‘Home is gone!’ – The Desire to Belong and the Renegotiation of Home
Iram Khawaja
Iram Khawaja is a postdoc at the Department of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen,
Denmark. She is a trained psychologist and has researched ethnic and religious minorities since
2001. She did her doctoral dissertation on young Muslims’ constructions of identity, collectivity
and belonging and is currently working on a project on Islam and the Danish municipal primary and
lower secondary school.
Abstract
The article is based on a study of young Muslims’ constructions of belonging, home and identity
and offers an understanding of belonging as a process that traverses multiple locations, communities
and points of identification. A focus on the embodied processes of becoming and home as a desire
to belong enables a dynamic and multilayered understanding of how young Muslims in Denmark
create emotional and spatial points of belonging. For many, Muslimness is used as a basis for
constructing belonging anywhere in the world, but Muslimness intersects with other positionings
and embodied experiences of non-belonging. Home is thus deconstructed and, in some ways,
reconstructed as a multidirectional desire to be seen as somebody who truly and naturally belongs.
Keywords: Belonging, Muslimness, home, diaspora, desire.
Introduction
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I am not home anywhere but I am home wherever there are Muslims and that is what fascinates me
about it. I can go here to a Muslim community and get along [...] And I am gonna be accepted
because I am a Muslim (Azam).
This quote is from an interview I conducted with Azam, who participated in my doctoral study of
young Muslims’ constructions of identity and belonging in religious communities in Copenhagen
(Khawaja). Azam was 36 years old, worked as a consultant and had come to Copenhagen from
Senegal. He had lived in Denmark for seven years. This quote summarises well what we need to
understand in regard to belonging and religiosity. Being a Muslim is here described as a means for
getting along and being able to belong anywhere in the world. In this sense, religion is used as a
marker of both identity and belonging, but what does it mean to belong? How do subjects create
emotional and spatial points of belonging? And how is this process of belonging connected to
specific subject positions and locations? I will address these questions by drawing on young
Muslims’ narratives of home and community. My aim is to explore the intersection between
religion, ethnicity and belonging by focusing on the concept of desire. Desire emphasises the
embodied and affective aspects of belonging and the process of becoming who you think you are.
The article thus nuances existing ways of understanding home and belonging as bound to a specific
location. The analysis of young Muslims’ narratives shows that belonging is a matter of desire, and
desire can be multidirectional. There is more than one way of belonging, and we need to look at
these ways in more detail if we want to understand what it means to be a young Muslim today (also
see Abbas; Skrbiš et al.). I will begin with an introduction to the study and its context and then
move on to look more closely at how desire can be used as a conceptual tool concerning the
narratives of belonging and home of young Muslims.
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Home and Belonging – The Study
The majority of the Muslim population in Denmark is comprised of immigrant workers, who came
to the country in the period 1968-1973 – when Denmark needed to import workers – and their
offspring, who are now second- or third-generation immigrants. Another large group consists of
refugees and asylum seekers, who came to the country more recently from different locations, such
as the former Yugoslavia, Somalia, Iraq and Iran. Another much smaller, but growing group
consists of converts to Islam, who are ethnic Danes or European in origin. My sample of research
participants encompassed these different groups, but a majority of them came from the first group
of female and male second- and third-generation immigrants, who were born and raised in
Denmark.
The Danish government has introduced increasingly restrictive laws on immigration in the past
twenty years in combination with a marked right-wing turn on the political scene – in some ways
similar to developments in the Netherlands and France. The head scarf, arranged marriages and the
concept of honour are hotly debated issues, and most often the category of ethnic otherness is
conflated with Muslimness with a strong emphasis on Muslims being people who do not truly
belong in Denmark. Concepts of belonging and home are still very much influenced by the
discourse of an original homeland that is ethnically and nationally defined. The three narratives I
will bring into play in this article represent different stories of migration and home: Azam came to
Denmark recently, Ahmed came to the country as a child, and Zahid was born and raised in
Denmark. The three Muslim men are shown to construct belonging and home in different, but
interconnected ways that fundamentally challenge the notion of home as limited and unilaterally
defined by ethnicity, nationality or geographical borders.
