Arab Ethnicity and Diasporic Islam: A Comparative Approach to Processes of Identity Formation and Religious Codification in the Muslim Communities in Brazil

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Arab Ethnicity and Diasporic Islam:

A Comparative Approach to Processes of

Identity Formation and Religious Codification

in the Muslim Communities in Brazil

Paulo G. Pinto

he Muslim communities in European and American countries have received increas-ing scholarly attention in recent years. Some groundbreakincreas-ing studies have shown how Islam became part of the religious landscape of the “West” through the

establish-ment of transnational connections and complex processes of cultural adaptation.1_Despite

the many merits of these works, they tend to generalize cultural- religious patterns to all the Muslim communities located within a particular nation- state, which is taken as the main unit of analysis, referring to general entities such as “French Islam,” “American Islam,” or “British Islam.” Some scholars, while rejecting an essentialized portrait of Muslims, have pushed the limits of generalization to the whole European context, claiming that Islam in Europe became

a deterritorialized system of meaning that exists beyond cultural particularities.2

However, a closer look shows that the Muslim identities in Europe and the Americas are the result of complex relations between local sociological and cultural elements and the vari-ous constructs of the normative system of Islamic doctrines and practices that were globalized through the circulation of people (migration, travels, pilgrimages, etc.), texts, and images. Therefore, I argue in this article that one has to take the local community as the main unit of analysis, for it is there that the relation between local and supralocal — regional, national, or global — influences acquires a particular configuration. National or regional patterns can only emerge from a careful comparison between the particularities and the common points among the discrete Muslim communities that exist in such political and geographical spaces.

To demonstrate these propositions, I analyze the constitution of Muslim identities among Arabic- speaking immigrants and their descendents in Brazil, showing how the rela-tion between Arab ethnicity and Muslim identity is shaped by processes that connect local, national, and transnational realities. I rely on ethnographic data that I have gathered in my

fieldwork research with the Muslim communities in Brazil since 2003.3

Unless otherwise noted, all English translations are mine. 1. Jocelyne Cesari, L’Islam à l’épreuve de l’Occident (Islam in

West-ern Contexts) (Paris: La Découverte, 2004); Yvonne Haddad and

Adair Lummis, Islamic Values in the United States: A Comparative

Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Gilles Kepel, Les banlieus de l’Islam: Naissance d’une religion en France (The Sub-urbs of Islam: The Birth of a Religion in France) (Paris: Seuil, 1991);

Kepel, Allah in the West: Islamic Movements in America and

Eur-ope (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997).

2. Olivier Roy, L’Islam mondialisé (Globalized Islam) (Paris: Seuil, 2004).

3. I gathered the ethnographic data for this article during my fieldwork with Muslim communities in Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba,

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and São Paulo. I also have been doing research among the Mus-3 1 and São Paulo. I also have been doing research among the Mus-3

Pa ul o G. P in to Ar ab E th ni ci ty a nd D ia sp or ic Is la m : A Co m pa ra tiv e Ap pr oa ch to P ro ce ss es o f Id en tit y Fo rm ati on a nd R eli gi ou s C od ifi ca tio n in th e M us lim C om m un iti es in B ra zil

Diasporic and Local: Muslims in Brazil

Brazil’s large Muslim community comprises about 1 million members and was formed since the nineteenth century by diverse migration waves from the Middle East (Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) and by the conversion of non- Arab

Brazilians.4_{The Muslim community is mostly}

urban, with large concentrations in Rio de Ja-neiro, São Paulo, Curitiba, and Foz do Iguaçu. Important sociological differences exist among the communities in each of these sites. For ex-ample, the Muslim community in Rio de Janeiro has not received a significant influx of recent immigrants, a fact that makes the process of the creation and reformulation of Muslim identi-ties more dependent on local and national cul-tural dynamics. In contrast, in the other three Muslim communities the production of Islamic identities is strongly influenced by transnational Islamic movements and by the constant contact with Islam as practiced in the Middle East. Mus-lims in these three communities tend to work primarily in commercial activities. However, in-creasing numbers are in qualified professions such as medicine, law, and engineering.

The majority of Muslims in Brazil are Arab immigrants and their descendants. Never-theless, there is a growing number of non- Arab Brazilians who have converted to Islam through personal relations, that is, through work, mar-riage, or friendship with Muslims. The first Islamic institutions appeared in Brazil in the

1920s, but they only gained force in relation to the “Syrian- Lebanese” or Palestinian associa-tions in the 1980s. These ethnic organizaassocia-tions were largely dominated by Arab Christians, who also maintained churches and institutions of their religious confession (Maronite, Greek

Orthodox, Melchite, etc.).5

After 1960 the fall in the number of Chris-tian immigrants from the Middle East and the assimilation of descendants of Arab immigrants into mainstream Brazilian culture led to the de-cline in the number of Arab ethnic associations and their members. However, the growing num-bers of Muslim immigrants from the Middle East in the 1970s fostered the creation of Islamic institutions and the public affirmation of a spe-cific Muslim identity that is associated with, but not submerged in, the larger Arab identity.

Because most Muslim immigrants to Bra-zil came from the Arab Middle East — mainly Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine — they were iden-tified with the large Arab community already

existing in Brazil.6_{The Arab immigrants who}

came to Brazil in the first half of the twentieth century were mostly Christians, and they man-aged to overcome or minimize the effects of the widespread racism and discrimination directed against them in the 1930s and 1940s, such as their stigmatization as backward, fanatical, and greedy “Orientals” by a large part of the

Brazil-ian intellectual elite.7_{They surmounted these}

difficulties through economic success and a lim communities in Foz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este (Paraguay) since 2007. This research has been sponsored with grants from CNPq and FAPERJ. For previous results of this research see Paulo G. Pinto, “Ritual, etnicidade e identidade religiosa nas comu-nidades muçulmanas no Brasil” (“Ritual, Ethnicity and Religious Identity in the Muslim Communities in Brazil”), Revista USP—Universidade de São Paulo 67 (2005): 228 – 50. 4. The census of 2000 gives the number of Muslims in Brazil as 27,239. Muslim religious authorities speak of 1 – 2 million Muslims. Based on my ethnographic experience, the estimate of 1 million Muslims seems more plausible. The Muslim African slaves who were collectively known as the “Malês” in the eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries constituted the first or-ganized Muslim community in Brazil. They led a slave uprising in 1835 in Bahia, known as the Revolt of the Malês (Revolta dos Malês). There is a nineteenth- century firsthand account of the Muslim communi-ties in Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, and Recife written by an Arabic- speaking imam from the Ottoman Empire who stayed in Brazil from 1866 to 1869. See ‘Abdurah-man al- Baghdadi al- Dimachqi, Deleite do estrangeiro

em tudo que é espantoso e maravilhoso / Masaliya al- gharib bi- kull amr ‘abib (Delight of the Foreigner in Everything That Is

Amazing) (Algiers:, Bibliothè-que Nationale d’Algérie; Rio de Janeiro: Biblioteca América do Sul – Países Árabes, Biblioteca Nacional; Caracas: Fundación Biblioteca Ayacucho, 2007). How-ever, when the Arabic- speaking Muslim immigrants started to create the first Islamic institutions in Bra-zil in the early twentieth century, the Islamic identity of the Malês was disappearing through conversion to Catholicism or to African Brazilian religions, such as Candomblé and Umbanda. There was no continu-ity between the Malês and the Muslim communities created by Arab immigrants in the twentieth century. See João José Reis, Rebelião escrava no Brasil: A

histó-ria do levante dos Malês em 1835 (Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The History of the Revolt of the Malês in 1835)

(São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2003).

