The Performance of Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims

193 Pages·2021·2.798 MB·New Perspectives on Language and Education

by  Andrey Rosowsky

The Performance of
Multilingual and
‘Ultralingual’ Devotional
Practices by Young
British Muslims
NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION
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NEW PERSPECTIVES ON LANGUAGE AND EDUCATION: 88
The Performance
of Multilingual
and ‘Ultralingual’
Devotional
Practices by Young
British Muslims
Andrey Rosowsky
MULTILINGUAL MATTERS
Bristol • Blue Ridge Summit
DOI https://doi.org/10.21832/ROSOWS1371
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Names: Rosowsky, Andrey, 1956- author.
Title: The Performance of Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional
Practices by Young British Muslims/Andrey Rosowsky.
Description: Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters, 2021. |
Series: New Perspectives on Language and Education: 88 | Includes
bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “This book examines the
wide range of multilingual devotional performances engaged in by young
Muslims in the UK today. It evaluates the contemporary mosque school in
the UK and contrasts this with practices from the past and with
prevailing discourses (both political and other) which suggest that such
institutions are problematic”—Provided by publisher.
Identifi ers: LCCN 2020048466 | ISBN 9781800411371 (hardback) | ISBN
9781800411388 (pdf) | ISBN 9781800411395 (epub) | ISBN 9781800411401
(kindle edition) Subjects: LCSH: Muslim youth—Great Britain. |
Muslim youth—Great
Britain—Social conditions. | Islam--Great Britain—Social aspects. |
Prayer—Islam. Classifi cation: LCC BP65.G7 R67 2021 | DDC
305.23088/2970941—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048466
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN-13: 978-1-80041-137-1 (hbk)
Multilingual Matters
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Copyright © 2021 Andrey Rosowsky
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any
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Contents
Figures vii
Acknowledgements ix
Foreword xi
Bernard Spolsky
1 Introduction 1
2 Multilingual and Ultralingual Devotional Practices among
British Muslim Youth 11
3 The Research of Ultralingual Practice in the Community: A
‘Gentle Ethnography’ 33
4 Ultralingual Language Practice in Devotional Settings 48
5 Ultralingual Devotional Performance in 2000 and in 2019 79
6 ‘Al-Qur’an’: The Sacred Text and its Centrality
(Mosque School A) 91
7 The Qur’anic Supplementary School in a Superdiverse Setting
(Mosque School B) 109
8 ‘Naat and Nasheed’: The Performance of Devotional Songs
and Poetry (Mosque School C) 124
9 Leaving ‘the Mawlana and the Child’ Behind
(Mosque School D) 141
10 ‘Binding and Shifting’: Language Continuity and
Linguistic Change in Ultralingual Devotional Practices 160
References 169
Index 180
v
Figures
Figure 4.1 Layout of three fully pointed verses from the
Qur’an 58
Figure 4.2 Layout of a typical musical score 59
Figure 4.3 A professional Qur’anic reciter with his Egyptian
audience 63
Figure 4.4 An extract from the Madani Qa’idah, a typical
primer for mosque schools available in the UK 66
Figure 4.5 Roman transliteration of an H-Punjabi naat 73
Figure 5.1 Cover of Biblical Hebrew primer for children 89
Figure 6.1 Teaching layout in Mosque School A based on
fi eld notes from 8 September 2014 94
Figure 6.2 Typical Indo-Pak Qur’anic script 95
Figure 6.3 Typical Uthmani Qur’anic script 96
Figure 6.4 Typical mosque school bag 107
Figure 7.1 Children’s work displayed on wall of Mosque
School C 115
Figure 7.2 Page from a Qa’idah with Roman transliteration
and English explanation 117
Figure 8.1 The Muslim boys choir of Mosque School C 125
Figure 8.2 Harris J’s YouTube channel 129
Figure 8.3 A page from a British Muslim song edited by
Abdul Hakim Murad (2005) 130
Figure 8.4 Wajid Akhtar’s YouTube channel 132
Figure 8.5 Teacher S from Mosque School C 136
Figure 9.1 Plastic stands designed for reading the Qur’an
and other religious texts while sitting on the fl oor 152
vii
Acknowledgements
First of all, this book acknowledges the young Muslims and their teachers
of the four mosque schools which are at the heart of this study. Without
them this book could not have been written. In my heart, I hope that their
admirable prowess and substantial expertise in the rich art of multilingual
and ultralingual devotional practice, whether through this book or in
other ways, becomes better known and appreciated.
I would also like to express my appreciation to my publisher,
Multilingual Matters, for whom this is my third modest off ering. I thank
them for their support and encouragement and the confi dence they have
placed in me to produce something worthy of their rich and extensive
catalogue.
Many readers will know, also, that I owe a great debt to my mentor,
friend and colleague, the late Tope Omoniyi (1956–2017). His early depar-
ture from this world left me and countless others bereft of his wisdom and
insight into language, religion and society. His infl uence on my thinking,
my research and my outlook on the world (academic and other) was enor-
mous. Together with his mentor, the late Joshua Fishman, he helped initi-
ate the Sociology of Language and Religion (SLR). I hope this book makes
a useful contribution to that ongoing project.
wa min allahi at-tawfi q [‘ultimately, all success is from God’]
ix
Foreword
In a number of pioneering studies, Andrey Rosowsky has been exploring
the relations between language and religion. This present volume, the
result of two decades of ethnographic observation, focuses on the devo-
tional practices of young British Muslims, who have blended a non-
Western religion and its traditions with the modern life and language of
an immigrant community. This is a signifi cant addition to the study of
diasporas, a term originally used for the Jewish communities outside
