ABSTRACT

Converts to Islam in southern Spain struggle to understand their place in the ummah (the global Muslim community). Some converts experience anxiety about their newfound minority Muslim status at home and racialized tensions with Spain’s migrant Muslims. This article asks what it means for converts to desperately want to feel belonging in a global Muslim community and to seek recognition from born Muslims, but also emphatically not to want to belong with Muslim immigrants in Spain. I argue that converts resolve this tension through various forms of global travel that range from pilgrimages to holy Islamic sites to trips to convert Indigenous Mexicans to Islam. Drawing on ethnography in southern Spain, I suggest that the moral geographies of converts’ travel narratives illuminate racialised paradoxes of belonging at the heart of their reimaginings of the ummah and their place in it.

摘要

在西班牙南部皈依伊斯兰教的人很难理解他们在 ummah（全球穆斯林社区）中的地位。一些皈依者对他们在国内新发现的少数民族穆斯林身份感到焦虑，并与西班牙移民穆斯林的种族紧张关系。本文询问皈依者迫切希望在全球穆斯林社区中获得归属感并寻求出生穆斯林的认可，但又强调不希望与西班牙的穆斯林移民归属，这意味着什么。我认为，皈依者通过各种形式的全球旅行来解决这种紧张局势，从朝圣到伊斯兰圣地，再到将土著墨西哥人皈依伊斯兰教的旅行。借鉴西班牙南部的民族志，