5. Majid Radawi, Al- hijra al- ’arabiyya ila al- Brazil

1870 – 1986 (The Arab Immigration to Brazil, 1870 – 1986)

(Damascus: Dar Tlas, 1989). 6. There are no reliable estimates of the number of Arabs in Brazil; of course, they would still vary accord-ing to the definition of “Arab” used in them. The Arab institutions and some scholars advance numbers that range between 3 million and 16 million Arabs and their descendants in a population of 170 million Brazilians. The larger figures are less likely to corre-spond to any demographic reality, but they reflect the greater recognition and visibility that the Arab immigrants and their descendants have achieved in Brazilian society. See John Tofik Karam, Another

Ara-besque: Syrian- Lebanese Ethnicity in Neoliberal Brazil

(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2007), 10 – 13. 7. Jeffrey Lesser, A negociação da identidade

nacio-nal: Imigrantes, minorias e a luta pela etnicidade no Brasil (Negotiating National Identity: Immigrants, Minorities, and the Struggle for Ethnicity in Brazil)

(São Paulo: Universidade Estadual Paulista, 2000), 87 – 135.

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Compar ative Studies of South A sia, A frica an d the Middl e East

strong investment in the acquisition of cultural capital, such as higher education for their sons and daughters, and thereby achieved impressive

upward social mobility.8

The privileged social position reached by the Arab immigrants and their descendants in Brazil allowed them to be incorporated as “whites” in the racial classification that in-forms the Brazilian national discourse. Brazil-ian racial hierarchies rank “white” on the top and “black” at the bottom of the social pyra-mid, with an enormous variety of intermediate “mixed” categories that people can mobilize and manipulate to move upward in the racial hierarchy according to the context and their so-cial and cultural capital. While this assimilation is far from complete or unproblematic, since negative stereotypes that associate a backward mentality, predatory greed and corruption, and fanatical religiosity with the image of the tur-cos (literally “Turks,” a term used to designate all immigrants from the Middle East and their descendants) remain widespread among Brazil-ians, it allowed a high degree of accommoda-tion of the Arab immigrants in Brazilian

soci-ety.9_{The jus soli adopted by the Brazilian state}

allowed the automatic acquisition of citizenship by all the second generation born in Brazil.

The media discourse on terrorism after September 11 made more present some of the tensions underlying the ambiguous insertion of Arabs in Brazilian society as whites who are, nonetheless, “marked” by cultural differences. This tension became more acute in the case of Muslims, who became the target of trans-national political discourses that tried to link them with international conflicts and define

them as a security threat (in particular, the

Muslim community in Foz do Iguaçu).10_These

discourses clearly had negative effects on the situation of Muslims in Brazil. Many informants told me that they were harassed in the streets and verbally abused, targeted as “terrorist” or, in the case of women, “bin Laden’s wife.” There were also a few cases of physical aggression in Rio and São Paulo.

However, the stigmatization of Arabs and Muslims as “terrorists” was challenged by other discourses that define the Brazilian nation in opposition to what is perceived as the imperial-istic policies of the United States and its allies. Some nationalist groups, such as Movement for the Valorization of the Language, Resources, and Culture of Brazil, or MV- Brasil, which gath-ers sympathizgath-ers and membgath-ers from both right- and left- wing parties, regularly denounce what they perceive as a constant American political and cultural aggression against Brazil — for example, the celebration of Halloween parties among urban middle- class youth and the cam-paigns to preserve the Amazon forest fostered

by nongovernmental organizations.11_{This tense}

relation with the United States in the Brazilian nationalist discourse caused a large segment of Brazilian public opinion to see the 9/11 terrorist attacks as a “retaliation” provoked by the very imperialist policies fostered by the Americans

in the Middle East.12

In this sense, Muslim identities in Brazil inherited the ambiguous position of the Arab/ Syrian- Lebanese ethnic identity, to which were added more dramatic symbolic and political meanings. With this broader context in mind, I next analyze the construction of Muslim

identi-8. Oswaldo Truzzi, Patrícios: Sírios e Libaneses em São

Paulo (“Patrícios”: Syrians and Lebanese in São Paulo)

(São Paulo: Hucitec, 1997).

9. For the use of the term turco for Arab- speaking im-migrants, see ibid., 67 – 79; for the use of this term for designating Armenian immigrants, see Roberto Grün,

Famílias e negócios: Armênios em São Paulo (Families and Business: The Armenians in São Paulo) (São Paulo:

Sumaré, 1992), 24 – 35. For the use of the same term to designate Middle Eastern immigrants in Mexico, see Theresa Alfaro- Velcamp, So Far from Allah, So Close to

Mexico: Middle Eastern Immigrants in Modern Mexico

(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 45 – 69. On the use of stereotypes among Brazilians, see Karam, Another Arabesque, 26 – 27, 46 – 68. 10. See John Tofik Karam, “Crossing the Americas: The U.S. War on Terror and Arab Cross- Border Mobiliza-tions in a South American Frontier Region,” in this issue. 11. See MV- Brasil’s official Web site, mv- brasil.org.br/ (accessed 15 October 2009). 12. The cultural legitimacy of the representations of militant forms of Islam as a legitimate form of resistance against American imperialistic aggres-sions among some sectors of Brazilian society can be seen in their playful inscription in cultural artifacts and public spaces. Thus masks depicting Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein were very popular attire in Rio’s street carnival from 2002 to 2007. After Sep-tember 11 a “bin Laden Bar” and a “bin Laden’s Cave” snooker bar opened in Niterói, the second largest city of Rio de Janeiro state, located on Guanabara Bay op-posite the city of Rio de Janeiro. Also, the Brazilian surfing champion named “Jihad” competed with a surfboard painted with bin Laden’s face. The surfer was prevented from competing in the United States with his board, although this kind of sanction never happened while he was competing in Brazil.

