Why architecture matters? some reflections on the articulations between Islam, migration and citizenship

Chair

Ester Gallo, University of Trento 

Abstract

The literature on home has focused on the importance of imagination and performativity in the making of places. In this article, I bring together the imagined and the material dimensions of home-making, to show how people (re)attach themselves to multiple places and, in the process, project idealized moral orders. These arguments draw on an ethnography of a mosque in Lisbon, established in 2000 by a group of Portuguese-Bangladeshi entrepreneurs, who have been negotiating with the munic- ipality for a space to accommodate its growing congregation. In 2012, the city hall announced the construction a new square in Lisbon, the “Moorish square,” a development project that would include several multifunctional spaces, some of which will be used to relocate this mosque. This session examines these negotiations as part of making a sense of home by my interlocutors from Bangladesh and, simultaneously, reveals the anxieties over the regulation and the place of Islam and Muslims in the city.