The Inheritances of Immigration
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Abstract
Rahima is a financial services professional in her early thirties, working for a bank and living with her parents in La Courneuve, a neighborhood of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. She grew up in the Islamic culture that was the result of the revivalist institution-building of the 1990s, listening to recorded lectures by Tariq Ramadan, enthusiastically attending the annual gathering of Muslims at Le Bourget, and participating in a young women’s study circle at her local mosque. Her religious path evolved, from a period in her youth that she later described as “rather salafist” to a period of deep engagement in French Muslim civic life during her undergraduate years to a period of relative distance from organized religion. At the time of our interview she described herself as “just Muslim, neither more nor less. I love Allah and I’m doing my best in the day-today.” Rahima explained that “Islam has always been the same. But my way of living it has changed over the years.” Despite these changes in her way of living, Rahima felt an abiding constancy in her piety, and in her connection to spaces of Muslim collectivity. Over dinner at a halal Thai restaurant in eastern Paris, she spoke of this piety as an affective inheritance from her family.