Jacob David Liming

JACOB LIMING, then a graduate student at University of California, Berkeley, California, was awarded funding in April 2021 to aid research on “’Islam is in Portugal’s Soul’: Muslim Historico-Legal Claims to Belonging at the Margins of Europe,” supervised by Dr. Charles Hirschkind. From October 2021 to October 2022 virtual ethnographic fieldwork was conducted among members of the Portuguese Islamic Community across four mosques in the greater Lisbon Area, public-facing Muslim and secular organizations which consider the importance of Portugal’s Moorish past to contemporary life, representatives of Portuguese institutions dealing with questions of immigration and religious freedom, and anti-racist activist groups throughout Portugal. The research considered the ways that both Portugal’s Islamic past and its colonial relationships with Islam in the long 20th century are invoked by project interlocutors to articulate a sense of Islamic belonging in Portugal. Far from being a purely instrumental and strategic invocation of history, the study highlights modes of relating to this history that exceed conventional historiographic and heritagization logics and which contribute to the cultivation of an ethical life among its interlocutors.