Can the ‘muhajir’ speak? European Syria fighters and the digital un/making of home

Abstract

This contribution investigates the figure of the deviant Muslim – or ‘Syria fighter’, as he is commonly referred to in Belgium and the Netherlands – (temporarily) migrating from Europe to Syria. Through a digital ethnography of some of their self-portrayals in social media over the course of 2012–2014, it gauges the various social meanings and modes of state sovereignty that their actions continue to engender in Europe. Importantly, their political parole remains fixated on Belgium and the Netherlands despite their relocation to Syria and the abundant public discourse on their foreign ‘Islamist’ nature. Rather than encountering well-substantiated ideas about Middle Eastern politics in their online narratives emanating from Syria, one can trace an understudied social critique of the home society in Western Europe, not least about tense majority-minority relations and a racialized treatment as abjected Muslim Others. In their online posts, a pertinent dialogical relationship can be identified in opposition to the political discourse of the far right in Europe. Syria, or sham as they romantically code their newly found ‘home’, facilitates a reconstitution of selfhood and community, of which the vernacular dispositions and violent ritual processions make relational testimony to – if not partly reproduce – a ‘lived space’ in Europe. The conspicuous focus of these European ‘muhajirin’ in Syria on the ‘mahjar’, or society of departure in Europe, puts to question the narrow emphasis on ideological pull-factors such as jihadi Islamism in the bulk of rapidly emerging radicalisation studies. The semiotic exploration of some of their online performances, styling efforts and digital speech acts suggests that ‘hijra’ to Syria partly constitutes a form of racialized self-exile and social status exchange. Seeking to reframe the study of radicalised mobile agency in relation to symbolic governmentality, this essay first investigates the social emotion of home-making and then sets out to conceptualize both the citizenship category of the ‘anti-citizen’ and the process of ‘status migration’. Keywords: Radicalisation, Europe, migration, hijra, Syria, social media, race, Islam, citizenship

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