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ties and objectified codifications of the Islamic tradition in Rio de Janeiro, Curitiba, São Paulo, and Foz do Iguaçu as a way to understand how different relations between Arab ethnicity and Muslim identities emerge as the result of pro-cesses that construct and objectify the Islamic tradition.13

Between Textual Universalism and Ethnic Distinction: The Muslim Community of Rio de Janeiro

Rio de Janeiro is Brazil’s second largest city, with about 9 million inhabitants in its metro-politan area. The Muslim community’s religious center is in the Islamic Mutual- Aid Association (Sociedade Beneficente Muçulmana do Rio de Janeiro, SBMRJ). Until 2007 the SBMRJ had a prayer hall (musallah) in a commercial building in downtown Rio. Since that date, it moved to a new mosque in the Tijuca neighborhood. This mosque is the only one currently operating in Rio de Janeiro, for the mosque built in the Jaca-repaguá neighborhood in the 1980s is closed be-cause of disputes between the leadership of the community and the mosque’s builder. There is one musallah downtown and another one in Co-pacabana. There is also the Alawi Association in Tijuca, which serves as a space of sociability and

for the celebration of Alawi rituals.14

The Muslim community in Rio is rather small in comparison to those in São Paulo or Foz do Iguaçu. According to SBMRJ estimates, there are five thousand Muslims in the whole state of Rio de Janeiro. However, despite its small size, the Muslim community in Rio is of particular interest because it is one of only a few in Brazil whose members are not predominantly of Arab origin. It is instead a multicultural and multieth-nic group that brings together Arabs and their descendants, Africans (mainly foreign students,

in addition to immigrants from that continent), and non- Arab Brazilians who have converted to Islam from other religious traditions.

Non- Arab Brazilians are, in fact, the ma-jority in the community, while Arabs and their descendants make up only 10 percent of the membership. The number of non- Arab Brazil-ian converts increased dramatically since 2000, from about 50 percent of the community to 85

percent in 2007.15_{In socioeconomic terms, the}

great majority of the members are small mer-chants in the region delimited by the commer-cial association of the SAARA (Sociedade de Amigos da Rua da Alfândega e Adjacências — a traditional commercial area in downtown Rio, near the location of the SBMRJ until 2007) or are employed in commerce, with a smaller number of university students and professionals (lawyers, veterinarians, etc.).

While Muslim Arabs are perceived to be more endogamous than Christian Arabs in Brazil, marriage with Arabs and even Muslims is quite common among Arab Muslim

men in Rio de Janeiro.16_{The early Arab}

immi-grants, both Muslim and Christian, were mostly single men and usually married non- Arab Bra-zilian women. Before the establishment of Mus-lim associations in Brazil’s main cities in the 1950s this usually meant the conversion of

Mus-lim men or their descendants to Catholicism.17

With the growing number of Brazil-ian converts to Islam, the pattern of marriage among Muslims in Rio de Janeiro became more complex. Muslim men of Arab descent are more prone than the non- Arab Brazilian male con-verts to marry non- Muslims. The concon-verts tend to look for brides inside the community. Even the former imam, a Sudanese named Abdu, and the current president of the Islamic associa-tion, an Egyptian named Muhammad, married

13. In this article I examine the concept of “objectification,” which Dale F. Eickelman and James Pisca-tori define as the codification of the Islamic tradition as an abstract, coherent, and integrated system that can be transmitted and applied as a normative code in the everyday life of Muslims. See Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori, Muslim Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996), 48. As I show in the ethnographic examples analyzed herein, there are forms of the objectification of the Islamic tradition that incorporate embodied and culturally marked un-derstandings and practices of Islam. 14. Alawis are an esoteric Shi‘i sect that exists in Syria, Lebanon, and the south of Turkey. In Rio they perform the daily prayers and celebrate some holy dates, such as Ashura and the Mawlid al- Nabawi. They are con-sidered by many Sunnis, such as the Salafis, to be heterodox Muslims. The Alawis in Rio de Janeiro nor-mally do not attend the SBMRJ. Some of them point to the Salafi tendencies of this institution as a factor that discourages them from attending its activities. The Alawi Islamic Mutual- Aid Association of Rio de Janeiro was created in 1931. 15. Silvia Montenegro, “Dilemas identitários do Islã no Brasil” (“Identity Dilemmas of Islam in Brazil”) (PhD diss., Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, 2000). 16. Karam, Another Arabesque, 108 – 13. 17. The first Muslim association in Brazil was the Is-lamic Mutual- Aid Association of São Paulo, created in 1929. This association also built the first mosque in the country, the Mesquita Brasil (Brazil Mosque), between 1946 and 1960. Only in the late 1970s were other mosques starting to be built in Brazil.

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non- Muslim Brazilian women. Female converts usually express strong vocal criticism against the marriage of Muslim men with non- Muslim

women.18_{The Muslim marriage Web pages on}

the Internet are a resource that female converts have used, with some marriages being con-tracted with Muslims from Pakistan, South Af-rica, and Egypt. The female converts who were already married to non- Muslims before adher-ing to Islam have their marriages recognized by the community. The official line in Rio’s Muslim community is that since there is no consensus among the religious scholars about this issue, it is a matter of consciousness for the individuals involved to decide.

The multiethnic character of the Rio com-munity leads to a complex process of construc-tion of Muslim identities in interacconstruc-tion with both Arab linguistic and cultural traditions and with the Brazilian social and cultural reality. The Arabic language is valued as a key element of the religious universe of Islam, but not as one that determines Muslim identity. For members of the community who are not of Arab origin (and even those who are but have not mastered the classical Arabic of religious texts), there is concern in teaching the language in order to give them direct access to the sacred text of the Koran. Nonetheless, the lingua franca for religious activities, such as sermons or courses, is Portuguese, with the exception of ritual for-mulas such as bismallah al- rahman al- rahim (in the name of God the compassionate and the merciful) or salam aleikum wa rahmatu- llah wa barakatu- hu (may the peace, mercy, and grace of God be with you) that are always pronounced in Arabic. The use of Portuguese in the official dis-courses of the Muslim community shows the ef-forts of the SBMRJ’s leadership in constructing a religious and linguistic milieu that is, to some extent, integrated in the local cultural context. Even the Koranic verses quoted in Arabic

dur-ing the Friday sermon are immediately followed by a Portuguese translation.