The study, which is based in part on the narratives of Zahid, Azam and Ahmed, was conducted in
the years 2006-2009. I did fieldwork in Copenhagen in different organisations and communities that
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defined themselves as Islamic. The fieldwork consisted of participant observations of gatherings
and meetings in the chosen organisations and qualitative interviews with young women and men
(18-36 years), who defined themselves as Muslims and who were associated with these
communities. In the interviews I focused on eliciting everyday life narratives about their
negotiations and constructions of community, religiosity and identity.
Many of the young men and women I interviewed talked about home, but home had many different
meanings. Home could be the place of birth, where the person had been raised, where the person
currently lived, it could be a certain community where the person felt at home, or it could be an
idealised and imaginary construction of a ‘somewhere’ far away – a diasporic construction of home
in its classical sense (also see Mason; Abdelhady, ‘Representing’). Some men and women defined
Denmark as their home, as the place they belonged to, others mentioned specific locations in
Denmark where they felt at home, and yet others, such as Azam, did not limit themselves to
national territories in their search for a home or a sense of belonging. Belonging was in these
narratives connected to the people the interviewees lived among and how they were able to present
themselves among these people. For many of the young Muslims a sense of belonging was created
through their participation in specific religiously defined communities, and in this way Muslimness
became a vehicle for the construction of transnational belonging. Much has been written about
home and belonging (e.g. Brah; Probyn; Ahmed et al.; Abdelhady, ‘Beyond Home’; hooks), and
new studies show that home is not merely a matter of where a person lives, but has to be seen as a
complex and dynamic process of fixation and movement (Abdelhady, ‘Beyond Home’; YuvalDavies; Mason; Nowicka). The concept of belonging thus emerges as a complex phenomenon, and
in the light of existing literature and the narratives of the young Muslim men and women I
interviewed it is vital to be able to capture both the points of fixation concerning place, location and
context as well as the points of movement and transgressions from these points of fixation. What is
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needed in studies of the concept of belonging is a conceptual framework that enables the scholar to
encompass this dynamic interplay of fixation and movement. I found the concept of desire (Davies,
‘The Problem’) and the focus on the embodied processes of becoming and subjectification1
(Foucault, ‘Discipline’, ‘The Subject’; Butler) very useful in this regard. I will shortly describe
these theoretical perspectives, before I present Zahid’s, Azam’s and Ahmed’s narratives on
belonging and home.
Home Is Where the Heart Is? – The Desire to Belong
The concept of desire is poignant in regard to understanding what belonging is. Bronwyn Davies
([In]scribing)and Judith Butler have worked with the concept of desire in an attempt to understand
the emotional and embodied aspects of the processes of subjectification. Subjectification and the
focus on the discursive processes of becoming are inspired by Michel Foucault’s (‘Discipline’)
work on how subjects become who they think they are through complex and power relational
societal and historical processes that enable or disable certain versions of subjectivity. To become a
subject is a matter of coming into existence through discourses that make certain versions, actions
and embodiments of subjecthood possible. In order for a person to position herself as a recognisable
and accepted being in a certain context, the person has to read, decode and subjectify herself to the
discursive logic prevalent in this context. In this way, the person comes into being in a process of
becoming somebody someone can categorise, position and interact with. Identity and ethnicity are,
in this perspective, not a matter of a core that is fixed and stable over time; they are rather seen as
relational and discursive processes (also see Bhabha; Gergen; Hall). An important aspect in this
respect is that the subject is not formed in a void; the processes of formation must be seen as
basically embodied, contextual and historical. My interest in becoming thus entails a focus on the
discursive and embodied practice and performance of belonging. Belonging is not only about
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belonging to a place; it is also about ‘being’ and very much about identity. This is a point especially
stressed by Elspeth Probyn, who argues that the concept should be seen as ‘be-longing’ and, in this
way, encompass both a focus on being (identity) and longing (desire). In the context of the young
Muslims and the question of why they participate in religiously defined communities, desire makes
it possible to see community and belonging as interconnected. Desire in relation to community is
based on the desire to belong, to be seen and recognised as part of the community – a desire that has
also been termed a ‘longing for belonging’ (Davies, [In]scribing; Brah; Yuval-Davies; Diprose).
