Beyond migration: Islam as a transnational public space

Recent studies of transnational religious phenomena have emphasised the importance of distinguishing between transnational processes of migration and movement on the one hand, and diasporic forms of consciousness, identity, and cultural creation on the other. While this distinction is useful, it risks directing the study of transnational social phenomena in certain, limited directions. Migration and diaspora insufficiently take into account the possibility of quite distinct self-understandings about boundaries and legitimacy on the part of both 'host' countries and 'immigrant' populations. Taking 'Islam in France' as an illuminating case in point because each of its two constitutive terms challenges the possibility of self-defining through migration and diaspora, I argue that transnational Islam creates and implies the existence and legitimacy of a global public space of normative reference and debate, and that this public space cannot be reduced to a dimension of migration or of transnational religious movements. I offer two brief ethnographic examples of this transnational public space, and maintain that even as it develops references to Europe it implies neither a 'Euro-Islam' nor a 'post-national' sense of European membership and citizenship. Rather, current directions of debate and discussion in France are strongly shaped by, first, French efforts to define Islam within national political and cultural boundaries, and, second, efforts by Muslim intellectuals to maintain the transnational legitimacy of Islamic knowledge.