“Assalamu ʿAlaykum, Can We Add This Sister?”
WhatsApp Group Chat as a Homemaking Practice among Dutch-Speaking Muhajirat in Morocco
In: Religion and GenderSearch for other papers by Nina ter Laan in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
This article examines the use of a WhatsApp chat group by Dutch and Belgian Muslim women (born or converted), who are considering or made hijra (religiously inspired migration to a Muslim country) to Morocco. I argue that WhatsApp plays a crucial role in facilitating and narrating these women’s migration by providing a support network and shaping a gendered sense of community and religious belonging. Drawing on theories of religion and gender, migration, and digital media, I conceptualize WhatsApp in the context of hijra to Morocco as a social practice of homemaking that helps alleviate the precarious conditions these women find themselves in. This article also illustrates the complex entanglement of offline and online realities by highlighting how my interlocutors’ interactions in this WhatsApp group foster a trans-local Muslim ‘sisterhood,’ that informs their offline practices and experiences of hijra to Morocco.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Al-Rawi, Ahmed. 2017. ‘Video Games, Terrorism, and ISIS’s Jihad 3.0’, Terrorism and Political Violence 30:4, 740–760.
-
Bareither, Christoph. 2019. ‘Doing Emotion through Digital Media: An Ethnographic Perspective on Media Practices and Emotional Affordances’, Ethnologia Europaea 49:1, 7–23.
-
Baumgartner, Christoph. 2019. ‘(Not) Shaking Hands with People of the Opposite Sex: Civility, National Identity, and Accommodation’ in Jonathan Seglow and Andrew Shorten (eds.), Religion and Political Theory: Secularism, Accommodation and the New Challenges of Religious Diversity, London: Rowman and Littlefield International, 119–136.
-
Becker, Carmen. 2013. ‘Learning to Be Authentic. Religious Practices of German and Dutch Muslims Following the Salafiyya in Forums and Chat Rooms’, PhD thesis, Radboud University.
-
Beekers, Daan 2021. Young Muslims and Christians in a Secular Europe: Pursuing Religious Commitment in the Netherlands, London: Bloomsbury.
-
Bilecen, B. 2017. ‘Home-making Practices and Social Protection Across Borders: An Example of Turkish Migrants Living in Germany’, Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 32:1, 77–90.
-
Blommaert, Jan. 2018. Durkheim and the Internet: On Sociolinguistics and the Sociolinguistic Imagination, London: Bloomsbury.
-
Blommaert, Jan, and Ico Maly. 2019. ‘Invisible Lines in the Online-Offline Linguistic Landscape’, Tilburg Papers in Culture Studies 223, 1–9.
-
Boccagni, Paolo. 2017. Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives, New York: Palgrave.
-
Cabalquinto, Earvin C.B. 2018. ‘“We’re Not Only Here but We’re There in Spirit”: Asymmetrical Mobile Intimacy and the Transnational Filipino Family’, Mobile Media & Communication 6:1, 37–52.
-
Caillet, Romain. 2008. ‘Trajectoires de salafis français en Egypte’ in Bernhard Rougier (ed.), Qu’est-ce que le salafisme?, Paris: Proche Orient, 257–271.
-
Campbell, Heidi (ed.). 2013. Digital Religions: Understanding Religious Practice in New Media Worlds, London: Routledge.
-
Campbell, Heidi and Giulia Evolvi. 2019. ‘Contextualizing Current Digital Religion Research on Emerging Technologies’, Journal of Human Behavior and Emerging Technologies 1:3, 1–13.
-
Coleman, Gabriella. 2010. ‘Ethnographic Approaches to Digital Media’, Annual Review of Anthropology 39, 487–505.
-
Cottaar, Annemarie, Nadia Bouras, and Fatiha Laouikili. 2009. Marokkanen in Nederland: De pioniers vertellen, Amsterdam: Meulenhof.
-
Cruz, Edgar Gómez, and Ramaswami Harindranath. 2019. ‘WhatsApp as a “Technology of Life”: Reframing Research Agendas,’ First Monday 25:12, https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v25i12.10405
-
Cutler, Cecelia and Unn Røyneland (eds.). 2018. Multilingual Youth Practices in Computer Mediated Communication, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Diminescu, Dana. 2008. ‘The Connected Migrant: An Epistemological Manifesto’, Social Science Information 47:4, 565–579.