But what is the difference between desire and belonging? Desire does not have a predetermined aim
or direction (Butler), but it describes a sense of a direction. Belonging is especially used in social
anthropology and postcolonial theory and research (Brah; Yuval-Davies; Anthias), whereas desire is
developed in a theoretical poststructuralist framework (Davies, ‘The Problem’, [In]scribing; Butler;
Søndergaard). The two concepts have been developed in different theoretical traditions, but this is
not a hindrance to using them in relation to each other, because both concepts highlight a drive or a
longing for something which is most often not within reach. Belonging entails a ‘longing’, a desire
(also see Walsh 126; Scheibelhofer 321), and a combined focus on desire in relation to the
embodied dimensions of becoming provides us with a conceptual framework for understanding
belonging not only as a discursive and reflexive process, but rather as an affective and embodied
process.2 This will be more evident in the analysis of the narratives of the young Muslims.
Muslimness and Belonging
As seen in the quote from the interview with Azam, being a Muslim is for many a basis for the
construction of belonging. This is also evident from Zahid’s narrative. Zahid was 36 years old, a
consultant and a member of the board of the organisation Muslims in Dialogue. Being a Muslim is
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viewed as the primary marker of commonality among the members of this organisation, which is
also very clearly expressed by Zahid:
I think for me it very early became clear, what is cultural and what is Islamic […] but
in high school I very early on became aware of the fact that I was a Muslim first, that I
am not a Pakistani, and I was neither a Dane, but I was a Muslim first and foremost. I
didn’t and don’t see nationality as making any difference.
Zahid’s understanding of himself as a Muslim can first and foremost be seen as an expression of a
negotiation of the different national, ethnic and religious categories he can position himself in.
Muslimness is given first priority, and this can be seen in the light of a more general discursive
tendency among young Muslims living in the West, who understand and practice Islam as a religion
which should be purified of ethnic, cultural and national influences (see also Roy). I asked Zahid
what it means to be a Muslim ‘first and foremost’, and he replied:
Well, it means that no matter where you are thrown in the world, and no matter how
bad the atmosphere might be at that particular place, then you know, you can go
anywhere in the world and your Islamic base will be with you. The surroundings
might be foreign to you, but you will have your Islamic base, which is the primary
identity. In this way, I feel rooted to Denmark in many ways, but if, for example, I
ended up in Australia, I would also be able to live there. There will be some ups and
downs, I think, socially, but I think I will somehow be able to find a place to stand, but
I would probably naturally seek out and turn towards religious communities.
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Liisa Malkki highlights the importance of being aware that the processes of self-construction and
belonging are not so much about ‘roots’, but about ‘routes’ (also see Gilroy). Zahid is talking about
his experience of being rooted in Denmark, but his Muslim positioning enables him to direct his
desire to belong in translocal and national directions. He can position himself as free from
geographical, local and cultural contexts and create news routes into the world. Olivier Roy also
points to this tendency among young Muslims in his study of ‘Globalised Islam’: ‘The new
generation of educated, Western born-again Muslims do not want to be Pakistanis or Turks; they
want to be Muslims first’ (25).
In this light, Zahid, like many of the other men and women in my study, is actively engaged in
moving away from versions of a ‘cultural Islam’, which is most often credited to the parent
generation, and towards a more ‘original’ Islam that is free of cultural and national limits (Vertovec;
Abbas). Zahid’s desire to belong is here embedded in a transnational sense of being a Muslim.
It is here worth noting the importance of being able to connect with other Muslims; it seems to be
natural forZahid to seek out other religious communities. This ‘naturalness’ could be seen as an
expression of a desire for security and a desire to be among peers.
The sense of commonality and familiarity in regard to the position of being a Muslim was also
evident in the quote by Azam. It can be seen as an underlying expression of the discourse of and
desire for a global Muslim Ummah (Roy). The idea of a global Muslim Ummah is based on an
understanding derived from the religious doctrine of Islam, which argues that all Muslims are
essentially united as brothers and sisters in a global community, where the colour of a person’s hair
or skin, national background or ethnicity make no difference. In this way, it is also possible to
understand Zahid’s narrative as an expression of a diasporic and transnational construction of
belonging. The desire for home is here not linked to location, ethnicity or nationality as such, but to
a sense of a religious community.