Nevertheless, the symbolic value of the Arabic language and Arab identity makes them markers of religious distinction within the com-munity. During the informal gatherings that follow religious rituals, it is common to see Arabic speakers using that language in their interactions, marking an ethnic boundary that separates them from the rest of the community. Those who have Arab origins but do not speak the language are constantly the target of subtle teasing and jokes that reinforce the value of Arabic as a cultural diacritic constitutive of the ethnic boundary between the Arab community and other groups in the larger Brazilian

soci-ety.19_{In fact, the great majority of the}

descen-dants of Arab immigrants do not speak Arabic, although in the past decade there has been a renewed interest among Brazilians of Arab de-scent, both Muslims and non- Muslims, to learn the language. A result has been the recent

pro-liferation of Arabic courses in Rio de Janeiro.20

Beyond that, it is also significant that most of the positions of power and status within the community are occupied by Arabic speakers,

clearly setting up an ethnic hierarchy.21_Abdu,

a Sudanese, whom I mentioned above, was the president and the imam (prayer leader) of the SBMRJ until 2007; he also defined himself as Arab, notwithstanding the emphasis he placed on his African origin after 2006 in order cre-ate a grecre-ater connection with the African im-migrants and black Brazilian converts that com-pose the community at the SBMRJ. Since 2007 the SBMRJ presidency has been the charge of an Egyptian, Muhammad, and the role of imam has been performed by a Syrian Brazilian who speaks Arabic and studied in Saudi Arabia.

During the eight years in which Abdu was the religious leader of the Muslim community in Rio, he legitimated his position as imam through 18. Gisele F. Chagas, “Identidade, conhecimento e poder na comunidade muçulmana do Rio de Janeiro” (“Identity, Knowledge, and Power in the Muslim Community of Rio de Janeiro”) (master’s thesis, Uni-versidade Federal Fluminense, 2006). 19. For the role of cultural diacritics in the definition of ethnic boundaries, see Fredrik Barth, “Introduction,” in Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social

Organiza-tion of Culture Difference (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget,

1969; Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland, 1998). 20. Nowadays, in addition to the traditional Arabic courses offered at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and the Mount Lebanon Club (Clube Monte Líbano), one can learn Arabic in the SBMRJ, the Maronite church, at some language courses, and with private teachers. 21. On the connections among religious knowledge, Arabic language, and power in the SBMRJ, see Cha-gas, “Identidade, conhecimento e poder.”

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his Arab origin, which, in principle, represented a symbolic guarantee of his linguistic and cul-tural mastery of Islam’s textual tradition. Abdu’s religious leadership was accepted as legitimate despite the fact that he did not have the neces-sary religious education to be recognized as a sheikh or ‘alim (religious scholar), since he did his studies in Libya at a more general level. It is also noteworthy that he has gradually empha-sized the link between his Arab cultural identity and the moral values he construes as essentially Muslim, such as the public performance of re-ligious piety in the activities of everyday life. Following his divorce from his first wife, a Muslim Brazilian, he has rearticulated his life and self through his marriage with a Moroccan woman who wears the veil (hijab).

Despite the relation between hierarchy and Arabic ethnicity in the religious division of labor within the SBMRJ, the leadership’s public discourse promotes the dissemination of Islam and the incorporation of converts into the com-munity, as is demonstrated by the centrality of educational activities, such as courses about Islam or “Muslim culture.” These courses tend to focus on the challenges that Brazilian society and culture pose for Muslims, particularly for converts or for recent immigrants. The classes touch on subjects like the use of the veil, the prohibition against drinking alcohol or eating pork, and interactions with non- Muslim friends and family members. These themes are mixed with others of global scope, such as the image of Islam and Muslims in the media, which is gen-erally seen as holding hostile and misinformed views on these topics; the conflicts in the Middle

East; and the terrorist attacks of September 11.22

The SBMRJ also offers spaces and forms of sociability that are alternatives to Brazilian cultural traditions that are seen as “un- Islamic” such as Carnival, which is particularly present in the everyday life of Muslims in Rio. During

Carnival, activities such as “Islamic camping” or “spiritual retreat” are usually offered and held on farms or at hotels in the countryside. On these occasions, those who want can retreat to an “Islamic” environment where leisure ac-tivities, including sports and hiking, are mixed

with praying and the study of Islam.23_Other

traditions linked to urban middle- class culture such as Mother’s Day or Children’s Day some-times also are given an “Islamic” version in the SBMRJ or are just the subject of commentaries in sermons about how a Muslim should behave during their celebration.

The missionary character of the commu-nity, however, makes it very conscious of its posi-tion in Rio’s religious field, in which the Muslim community tries to inscribe itself as part of the local “religious diversity” by offering a discourse of tolerance and coexistence. Since 2008 a del-egation from the Muslim community partici-pates in the annual “March Against Religious Intolerance,” where it shares a space of identi-fication with other religious traditions such as African Brazilian cults (e.g., Candomblé and Umbanda), which the SBMRJ leadership would

consider condemnable polytheist religions.24

Muslim identities in the SBMRJ are not only constituted in contrast to the beliefs and practices of non- Muslims. They are also pro-duced by the contrast among the different Is-lamic traditions represented among members of the community, according to their diverse origins. Since the dominant tradition in SBMRJ is Salafiyah, a Sunni reformist movement that emerged in the nineteenth century and preaches a return to the “original Islam” codified in the Koran and hadith (the collection of traditions, sayings, and actions of the Prophet), differences in the ritual practices and doctrine within the community tend to be perceived as bid‘ah (con-demnable innovations), that is, as deviations from “true” Islam that must be corrected.

22. Silvia Montenegro, “Discursos e contradiscursos: O olhar da mídia sobre o islã no Brasil” (“Discourses and Counterdiscourses: The Media’s Regard on Islam in Brazil”), Mana 8, no. 1 (2002), 63 – 91. 23. This creation of alternative spaces of religious so-ciability is not exclusive to Muslims; devout Catholics and Evangelical Christians also have their “spiritual retreats” in order to avoid the festivities of Carnival. 24. This march was created in 2008 after episodes of violence between members of Evangelical churches and adepts of the African Brazilian cults. Almost all religious groups, including the Catholic Church and the Jewish community, participate in this march, which takes place along Copacabana’s seaside ave-nue. Many Evangelical churches refuse to participate, for they consider themselves the real victims of the intolerance of other religious groups.

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Thus the SBMRJ’s religious leaders are very critical of other Muslim traditions such as Sufism, the cult of the saints, and Shiism and seek to prevent members of the community from following these other paths. In that sense, one can say that the multiethnic character of their community in Rio de Janeiro has gener-ated an awareness of doctrinal and ritual dif-ferences among various Islamic traditions, as evidenced by the need to codify Islam as an abstract religious system that could be taught to new converts and should be mastered by all Muslims. This necessity of creating a religious common denominator among the members of the SBMRJ led to a search for the “true” Islam within the framework of a Salafi preaching cen-tered on the textual tradition.

