Desiring home: A long-term ethnography of a mosque in Lisbon

Abstract

The recent 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 municipality 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 article 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.