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The Embodiment of Non-belonging
As noted in Zahid’s narrative, belonging is not only a matter of where you are from, but also where
you are going (Gilroy); it is about the routes in the world you can create and take. However, some
routes end up in a feeling of non-belonging and the experience of having to reconstruct the sense of
desire for home. This was very apparent in Ahmed’s narrative about going to Iraq. At the time of
the interview, Ahmed was 26 years old and a trained dentist. His family had come to Denmark from
Iraq when he was 10 years old. He had been living in Copenhagen for the past 18 years, and he was
an active member of a Shiite Muslim youth organisation. When he talked about Iraq, it was in terms
of belonging through blood and land. Whereas Malkki uses the botanical metaphor of roots, we can
here see examples of biological (blood) and geographical (land/earth) metaphors of belonging
denoting a link to a place that is located ‘there’, but which Ahmed feels a strong connection to in
the ‘here’ he is living in, Copenhagen. This apparently strong sense of belonging is challenged
when he visits Iraq. In the following interview excerpt Ahmed talks about his first visit to Iraq:
I went to Iraq for the first time in my life in 2004 […] You speak the same language,
same dialect and have the same religion, right? You have the same sense of belonging
and same background, right? But still not, I mean you don’t think in the same way
there, you don’t look at things in the same way, and okay you have the same colour of
skin and same blood, but you are not the same […] Because the way we act, the way
we walk, the way we talk, the way we scratch ourselves on the cheek – it is totally
different! For example just the way we look at stuff. The way we ask questions, our
body language is totally different, and our wordings are different, so when you speak
with them, they can hear that it is Iraqi, but okay, ‘where do you come from?’ […] Of
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course you try to wear the same clothes as them, and all. That’s not the issue. You also
look like them as long as you don’t speak up. But I think they are able to look at
people, how they act, how they are, and know.
Many of the young Muslims I interviewed recounted concurrent feelings of belonging and
alienation concerning a specific place. In Baghdad, Ahmed was unable to walk down the street
without being positioned as somebody who does not really belong. His body, despite its apparent
likeness to other Iraqis in hair and skin colour, somehow betrayed him. His desire to be seen as
somebody who naturally belonged was countered by the looks and the questions he was met with.
The locals still ask him, ‘Where do you come from?’ No other question can so abruptly wake a
person up from the illusion of belonging. Interestingly, this question is also asked of Ahmed, maybe
not directly, but through the glances and ways people react to his presence in Denmark. The
experience of non-belonging also occurs in other locations, for instance when he is walking down
the street in one of Copenhagen’s upper-class areas, Hellerup. Here he also feels like someone who
does not belong. It is different when he is moving about in the area he was born and raised in,
Amager,3 where he does not feel pointed at as someone who needs to explain his origins. Ahmed
talks about walking down the street in Denmark and Iraq, respectively, and says, ‘I think it is
different in regard to where you live, right. I have been living with my parents in Amager since ‘92,
up until I got married in 2003. That is around 11 years. And where one lives, one doesn’t think
about it right?’
First, Ahmed’s narratives of non-belonging reveal that belonging is very much an embodied
experience. Second, it becomes evident that the desire to belong is connected to place and location
in diverse and complex ways. The place where he has grown up and knows well is invested with a
sense of naturalness. Belonging can, in this sense, be seen as bound to a feeling of not having to
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answer or think about the ever-lurking question, ‘Where do you come from?’ It is given. Iraq is the
place Ahmed says he ‘comes from’, but at the same time it is not the place he feels at home in. It is
possible to feel connected to a ‘there’ far away from Denmark and, on another level, feel at home
and at ease in certain contexts in Denmark. To feel at home and to belong are, in this regard, two
interlinked, but not always identical processes. Avtar Brah distinguishes between ‘feeling at home’
and ‘declaring a place as home’ (197), which draws our attention to the many ways in which it is
possible to negotiate the desire to belong (also see Nowicka 79). The desire for home and a
homeland/motherland might here be intersecting in alternative ways. In Ahmed’s narrative,
homeland becomes the far away diasporic ‘there’, while home becomes the local and nearby ‘here’
that he knows and feels safe in. Daphne Winland’s work with Croats’ diasporic belonging to
Canada and Croatia shows some of the same tendencies. She talks about the construction of a
certain ‘homing desire’, which is defined as a ‘sense of place that is local in its materialization’ but
at the same time ‘transnational in its symbolic reach’ (Winland 695). Homing desires can be
multilocational and -functional, and with this perspective in mind it is not possible to maintain the
common understanding of a simple one-to-one relation between nationality, identity and belonging.