The disciplinary practices developed by the SBMRJ’s religious authorities (sermons, courses, normative texts, etc.) have produced a process that “objectifies” Islamic tradition, gen-erating a “purified” religious system of cultural and social practices that serves as a conscious normative point of reference in the life of the

faithful.25_{That “objectified” Islam facilitates}

the integration of converts, relegating cultural difference to the background and bringing ev-eryone under the same religious discipline.

Ethnicity Overcoming Sectarianism: The Muslim Community in Curitiba

In the Muslim community in Curitiba, a pros-perous city of 1.5 million inhabitants in the state of Paraná in southern Brazil, about five thou-sand families (twenty thouthou-sand people) are af-filiated with the mosque of Imam Ali Ibn Abi

Talib.26_{This mosque was constructed in 1977}

in an “international Islamic” style, with mina-rets, horseshoe arches, and a dome. The Mus-lim society, which is at the same time a social club and a mutual- aid institution, is composed almost exclusively of Syrian, Lebanese, Pales-tinian, and Egyptian immigrants and their de-scendants. From 2003 to 2005, its leader was the Shi‘i sheikh Muhammad Khalil, who received his religious education in Qom, Iran, and in Lebanon. Before coming to Curitiba, he was the imam of the Muslim community in Santi-ago, Chile, which was, according to him, “made up almost completely of Lebanese and

Palestin-Members of the Muslim community in Rio de Janeiro together with priests of the African- Brazilian cults (Candomblé) and a Catholic priest in the March Against Religion Intolerance. Despite the Arab attire, the Muslims in this picture are Arab Brazilian converts to Islam. Picture by the author, 2008

25. On these disciplinary practices, see Talal Asad, Ge-nealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Islam and Christianity (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1993), 130 – 35.

26. The estimate of twenty thousand members was given to me by the vice president of the Islamic Mutual- Aid Association of Curitiba during an inter-view in February 2008.

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ians.” As the community is much larger and eth-nically homogeneous than the one in Rio, the marriages tend to be among second- and generation Muslims of Arab descent.

In the Muslim community in Curitiba, my conversations and interviews were almost always conducted in Arabic or in a mixture of Arabic and Portuguese. This community has been functioning since the 1950s, with the creation of the Islamic Mutual- Aid Association. Sheikh Mu-hammad stressed in an interview that “the com-munity in Curitiba was very smart to create first a club and then worry about building a mosque, since the club allows for the integration of fami-lies, and particularly, keeps the youth together and interested in Islam. If young Muslims do not do things together and feel that Islam is just about praying at the mosque or following the rules of the religion, they will eventually lose in-terest in becoming good Muslims.”

Despite its hegemonic Arab presence, the community in Curitiba shows an important sec-tarian division, for half of its members are Sun-nis and half Shi‘is. Since the 1970s, when the civil war in Lebanon and the Israeli invasion of South Lebanon intensified the immigration

flux coming from southern Lebanon, the num-ber of Shi‘is in the community has grown. The mosque was built in 1977 as a Sunni mosque, and it remained so until 1986, when the gov-ernment of Iran, in its policy of disputing with Saudi Arabia the finance and control of inter-national Islam, offered significant donations to the mosque. Thereafter, a Shi‘i sheikh has al-ways led the mosque. The presence of Iran is immediately felt in the beautiful mihrab (the niche marking the direction of Mecca) of mo-saic tiles in Persian style, with the inscription in Arabic and Portuguese: “Gift from the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1996.”

According to Sheikh Muhammad, the fer-vor to promote a revolutionary and militant Shi-ism supported by Iran alienated many Sunnis in the community. The Iran- Iraq war exacerbated tensions between the two groups to the point that the community was on the verge of fragmenting or dissolving itself. In the words of the sheikh: “It was a difficult time. To give you an idea, the Islamic school that was created at the same time as the Muslim society had to close because it was impossible to reach consensus on the content of

its religious curriculum.” 27_{He added that the}

Friday sermon at the Imam Ali Ibn Abi Talib Mosque in Curitiba. Picture by the author, 2011

27. The Islamic school reopened in 2007 with twenty elementary- level students, half of them non- Muslims. The curriculum is similar to other Brazil- ian schools, with optional classes on Islam and Ara-bic language. According to the vice president of the Islamic Mutual- Aid Association, many of the non- Muslim students take these classes.

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situation only began to change with his prede-cessor, who toned down the politico- religious militancy of the official discourse that had pre-vailed in the mosque until he took charge of it. The predecessor of the current sheikh also with-drew from the mosque all political or sectarian symbols, such as portraits of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini and images of the holy figures of Shiism. Thus a meta- sectarian Muslim identity began to be constructed through the emphasis of doctrinal and ritual elements shared by Sun-nis and Shi‘is.

At present, although ritual differences among Sunnis and Shi‘is are evident in the col-lective prayers, these differences are understood and integrated as variations within a spectrum of legitimate practices. In the mosque, clay tab-lets (generally made of sacred soil from Karbala, Iraq) are accessible in a box for those who wish their heads to touch a natural material during prayer. Sunnis do not have this obligation. One of the consequences of such an effort at integra-tion is the tendency to minimize the ritual and doctrinal boundaries or abandon the mecha-nisms of exclusion used by sectarian groups to mark their identity. As such, the rule of ritual purity demanded by the Shi‘i tradition, accord-ing to which a Shi‘i cannot pray behind a Shi‘i, is not followed in the mosque in Curitiba. Shi‘is and Sunnis freely mix among the rows during prayer. By the same token, the adhan (the call to prayer) does not include the piece used only by Shi‘is, which elevates ‘Ali (cousin and successor of Muhammad) to the level of the Prophet.

At the doctrinal level, overcoming sectar-ian differences entails a certain degree of ob-jectification of Islam. The religious common denominators are deliberately found in the Koran, which is consensually accepted as the ultimate written source of religious truth by

both the Sunnis and the Shi‘is.28_{However, in}

contrast to the practices of the community in Rio de Janeiro, the process of “objectification”

in Curitiba is based not on a conscious and integrated religious system that encompasses daily practices but on an interpretive consensus anchored in shared doctrinal understandings and ritual practices. This strategy allowed for the incorporation of values and practices from Arab culture in the religious worldview of the community in Curitiba. There is, then, an “eth-nification” of Islam as a “religion of Arabs in Brazil,” as a convert identified the definition of Islam prevalent in the community, an looking religious universe, resistant to the in-corporation of new members and bound to the Arab community. Indeed, the sheikh confirmed that the community does not have any mission-ary or da’wah (preaching and spreading Islam) strategy or any scheme aiming to integrate the

few converts.29_{These converts, generally}

univer-sity students who came into contact with Islam through their studies, confront a serious and powerful linguistic barrier in the community, since rituals, sermons, and a large part of the ordinary conversation among the members take place in Arabic, accompanied on occasion by translation into Portuguese.

