Abstract
Taking an ethnographic, intersectional, and longitudinal approach, this research project studies how former Muslims navigate their predominantly religious environment, with a particular focus on mobility as a coping strategy. Building upon and extending on long-term fieldwork in Morocco and among the Moroccan diaspora, the study draws on life-story interviews with young adults who self-identify as not religious.
Nonreligious minorities in Muslim-majority countries have different options to navigate their predominantly religious environment. Being part of a minority, they face everyday moral compromises, dilemmas, and contradictions. According to the specific situation and their own position, they handle different strategies in dealing with the social, professional, and institutional repercussions of being nonreligious and the expectation to be Muslim. Their reactions and adaptations range from wanting to change, merge in, hide from, ignore, or avoid the situation. This postdoctoral research project looks particularly at the last option: those who want or have to migrate. The study explores these prevalent strategies across five key dimensions: activism, adaptation, living a double life, bonding, and migration. Among these strategies, migration, both short and long-term, as well as more and less voluntary, emerges as a significant theme. Many atheists and agnostics no longer want to lead a double life or get tired of engaging in activism. Instead, or in addition to, they develop aspirations to move abroad. Sometimes, these aspirations are only temporal and local, such as spending Ramadan in a more liberal city or in Morocco's neighbouring country, Spain. In other cases, aspirations become more long-term. Mobility is not only linked to being nonreligious but also to work and study aspirations and/or other forms of discrimination. Like other responses, the possibility of being mobile depends on privileges or the lack thereof. Taking a transnational perspective, this study analyses the challenges of former Muslims moving to a secular EU city and the potential biases they face in doing so.
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