuates their stigmatization, hence the propensity among these immigrants to search for alternative identity markers. This is where Islam comes in, as Kibria cogently argues. She illustrates how Islam serves as a strategic resource both for the first-generation immigrants who utilize it to keep their children "in line" and for the second-generation immigrants who adopt it as a more positive identity marker to escape the insignificant and stigmatized Bangladeshi identity and approach political and social integration in "Muslim America."

In contrast to the strong faith in "the American Dream" for their children among Bangladeshi immigrants in the United States, Kibria finds those in the United Kingdom are less optimistic because of their predominantly rural background and limited education compared to their U.S. counterparts. She recognizes that the lack of opportunities for upward mobility steers these migrants to participate in politics both in their community of settlement in Britain and in their community of origin in Bangladesh. They consolidate their transnational ties through sending remittances to Bangladesh that construct the ancestral community as a place for them to reclaim part of the "honor" they lost upon migration. They take respites from the routine life of hardship by going on vacation, and they build retirement destinations as a necessary safety net. Furthermore, they resort to transnational marriage to pass these ties down generations. However, Kibria observes elements of frustration and resentment among the younger generations of British-Bangladeshis with regard to their low socioeconomic condition as well as the degraded identity of their community. Consequently, the younger generation tends to embrace Islam as a way to mainstream themselves and break through the constrained life and stigmatized identity as Bangladeshi. This, Kibria appropriately argues, leads to intergenerational conflict and weakens the transnational ties these migrants nurture in their...