-
Doná, Giorgia. 2015. ‘Making Homes in Limbo: Embodied Virtual “Homes” in Prolongued Conditions of Displacement’, Refuge 31:1, 67–73.
-
Duyvendak, Jan-Willem. 2011. The Politics of Home: Belonging and Nostalgia in Europe and the United States, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan.
-
Van Es, Margaretha A. 2019. ‘Muslim Women as Ambassadors of Islam: Breaking Stereotypes in Everyday Life’, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power 26:14, 375–392.
-
Van Es, Margaretha A., Nina ter Laan, and Erik Meinema. 2021. ‘Beyond “Radical” versus “Moderate”? New Perspectives on the Politics of Moderation in Muslim Majority and Muslim Minority Settings’, Religion 51:2, 161–168.
-
Evolvi, Giulia. 2020. ‘Materiality, Authority, and Digital Religion the Case of a Neo-Pagan Forum’, Entangled Religions 11:3.
-
Fadil, Nadia. 2009. ‘Managing Affect and Sensibilities. The Case of Not-handshaking and Not-fasting’, Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale 17:4, 439–454.
-
Fadil, Nadia, Annelies Moors, and Karel Arnaut. 2021. ‘Envisioning Hijra: the Ethics of Leaving and Dwelling of European Muslims’, Contemporary Islam 15:1, 1–16.
-
Grossi, Angelantonio. 2017. ‘Vodu and Social Media in Ghana’, Religious Matters (blog). July 30, 2020. https://religiousmatters.nl/vodu-and-social-media-in-ghana/.
-
Grüber, Christiane, and Sune Haugbolle. 2013. Visual Culture in the Modern Middle East: Rhetoric of the Image, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
-
De Haas, Hein, Tineke Fokkema, and Mohamed Fassi Fihri. 2015. ‘Return Migration as Failure or Success? The Determinants of Return Migration among Moroccan Migrants in Europe’, Journal of International Migration and Integration 16:2, 415–429.
-
Hall, Stuart. 1990. Cultural Identity and Diaspora: Identity: Community, Culture, Difference, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
-
Hine, Christine. 2000. Virtual Ethnography, London: SAGE.
-
Horst, Heather A., and Daniel Miller (eds.). 2012. Digital Anthropology, London: Berg.
-
Houtman, Dick, and Birgit Meyer. 2012. Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, New York: Fordham University Press.
-
Kaufmann, Katja, and Corinna Peil. 2020. ‘The Mobile Instant Messaging Interview (MIMI): Using WhatsApp to Enhance Self-reporting and Explore Media Usage In Situ,’ Mobile Media & Communication 1:18, 229–246.
-
Kazi-Aoul, Samia, Heike Lautenschlager, Clara Van Panhuys, and Gehan El-Sharkawy. 2017. Study on Bilateral Labour and Social Security Agreements in North Africa, Caïro: International Labour Office.
-
Ter Laan, Nina. 2021a. ‘Musical Negotiations of a “Moderate” versus a “Radical” Islam in Morocco: Dissonance and the Sonic among Vocal Performers of Islam-inspired music’, Religion 51:2, 214–236.
-
Ter Laan, Nina. 2021b. ‘They Have no Taste in Morocco: Home Furnishing, Belonging, and Notions of Religious (Im)perfection among White Dutch and Flemish Converts in Morocco’, Contemporary Islam 15:1, 57–82.
-
Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning Legitimate Peripheral Participation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Lee, Everett S. 1966. ‘A Theory of Migration’, Demography 3:1, 47–57.
-
Leurs, Koen. 2019. ‘Transnational Connectivity and the Affective Paradoxes of Digital Care Labour. Exploring How Young Refugees Technologically Mediate Co-presence’, European Journal of Communication 34:6, 641–649.
-
Leurs, Koen, and Madhuri Prabhakar. 2018. ‘Doing Digital Migration Studies: Methodological Considerations for an Emerging Research Focus’ in Ricard Zapata-Barrero and Evren Yalaz (eds.), Qualitative Research in European Migration Studies, IMISCOE Research Series, New York: Springer, 247–266.
-
Lim, Frances K.G., and Bee Bee Sng. 2020. ‘Social Media, Religion and Shifting Boundaries in Globalizing China,’ Global Media and China 5:3, 261–274.
-
Miller, Daniel, and Don Slater. 2000. The Internet: An Ethnographic Approach. Oxford: Berg.
-
Miller, Daniel, and Heather A. Horst. 2013. The Digital and the Human: A Prospectus for Digital Anthropology, London: Berg.
