European Muslim Women in Dubai: Religious Conversion, Migration and Belonging in a Global City

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores the complex and diverse ways in which European Muslim converts create and negotiate a sense of belonging as migrants in Dubai. Drawing on ethnographic work conducted in the fall of 2015, it provides an intimate account of the lives of European Muslim women in Dubai. By addressing the intersection between migration and religious conversion, this thesis seeks to add to existing research on the way religion plays an important role in migration experiences in a globalized world. I show that for European Muslim converts, their religious identification is essential to understanding how they experience their migration. I argue that their belonging spans multiple locations and peoples, but that their implication in multiple environments also creates a sense of not fully belonging anywhere. While religious conversion to a controversial religion on the one hand problematizes their belonging in Europe, simultaneously as migrants, their belonging in Dubai is also partial and temporary. Belonging to the ummah, as the global Muslim community, provides converts with an alternative belonging; a belonging that transcends localized notions of belonging. This belonging takes on important meanings in their lives as they create a sense of belonging in and to Dubai, a global city with a culturally and ethnically diverse Muslim population.