The relation that the Curitiba community has with Brazilian society follows the dynamic of an “ethnoreligious enclave,” similar to those, for example, in the Jewish and Armenian com-munities in Brazil. But this relation does not thwart a deep integration into the local social and cultural universe in other realms of life (work, friendships, etc.). The Arab Muslims in Curitiba participate actively in the Arab ethnic associations, such as the Arab Brazilian Aid Association (Sociedade Beneficente Árabe Brasileira) or the Syrian- Lebanese Club (Clube Sírio- Libanês), as well as in the economic, politi-cal, and cultural spheres of local society. The ob-jectification of Islam in the Muslim community of Curitiba is done through the systematization of shared cultural understandings of the reli-gious doctrines and practices and allows its mem-bers to understate their sectarian differences. 28. Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Common Denominators:

Ethnicity, Nation- Building, and Compromise in Mauri-tius (London: Berg, 1998). 29. Since 2005 some members of the community, in-cluding the vice president of the Islamic Mutual- Aid Association, have been trying to develop the work of spreading Islam among the larger society by provid-ing information and opening the mosque for public visitation on Sunday mornings. Also, in 2007, classes started to be held in the mosque on Saturdays in order to teach converts and non- Muslims about Islam.

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Diverse Identities and Institutional Pluralism: The Muslim Community in São Paulo

São Paulo, which is the largest Brazilian city, with 12 million inhabitants in its metropolitan area, offers a pluralistic context for the rela-tion between Muslim identity and Arab ethnic-ity, for the city has several Islamic institutions and mosques. Owing to the community’s de-mographics, ethnic and religious diversity, and multiplicity of institutions, various levels and

forms of belonging can be found.30_However,

the Muslim communities in São Paulo are com-posed mostly of Lebanese, Palestinian, or Syr-ian immigrants.

This ethnic dominance is more apparent in the Shi‘i community. The Muhammad Raçu-lullah mosque, also known as the Brás Mosque, is the religious center of São Paulo’s Shi‘i

com-munity.31_{Although the mosque has just three}

thousand members, only a fraction of the city’s Shi‘i community (which numbers twenty thou-sand), it is considered the center of Shi‘i identity within the Muslim community. The Shi‘i com-munity is almost exclusively composed of Leba-nese immigrants and their descendents and has a clear Lebanese/Arab identity.

Members tend to marry within the com-munity, owing to its large size, or grooms and brides come from Lebanon for this purpose. Because the transnational links with the Mid-dle East are very strong in this community, with many members coming and going from Brazil to Lebanon, or spending different phases of their lives in one of the two countries, marriages with Lebanese Muslims are frequent.

There is a small group of converts (about forty) in the Shi‘i mosque. Some of the converts told me that they were attracted to Shi‘i Islam because of its role in the struggle against North American imperialism and in defense of the people’s right to self- determination, as well as by the message of solidarity, equality, and social justice. For them, Islam has all the

characteris-tics of a religion and a political ideology based in a Third World perspective, which can also be found among the followers of liberation theol-ogy in Latin American Catholicism. The Ira-nian revolution and Hezbollah’s resistance to the Israeli occupation of Lebanon are some of the things these converts cited to explain their option for Shiism, which they consider “purer” and more “revolutionary” than Sunni Islam.

Other converts told me that they were in-troduced to Islam by friends or by colleagues at work who are Shi‘is. According to them, after some visits to the mosque and conversa-tions with Muslims, they were impressed by the solidarity and mutual respect that members showed to one another. They then converted. Four members of the religious course held at the mosque said that they became interested in Islam through news reports or through Mus-lim friends or acquaintances. After visiting the mosque and learning about the doctrinal principles, they converted because they were convinced by what they defined as the religious truth of Islam.

Until 2007 the mosque was led by Sheikh Said Hassan Ibrahim, who was born in An Na-batiyah at Tahta, South Lebanon, but was raised in Beirut and educated in Qom, Iran. The mosque is located in the center of the textile commercial sector of the Brás neighborhood, which is dominated by Muslim merchants and Korean entrepreneurs. The labor force in the wholesale stores, which are owned mostly by Muslims, is from the northeast of Brazil (nordes-tinos), while illegal Bolivian immigrants staff the clothing factories owned by Koreans.

The ethnic and religious diversity among business owners and workers in textile produc-tion and commerce is reproduced in the mul-tiple religious institutions and spaces that shape the urban landscape of Brás. Thus the neigh-borhood has a concentration of three Muslim institutions: the Shi‘i mosque, the Salah al- Din 30. In the absence of precise, or even reliable, numbers, it is reasonable to extrapolate from the commu-nities I studied that in the greater São Paulo region there are about 250,000 Muslims, which is about 25 percent of the Muslim population in Brazil. 31. This awkward transliteration in Portuguese of

Muhammad Rasul Allah (Muhammad, the Prophet of

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Mosque, and the Islamic Youth League (Liga da Juventude Islamica), the last two of which are Sunni. Beyond that, there is the Bolivian Cul-tural Center and many bars and forrós (public dance halls) that bring together migrants from the northeast of Brazil.

The architecture of the Brás Mosque shows a process of the “Persianization” of the religious imagination of Shi‘i communities around the world through aesthetic and visual elements that link transnational Shiism with the religious and cultural history of Iran. This process is actively encouraged by the Islamic Republic of Iran, which finances the construction or

reconstruc-tion of mosques and sacred places.32_{While the}

small Iranian community in São Paulo has the Brás Mosque as the institutional and spatial ref-erence point of their religious identity as Shi‘i Muslims, the Iranians almost never attend ritual activities, such as daily or community prayers, meetings, or get- togethers, which take place regularly at the mosque. The Iranian presence becomes visible only during the most impor-tant celebrations of the Shi‘i calendar, such as Ashura, which commemorates the martyrdom of Husayn, Muhammad’s grandson, at the battle of Karbala.

The Iranians’ distancing is surprising at first sight, given that Sheikh Said had his reli-gious training in Iran. However, some Iranians with whom I talked told me that the connection of the sheikh with Iran is not an attractive fea-ture. Many of them left Iran disappointed with the political and economic direction of the Is-lamic Republic, and they do not have any inter-est in what they define as “official Islam,” the religious interpretation favored by the Iranian state, which is the main reference for Sheikh

Said.33_{The Iranians also resent the pervasive}

presence of the cultural diacritics of Arab eth-nicity in the religious context of the mosque.