It is much more complex. Many of the young Muslims, like Ahmed, do not position themselves as
Danes; however, their narrations reveal that they only really feel at home in Denmark. Feeling at
home and a sense of belonging is thus not only about what a person discursively constructs as her
homeland, and how she positions herself; it is also very much about the actual embodied desire and
possibility of moving about and being seen as someone who truly and naturally belongs. Is it then
possible to rewrite the famous saying, home is where the heart is, to home is where the desire to
belong is enacted? Home can, in this sense, be the diasporic ‘there’, the local street you live in, the
community you have chosen to take part in or the sense of being a Muslim. In any case, it is related
to the desire to be seen as someone who does not need to explain or defend her presence (Kondo;
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Mason). Hence, belonging is not so much about place or location, which is in keeping with
Magdalena Nowicka’s fieldwork among a group of transnational and mobile professionals. She
shows how home is constructed in diverse ways in relation not only to location, but also in relation
to people, practices and objects. She writes, ‘Home can be at the same time an emotional place of
origin, the place where one grew up in a family, and a point of departure for the rest of one’s life. At
the same time home is something that one constructs, not a particular place, not a location but an
entity in becoming’ (77).
Ahmed, Azam and Zahid are not transnational professionals, like the research participants in
Nowicka’s study, but their experiences of migration and their transnational relations and homing
desires, which go beyond Denmark, all help to create an experiential basis for the same type of
deconstruction and reconstruction of home. The reconstruction and negotiation of the desire to
belong is thus not only related to the categories Muslim and Ethnic Other, even though it does play
an important role in their narratives; it is also very much associated with the mobility and global
relations that are essential parts of all of their lives. In Azam’s narrative about going back to
Senegal, it is further revealed how his sense of belonging has to be renegotiated in regard to a desire
of being at home everywhere.
‘Home Is Gone!’
The experience of being Other in places where a person has constructed a sense of belonging is also
touched upon in Azam’s narrative:
A: Because at the end of the day, I no longer have that sense of belonging to a specific
and definite place. To give you an example, when I go back to Senegal, whenever it is,
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you know, close, I look forward, telling everybody ‘I am going home’. But the
moment I step there, people say, ‘Oh, where do you come from?’ And, you know, I
am not home, you know. [Laughs] […]
I: And then you say in Senegal they also ask you, so where is home then?
A: [Laughs] That’s it, that’s it, I mean, home is gone! [Laughs] Yeah, the last episode,
I was with my brother, we went to Senegal to go north, you know, where I was born.
So we rented a car, so we stopped at a station to tank, and this young guy came to me
and he was selling some items, I don’t know what they were. He said, ‘Do you want to
buy?’ And I said, ‘Seriously no’, and he said, ‘Please buy’, and I said, ‘Why, I don’t
need this, I am sorry’. He said, ‘If you do not buy it, who else is going to buy it?’ And
I said, ‘What do you mean?’ ‘Well, I can see you do not come from here’. [Laughs]
And I am as dark as anybody else but I don’t know, they can see it somehow, I have
no idea. [...] I don’t know, I cannot tell. I was absolutely so banal, when I show up in a
T-shirt and some clip clap, I don’t know. But they can see it. And even if I am very
dark as you see me now, when I am in Senegal actually, they can see that I am
actually not that burned as they are. I don’t know, so it’s a very, yeah, very weird
situation. So I am not home anywhere but I am home wherever there is Muslim and
that is what fascinates me about it. I can go here to a Muslim community and get
along. And I am gonna be accepted because I am a Muslim. But the danger is, you
should not take that as a refuge. That’s where the danger starts because when you do
so, you are gonna cut off the rest of the world. And I am not willing to do that. I am
gonna be their home as I am gonna be home with a bunch of Buddhist or a bunch of
Atheist, I don’t care. So I am not going to be limited by religion neither by anything
else.