-
Miller, Daniel, Elisabetta Costa, Nell Haynes, Tom McDonald, Razvan Nicolescu, Jolynna Sinanan, Juliano Spyer, Shriram Venkatraman, and Xinyuan Wang. 2016. How the World Changed Social Media, London: UCL Press.
-
Navest, Aysha, Martijn de Koning, and Annelies Moors. 2016. ‘Chatting About Marriage with Female Migrants to Syria’, Anthropology Today 32:2, 22–25.
-
Patterson, Jeffrey, and Koen Leurs. 2020. ‘Transnational Digital Intimacy Practices: Paradoxes of Transnational Connectivity and Home-Making among Young Adult Expatriates in Amsterdam, the Netherlands’, Communication and Media 1:1.
-
Plantin, Jean-Christophe, Carl Lagoze, and Paul Edwards. 2018. ‘Re-integrating Scholarly Infrastructure: The Ambiguous Role of Data Sharing Platforms’, Big Data & Society 5:1.
-
Ponzanesi, Sandra. 2020. ‘Digital Diasporas: Postcoloniality, Media and Affect’, Interventions 22:8, 977–993.
-
Schlatmann, Annemeik. 2020. Not Shaking Hands. The New Normal? Religious Matters (blog). 19 May, 2020. https://religiousmatters.nl/not-shaking-hands-the-newnormal/.
-
Scollon, Suzie Wong. 2004. Nexus Analysis Discourse and the Emerging Internet, London: Routledge.
-
Slama, Martin. 2018. ‘Practicing Islam through Social Media in Indonesia,’ Indonesia and the Malay World 46:134, 1–4.
-
Staudacher, Sandra, and Andrea Kaiser-Grolimund. 2016. ‘WhatsApp in Ethnographic research: Methodological Reflections on New Edges of the field’, Basel Papers on Political Transformations 10, 24–40.
-
Twigt, Mirjam. A. 2018. ‘The Mediation of Hope: Digital Technologies and Affective Affordances Within Iraqi Refugee Households in Jordan’, Social Media + Society January–March, 1–14.
-
Uberman, Matan, and Shaul Shay. 2016. ‘Hijrah According to the Islamic State: An Analysis of Dabiq’, Counter Terrorist Trends and Analysis 8:9, 16–20.
-
Vroon-Najem, Vanessa. 2014. ‘Sisters in Islam. Women’s Conversion and the Politics of Belonging: A Dutch Case Study’, PhD thesis, University of Amsterdam.
-
Vroon-Najem, Vanessa, and Annelies Moors. 2021. ‘“Making Hijra”: Mobility, Religion and the Everyday in the Lives of Women Converts to Islam in the Netherlands’, Contemporary Islam 15:1, 35–55.
-
Whitehead, Deborah F. 2018. Christian Evangelicals and Digital Media: The Mediated Gospel in America, New York: Routledge.
-
Wilson, Rob, and Wimal Dissanayake (eds.). 1996. Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, Durham: Duke University Press.
-
Zillinger, Martin. 2017. ‘Graduated Publics: Mediating Trance in the Age of Technical Reproduction’, Current Anthropology 58:15, 41–55.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 811 | 408 | 71 |
| Full Text Views | 54 | 16 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 80 | 24 | 0 |
“Assalamu ʿAlaykum, Can We Add This Sister?”
WhatsApp Group Chat as a Homemaking Practice among Dutch-Speaking Muhajirat in Morocco
In: Religion and GenderSearch for other papers by Nina ter Laan in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
This article examines the use of a WhatsApp chat group by Dutch and Belgian Muslim women (born or converted), who are considering or made hijra (religiously inspired migration to a Muslim country) to Morocco. I argue that WhatsApp plays a crucial role in facilitating and narrating these women’s migration by providing a support network and shaping a gendered sense of community and religious belonging. Drawing on theories of religion and gender, migration, and digital media, I conceptualize WhatsApp in the context of hijra to Morocco as a social practice of homemaking that helps alleviate the precarious conditions these women find themselves in. This article also illustrates the complex entanglement of offline and online realities by highlighting how my interlocutors’ interactions in this WhatsApp group foster a trans-local Muslim ‘sisterhood,’ that informs their offline practices and experiences of hijra to Morocco.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 811 | 408 | 71 |
| Full Text Views | 54 | 16 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 80 | 24 | 0 |