Arabic language is the linguistic context of most social interactions that take place within the mosque. The religious rituals are also per-formed exclusively in Arabic, with no translation of the sermon into Portuguese. Also the rituals are performed according to Lebanese cultural traditions, with strong chest beating during the Ashura celebration. Therefore, within the con-text of the Muslim communities in São Paulo, the Shi‘i mosque appears as a space for the construction, assertion, and maintenance of an identity that blends diasporic religious elements (the umma of global Islam) and ethnic/national dimensions (the Lebanese diaspora) with the sectarian affirmation of transnational Shiism. Like the Muslim community in Curitiba, the members of the Mesquita do Brás objectify Islam as a set of culturally shared understand-ings and embodied dispositions, rather than a system of abstract doctrinal principles that can be transmitted through discursive disciplinary mechanisms.

Ethnicity Reinforcing Sectarianism: The Muslim Community in Foz do Iguaçu

The Muslim community in Foz do Iguaçu, in the state of Paraná, is almost totally composed of Lebanese and Palestinian immigrants and their descendents. The Lebanese constitute a large majority within the community. While there are no reliable statistics for the number of Muslims in Foz do Iguaçu, the religious leaders of the community advance numbers that range from eighteen thousand to twenty- two thousand Muslims in the area of the “Triple Border” (trí-plice fronteira/triple frontera). This area is at the confluence of the national borders of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay and has three cities, one in each country, that have among them different levels of integration. The economy of this region is oriented toward transborder com- 32. That investment by the Iranian government is evi-dent in Syria, where the sacred places linked to Shi‘i sacred history were reconstructed to exhibit a clear Shi‘i religious character. Many places like the tomb of Sayyidah Zaynab in Damascus, which used to have a strong Sufi presence, were recreated within an aes-thetic framework derived from Persian architecture. See Paulo G. Pinto, “Pilgrimage, Commodities, and Religious Objectification: The Making of Transna-tional Shiism between Iran and Syria,” Comparative

Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27

(2007): 109 – 25.

33. On the social and political disappointment and indifference and the religious individualization that characterize contemporary Iranian society, see Fariba Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Olivier Roy and Farhad Khosrokhavar, Iran: Comment sortir d’une revolution

religieuse (Iran: How to Move away from a Religious Revolution) (Paris: Seuil, 1999).

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merce and tourism, for it harbors the Iguaçu waterfalls, which are on the border between Brazil and Argentina and are a major tourist at-traction of both countries.

While Paraguay has no major tourist at-traction in this area, its city, Ciudad del Este, with 170,000 inhabitants, developed as a major commercial hub that feeds the Brazilian market with both certified and falsified imported elec-tronics and luxury goods from Asia, Europe, and the United States. The commerce in Ciu-dad del Este is controlled mainly by Arab and Chinese immigrants and their descendants. Many Brazilians also work in Ciudad del Este. Therefore, the economy of Foz do Iguaçu, which on the Brazilian side is the largest city of the region, with three hundred thousand inhabit-ants, is fully integrated with Ciudad del Este, with a constant flux of people and goods flow-ing between the two cities. The Arab Muslim community is spread between both cities, with those who are better- off economically tending to live in Brazil and those recently arrived living in Paraguay. Puerto Iguazú on the Argentin-ean side, with thirty- two thousand inhabitants, is the smallest and the least integrated in the transborder economy of the three cities, with no Arab/ Muslim community. The Muslim

commu-nity in the Triple Border gained great visibility after September 11 after it was targeted by the discourses on international terrorism fostered by the Argentinean and American governments, which tried to link it with the bombing attacks against the Israeli Embassy and the Jewish Mutual- Aid Association of Argentina (AMIA) in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994, as well as with

militant groups in the Middle East.34

There are Islamic institutions in both Foz do Iguaçu and Ciudad del Este. In Foz do Ig-uaçu there is the Mesquita Omar Ibn al- Khattab, which belongs to the Sunni community, and a Husayniyah in the Sociedade Islamica de Foz do Iguaçu, which belongs to the Shi‘i community. In Ciudad del Este, the Shi‘i community has the Mesquita del Profeta Mohammed, and the Sunni community has a prayer hall in a com-mercial building. While there is a great circula-tion of people between the institucircula-tions within each sectarian group, with the mosque and prayer hall in Paraguay functioning more dur-ing the workdur-ing hours and the mosque and the Husayniyah functioning for celebrations and collective prayers at night or during the week-ends, there is almost no circulation of Sunnis to Shi‘i religious institutions and vice versa.

The existence of separate institutions

re-Mesquita do Brás, the only Shi’i mosque in São Paulo. Picture by the author, 2007

34. Silvia Montenegro and Verónica Gimenez Bé-liveau, La Triple Frontera: Globalización y

construc-ción social del espacio (The Triple Border: Globaliza-tion and the Social ConstrucGlobaliza-tion of Space) (Madrid:

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veals the importance of sectarian boundaries for the Muslims in Foz do Iguaçu. While both communities present a discourse of Islamic universalism, stressing the unity of Islam and the irrelevance of sectarian divisions, there is a great awareness of the existence of two Mus-lim communities with discrete understandings and practices of the religion. Despite their dif-ferences and rivalries, the Sunni and the Shi‘i communities agree in their distinction between Muslim and Arab identity. The leaders of both communities see their role as the maintenance of the Arab Muslim identity of their community and its transmission to the new generations.

When I asked Sheikh Ahmad of the Sunni mosque in Foz do Iguaçu if his community had any plan of spreading Islam in the Brazilian so-ciety, he said: “No, we have no plans for da’wah among the non- Muslims. Actually our main concern is to create conditions for the Muslims to remain Muslims, and for the new generations to not go away from Islam. If we manage to do that, we can say that we were very successful.” Indeed, neither the Sunni nor the Shi‘i commu-nity has any plan for attracting new converts to Islam, thus showing a complete identification of Islam and Arab ethnicity in their definition of the Muslim identity.

The transnational connections with the Middle East are very active, with an intense

cir-culation of people, goods, and ideas from Brazil to Lebanon and back. In many marriages the grooms and brides have come from Lebanon, to where some of the wealthier families send their sons and daughters to learn Arabic and the cul-tural traditions of their region of origin. These transnational ties are important symbolically and economically, as many families have prop-erties and business in both Lebanon and Brazil. While there are some cases of marriage with non- Muslim Brazilian and Paraguayan women, I did not come across any case of a mixed Shi‘i couple, showing again the strength of the sectarian divide.