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This example is telling of how the body again becomes an active marker of belonging or nonbelonging. Here it is expressed in the colour of Azam’s skin. His body reveals to others around him
that even though he ‘comes from’ Senegal, he cannot pass as someone who truly belongs there.
Azam’s and Ahmed’s narratives can be read as narratives about how the experience of going back
home becomes an experience of never really being able to go back or be seen as someone who
belongs (see also Safran; Mason; Abdelhady, ‘Representing’). As Victoria Mason points out in her
work on the Palestinian diaspora, this desire for home, and going back and not finding it, is very
much related to identity: ‘The basis of identity is not only lost, but never existed, and the dream of
‘returning’ represents a search for identity as much as for a place’ (Mason 274).
This applies to both Ahmed and Azam, who go back to a place they call home only to discover that
they have to redirect their homing desires, resulting in a general destabilisation of home, belonging
and identity. Ahmed operates with a diversified homing desire that is directed towards both the
local and the transnational, while Zahid decentralises home to everywhere in the world where there
are other Muslim communities. Azam deterritorialises home to anywhere he can find like-minded
people (also see Abdelhady, ‘Representing’). In the subject positions ‘Muslim’ and ‘citizen of the
world’ he can construct a cosmopolitan sense of identity and find a base for his desire to belong.
This is done actively throughout his everyday life, where he uses the Internet as an active homing
device (Brah; Cohen; Bryson et al.) to stay updated on what is happening in the world. This can be
seen as a diasporic form of belonging, as the homing desire is not restricted to others of the same
religion or ethnicity. Delia Abdelhady also touches on this point in her fieldwork on the Lebanese
diaspora in Canada, France and Australia, where she sees that ‘the multiple worlds in which
members of the diaspora live are not confined to co-nationals and co-ethnics, but expand to include
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others who share a similar sense of belonging and acting in the world at large’ (‘Beyond Home’
448). But how are we to understand diaspora in relation to the desire to belong?
The Diasporic Home and the Generalised Homelessness
Traditionally, the understanding of the construction of a diasporic home has been of a person who
orientates her desire to belong to a specific location, a ‘there’, which is far from the ‘here’ in which
the person lives (Cohen). This was, for example, evident in Ahmed’s narrative about belonging to
Iraq. Roy touches on the issue of diaspora with regard to Muslimness and the community of
belonging to the religion Islam. He uses the concept of diaspora to understand Muslims’ global
ways of orientating themselves towards the world, and diaspora is in this respect seen as connected
to a person’s belonging to a specific homeland that she longs for and tries to maintain a relation to
(Roy 105). This is a very traditional way of understanding diaspora and belonging, where location
and place are the centre of attention. The young men and women I talked to presented another
picture of diasporic belonging and home. Location is important and the construction of homeland is
seen in many of the young Muslims’ narratives, but more is at stake and must be taken into account
if we want to understand their desires for belonging and identity. The lines of desire that traverse
the young Muslims’ narratives are multiple and attach themselves to many different places,
positions and contexts. One has to follow these lines of desire to understand that belonging is bound
not only to location; more often it is about where and how it is possible for the subject to be without
being questioned or looked at as an Other, and this process is very much embodied and
performative. Much work has been done on the concept and phenomenon of diaspora, which points
to this tendency (Ahmed et al.; Hall; Abdelhady, ‘Beyond Home’, ‘Representing’; Mason), where
the construction of belonging is intertwined with a reconstruction process as well as a
deconstruction process (also see Singla et al.): a process where home, on the one hand, is upheld as
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the local and known context, and, on the other hand, is renegotiated as the home ‘there’, which is
lost or reconstructed as an abstract entity, united in a global Islamic Ummah. This process of
negotiating the desire for home and belonging is not only relevant to young Muslims or people with
an ethnic minority background. As early as 1978, Edward Said wrote that our world is characterised
by ‘a generalized condition of homelessness’ (Said 18), and this is even more true for the world we
live in today, which is increasingly defined by globalisation, deterritorialisation and transnational
relations (Imbert). The desire to belong must also consider the subjects we assume ‘naturally’
belong. The position as native Iraqi, Dane or Senegalese is not given, as one might think. Brah
suggests that we use the concept of ‘diaspora space’ as a way of conceptualising the
intersectionality of diaspora, dis/location and the construction of home. She argues that diaspora
space is ‘where multiple subject positions are juxtaposed, contested, proclaimed or disavowed;
where the accepted and the transgressive imperceptily mingle even while these syncretic forms may
be disclaimed in the name of purity and tradition’ (208).
