Sciiti in Italia – Il cammino dell'Islam minoritario in diaspora by Minoo Mirshahvalad (review)

Mirshahvalad's The Shi'a in Italy – journey of minority Islam in the diaspora fills a significant gap in the study of Islam in Europe that almost inevitably targets the majority Muslim population adhering to Sunni 'orthodoxy'. Focusing on this 'minority within a minority' affords the author a broad canvas to present an otherwise relatively unknown community of Muslims who have either chosen to make Italy their home or who, as Italians, have chosen to convert to the Shi'a path.

Unlike more established and larger Shi'a communities living in other parts of Europe, the diaspora in Italy is both dispersed and fragmented along ethnic lines—not unlike the Sunni communities who tend, for the same cultural and linguistic reasons, to stick together.¹

Mirshahvalad's participant observation study is the result of her comprehensive qualitative research into the most numerically significant Shi'a communities in thirteen Italian cities including Turin, Milan, Bologna, Trieste, Rome, and Capri. Significantly, the author positions herself as an 'Iranian woman' but this dual cultural, and no doubt bilingual background, add credence to Mirshahvalad's study aiding her access to groups of migrants who experience difficulties in integrating in the hosting country owing to linguistic and cultural barriers.

Although Mirshahvalad concedes there were difficulties on account of being a female, particularly among the predominantly male Pakistani and Afghan communities, she was nevertheless able to access women-only gatherings and moreover, as a non-muhajjaba,² the author was able to connect with the younger, Italian-born generation of 'genetic' Shi'as and again, through her bicultural background, she interviewed several Italian converts.

The book is organised in six chapters whose themes range from the ethnic composition of Shi'a groups, the various degrees of acculturation of members, the space used for worship and socio-religious gatherings, women as 'guardians of collective identity' in the public and private spheres, the notion of transnationalism and the crisis of authority, the discovery of the self and the Other and finally the search for pure Shi'ism.

The specificity of Shi'as in Italy consists in their relatively recent presence, their small number, and the fact they are less organised than their Sunni counterparts in the rest of Europe. Given this lack of a centralised organisation, most Shi'a communities sharing a similar ethnic or cultural background, gather in informal settings as well as online. The second chapter is dedicated to sacred space designated as a 'floating signifier'. Here the author departs from her initial empirical stance and moves into a more symbolic reading of sacred space, raising the scholarly proposition that the mosque as a circumscribed space should be questioned. Nevertheless, the chapter opens with the assertion that currently there are only six Sunni mosques and no Shi'a mosques in Italy (p. 41). This is not a reliable statistic, but it does not take away, again, the special situation in Italy with regards to Muslim places of worship. As the author goes on to explain, the main obstacle in the building of purpose-built mosques is the lack of understanding between the Muslim community and the Italian state. Indeed, this misunderstanding is sometimes compounded by anti-immigration policies as was the recent case of the auction of an Orthodox Christian church to the local Bergamo Muslim community.³

The lack of formal places of prostration provides an opening for alternative gathering places whose status is perhaps akin to the notion of 'liminal space' the author mentions in the introduction but one that does not resurface or undergo a substantiated analysis. And yet the discussion on the mosque fits this notion far more than the term 'floating' used in the title of the second chapter which evokes, misleadingly, Edo's eighteenth century 'floating world' (ukiyo) depicted in the famous woodcuts of Utagawa, Hiroshige and Hokusai amongst others. Perhaps owing to the fragmentation between various Shi'a communities in Italy, instead of building mosques, there...