However, the very construction of Islam as a cultural heritage that, in principle, is shared by all Middle Eastern immigrants and should be transmitted to their descendants enhanced the awareness about the sectarian differences between Sunni and Shi‘i Muslims. To be able to transmit a general “Muslim identity” that is de-fined as a specific cultural content, the commu-nity had to reach a consensus about the doctrinal and ritual elements that constitute it. Therefore, the various doctrinal and ritual references that mark the boundary between Sunni and Shi‘i constructions of the Islamic tradition were seen as deviations from the cultural consensus that should prevail in the community and, in the end, led to its division along sectarian lines.

Omar Ibn al-Khattab Mosque in Foz do Iguaçu. Picture by the author, 2008

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Sheikh Muhammad Khalil, who became the leader of the Shi‘i community in Foz do Iguaçu in 2005 after leading the mosque in Curitiba, sees in the division the effect of the introduction into the Sunni community of Wahhabi- influenced understandings of Islam, which forced the Shi‘is to create their own re-ligious institutions. According to him, the reli-gious consensus that existed in the community, owing to their shared cultural understandings of Islam as it was practiced in the Middle East, was broken by the introduction of what he saw as an intolerant religious ideology by Lebanese sheikhs.

In contrast, Sheikh Ahmad, who was born in Brazil and completed his religious studies in Saudi Arabia, blamed the Shi‘is for the di-vision of the Muslim community, saying: “We were all together in this mosque until the Shi‘is built their Husayniyah. Then it was impossible to keep the community together, because they would perform rituals [of the Ashura] there that are not acceptable for us. They preferred to maintain these rituals than to continue with us. It is better this way, they have their religion and we have ours.”

There were nonreligious institutions, such as the Clube da Unidade Árabe (Nadi al- Ittihad al- Arabi/Arab Unity Club), which managed to gather the Sunnis and Shi‘is on an ethnic basis as Arabs. However, the club was closed a few years ago because of financial problems. The end of the club also entices mutual accusations from the Sunni and the Shi‘i communities, with the Sunnis saying that the Shi‘is were respon-sible for the club’s bankruptcy and the Shi‘is ac-cusing the Sunnis of closing the only institution where members from both communities could interact as Arabs.

The strong identification of Islam with the cultural diacritics of Middle Eastern societies can be seen in the investment that these com-munities have in their transmission to the new generations. Thus the Sunni community has the Escola Árabe Brasileira (Arab Brazilian School), which functions in a building near the mosque, and the Shi‘i community has the Escola Li-banesa Brasileira (Lebanese Brazilian School). There is also a Shi‘i Lebanese school in Para-guay. The main purpose of these private schools

is to teach Arabic to descendants of Muslim im-migrants, allowing them to keep their linguistic and cultural ties with the Middle East.

However, despite the obvious purpose of maintaining the transnational character of the Muslim community, the schools also serve as an instrument of cultural localization in Brazilian (and Paraguayan) society. Both schools teach the regular national curriculum common to all Brazilian schools, public or private, together with a large number of hours for Arabic (and English) as a foreign language. Therefore, while the Arab school enables new generations of Mus-lims to maintain transnational cultural connec-tions, it also gives them a clear insertion in the Brazilian educational and social context.

This complex interaction between trans-national and local elements in the constitution of Arab Muslim identities is even clearer in the Lebanese Brazilian Scout Group (Grupo de Es-coteiros Líbano- Brasileiro), which was created in 2005 by the Shi‘i community and functions in a building next door to the Husayniyah. The Scout group accepts both boys and girls as mem-bers; they are taught by male and female tutors respectively. The organization’s president, a member of the Shi‘i community, stressed that the Lebanese Brazilian Scout Group is very much part of the scene of youth associations in Foz do Iguaçu, in that it has strong connec-tions with the city’s other two scouts groups and participates in the activities of the União dos Escoteiros do Brasil (Brazilian Union of Scout Groups). In this sense, the scout group is for the Muslim community an instrument of insertion in the local social context as well as in the Bra-zilian nation- state.

However, this affirmation of belonging to the local society is articulated with the af-firmation of cultural diacritics that delimit the boundaries of the Arab Muslim community as a particular group within the Brazilian state. The president of the Lebanese Brazilian scout group expressed this double process when he explained the purposes that informed the group’s creation:

The idea to create the scout group was to pro-vide to our youth a space for healthy entertain-ment, where they could meet and know one an-other, as well as other kids who are not from the

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community. It is very important to teach them [the young ones] social responsibilities and re-spect for nature and the environment. In this sense the Scout group can be seen as part of the education of our sons and daughters as Muslims and as citizens. Of course the idea to create a group for the Lebanese and the rest of the Arab community comes from the necessity to allow the young generations to live a normal life while teaching them to respect the customs that de-fine us as Muslims and Arabs. We have boys and girls in all the activities, but we make sure that everything is within the boundaries of Islamic morality, in particular our camping [activities]. But, of course, it just reinforces the healthy and respectful atmosphere that is the essence of scouting.

As this statement indicates, Arab and Muslim identities are treated as having equivalent or, at least, overlapping cultural meanings, as both are referred to as a set of “customs” and moral values related to Middle Eastern societies. The group’s activities use both Portuguese and Arabic as their linguistic contexts. This iden-tification between ethnic and religious identi-ties was stressed by the group’s president, who pointed out that while most members are Shi‘is, the group also includes descendants of Sunni, Druze, and Christian Arab immigrants, who see in it a space where Arab identities can be rein-forced among the new generations born in Bra-zil. Therefore, one can say that the scout group fosters identities and creates cultural

compe-tences that allow its members to negotiate their insertion in the local society, in the Brazilian nation- state, and in the transnational social net-works and symbolic systems that connect them to Middle Eastern societies.

The fostering of these multiple layers of local, national, and transnational social imagi-naries by the Lebanese Brazilian Scout Group was exemplified by Akil Merhei, its honorary patron. Merhei was the group’s president until he was killed, together with his wife and two kids, in the indiscriminate bombing of South Lebanon by the Israeli army in the 2006 war. The figure of Merhei condenses several layers of meaning in the symbolic rendering of his life and death.

In relation to this analysis, Merhei repre-sented, at the same time, a local public figure, known and loved by many, who fostered the in-sertion of the Arab Muslim community in the society of Foz do Iguaçu; he was a transnational Arab Brazilian who lived and worked in Brazil and maintained his cultural and personal ties with Lebanon, where he took his family for va-cations and visited relatives; he is a “martyr” (shahid ) who became a victim of the regional and global conflicts that involved the Middle East. In this sense, the figure of Merhei works as a dominant symbol in the context of the Lebanese Brazilian Scout Group, allowing the condensation and articulation of the gamut of identities (Brazilian, Lebanese, Arab, Muslim,

Poster depicting Akil Merhei at the Lebanese-Brazilian Scout Group. Picture by the author, 2007