Diaspora space is not only about the Others, that is, the minoritised subjects who came to the
country or whose life stories have been defined by generational migration; it should also encompass
the subjects we would normally define as naturally belonging. In this perspective, there is nothing
natural about belonging, other than the feeling of being someone who naturally belongs. The desire
to belong must thus be seen as an always negotiated and contested desire, which is never given,
neither for the ‘native’ nor for the ‘non-native’.
Concluding Words
The concept of desire makes it possible to explore the complex intersections of religion, community
and identity by focusing our attention on the embodied sense of belonging and non-belonging. If
home is seen as intrinsically connected to the processes of desire and embodied enactments of
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belonging, the concept is not only relevant in relation to location and place. It has to be seen as
bound to multiple ways of constructing points of homing desires. It has to be seen in relation to the
dynamics of fixation and movement, of reconstructing and, at the same time, deconstructing what
we know as home. Home is, in this respect, conceptualised as a multidirectional desire that can be
invested in different locations, communities and subject positions. Muslimness is used in this way
by many young Muslims as a resource for positioning themselves as someone who belongs
anywhere in the world. Home is where there are other Muslims, and in this way the desire to belong
is not based on location, place and nation as such; instead, it is related to the question of religion
and community. Ahmed, for example, constructs a clear, geographically-demarcated location and
land in his construction of Iraq as the place he belongs to, but, at the same time, home is also the
local area in Denmark he has lived in for several years. Other narratives demonstrate that
Muslimness and communities of Muslims are used as points of belonging. Islam and the Muslim
Ummah seem, in this way, to become a ‘home’ to strive and long for, even though the reality of this
home might be very different from the idealized sense of it. Ahmed experiences this first hand when
visiting Iraq, which is in contrast to Zahid who is hypothetically thinking about shifting to
Australia. Furthermore, in both Azam’s and Zahid’s narratives the subject position of Muslim is a
basis for the construction of a transnational desire to belong, but Azam takes this a step further by
not limiting himself to the category of Muslimness.
Most of the young Muslims I interviewed mention the experience of losing their home – or rather
having the construction of belonging challenged and destabilised. Most often this experience of
non-belonging is characterised by the subject’s body being read and positioned as someone who
does not truly belong. The way a person talks, the way a person walks and the colour of a person’s
skin are telling markers of Otherness. Home and the desire to belong must thus be renegotiated. It is
worth noting, that Azam’s statement that “home is gone!” is not imbued with an overarching sense
17
of loss and despair. It is rather a point of departure for his cosmopolitan and dynamic sense of
home. The experience of non-belonging and the destabilization of home are in this way not always
negative or counterproductive experiences - on the contrary they can be the basis for new ways of
constructing and orientating one’s homing desires. In this way, the construction of diasporic homes
must be seen as not only a condition of the Others trying to uphold a connection to a “there” far
away, but has to be seen as a generalized condition of trying to find a way to truly belong.
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1
Subjectification as a concept draws on a Foucauldian understanding of the subject’s becoming. The subject comes into
existence in a double relation to the existing discourses in a society. Discourse denotes particular ways of understanding
and speaking of a subject or a phenomenon. Discourses are power relational and dynamic and always in play with
regard to how it is possible to see, think or act. The process of subjectification, in this way, offers a power relational
focus on how and in which ways it is possible to become the specific subject you understand yourself to be.
2
From this perspective the body is not understood as merely a biological entity, but rather seen as ‘physical field sites
upon which the world inscribes itself – places to which others come and make their difference, places like any other
place – localised and with continuously negotiated boundaries and subregions’ (Nast 95 in Davies, [In]scribing 40).
3
Amager is a mixed social class area of Copenhagen, but traditionally it was a working class area.
23