Fourteenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

This paper explores how Sierra Leonean Muslims living in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area creatively utilize urban space to navigate the complex global flow of meanings in the diaspora. I focus on how religion is employed to build community relations around the complexities of urban life and how city environments, layered with disparate social activities, relationships, and the architectural and civic objectives of city planners, are rewritten by Sierra Leonean Muslim “self-representation.” Through fine-grained ethnographic description and analysis, I show how individual life trajectories intersect with the collective forces of city life and how acts of public piety are part of a repertoire of “tactics” that they use to express themselves in the face of displacement and alienation. This is particularly significant in a city where nearly every public space is punctuated by shrines and memorials through which patriotic orthodoxy and national myth are materialized, ritualized, and celebrated. Challenging the notion that cities are inherently knowable secular environments disconnected from religious sentiment and expression, I illustrate how dispossessed communities use public religious practice as an antidote to the powerful sense of displacement they feel living far from home. In so doing, I draw attention to the changing American religious landscape and broader transformations in the Muslim world, exemplifying how religious practices remake city space to produce distinctly urban forms of faith and a powerful sense of belonging.