Israel which fl ourished as early as Temple times, but which were the main
location of continuing Jewish life for 2000 years. The term was later
applied to non-Jewish ethnic and nation communities. Safran (1991) was
among the fi rst to propose a set of criteria for all diasporas. They were, he
said, ‘expatriate minority communities’ characterized by: dispersion from
a homeland to two or more foreign regions; maintenance of a common
memory of the homeland; varying degrees of isolation from the host soci-
ety; a continuing desire to return to the homeland when conditions are
right; a belief that they should be committed to the maintenance of the
homeland; and collective solidarity built on a personal or vicarious rela-
tionship to the homeland. Using this defi nition, he said, it would be appro-
priate to speak of the Armenian, Maghrebi, Turkish, Palestinian, Cuban,
Greek and ‘perhaps Chinese diasporas at present’, and the Polish diaspora
of the past. And, as a result of the current chaotic state of Islamic coun-
tries, one would add the rapidly growing Arabic-speaking diasporas in
much of Europe, which face a demographic and religious change of gigan-
tic proportions.
An inevitable eff ect of diasporas is the development of what Grosjean
(2015) labels ‘bicultural bilinguals’ – individuals with uneven profi ciency
in at least two language varieties and the related ability to function in two
diff erent cultures, forming the controversial mixture that is now labelled
as ‘hybridity’ (Kalra et al., 2005). Diaspora communities are made up of
complex mixtures of plurilingual individuals who vary in their degree of
profi ciency and use of both their languages, the result being fuzzy and
debatable patterns. And when more than two varieties and cultures are
involved, as occurs with people who have a history of conquests and
expulsions, the situation that emerges shows many infl uences.
xi
xii Multilingual and ‘Ultralingual’ Devotional Practices by Young British Muslims
The Muslim community in Britain constitutes an important example
of this hybridity. Now seen as ‘a dangerous, socio-cultural threat’, ‘a prob-
lematic outsider’, ‘the enemy within’ and the target of growing
Islamophobia, British Muslims have ‘contested their “othering” through
practices of assimilation, integration and hybridization’ (Ansari, 2004). It
is hybridization that Rosowsky investigates in this study, focusing not just
on language but also on the added dimension of religious otherness. While
the British public is increasingly marked by secularism, as witnessed by
the large number of deconsecrated churches one notices when walking
through the countryside, Muslims in Britain, many of them from non-
Arabic speaking south Asia, are identifi able not just by trilingualism in
their heritage languages, their learning of Arabic for religious purposes
and their addition of environmental English, but also by their continuing
acceptance of Islam and the resulting ties to mosque and madrassa.
Rosowsky in this book sets out to describe the religious practices and
performances of young British Muslims. A number of studies in Omoniyi
and Fishman (2006) have explored the way in which religion has contrib-
uted to language maintenance. For Islam, Rosowsky (2006a) reminds us
of the distinction between liturgical literacy and the spoken varieties of
Arabic. He notes that the Muslim communities of Britain, many of south
Asian origin and speaking many diff erent languages while maintaining
Arabic as their liturgical language, continue to believe in the high status
of Qur’anic Arabic. At the same time, these communities and especially
the younger members are assimilating linguistically and culturally to their
British environment, producing a multilingual and culturally diverse
hybridity that Omoniyi (2006) identifi ed and explored.
With the continuing and growing multilingual communities and plu-
rilingual individuals produced in Europe by the growing number of
migrants and asylum seekers from so many countries, studies such as this
of the developing hybrid communities are of great signifi cance. The issue
of religious infl uence on sociolinguistic repertoires is not new: studies of
classic Jewish diasporas showed the adoption and adaptation of languages
other than Hebrew, and the maintenance of liturgical and literary Hebrew
over the generations (Spolsky, 2014); and the way in which Persia and
Turkey accepted Islam and Arabic liturgy while maintaining their own
languages showed multilingualism resulting from religious conversion.
South Asian nations like Pakistan and Bangladesh, when fi nally liberated
from British colonial rule, also adopted liturgical Arabic alongside their
own national languages. There have been many migrants from these
countries. The UK is home to the largest Pakistani community in Europe,
with the population of British Pakistanis exceeding 1.17 million based on
the 2011 census; in the census, another 450,000 respondents reported
Bangladeshi origin (ONS, 2012). Migrants from these countries to Britain
added English to their individual and community repertoires, building the
Foreword xiii
linguistic, cultural and religious hybridity that Rosowsky has been
studying.
The way the young members of this large immigrant population adapt
to their mixed environment, drawn towards the new language while home
and mosque off er two other signifi cant languages, off ers important clues
as to the eff ects of the major demographic developments. The children of
migrants regularly face the challenge of acquiring at least two languages –
the heritage language favoured and still used by their parents, and the
environmental language of the surrounding community, presented to
them by peers and schools. In religious communities, Muslim or Jewish
or Christian, there is a third language involved, as parental support for
traditional liturgical languages is implemented by supplemental or com-
munity schools.
All of this produces a kind of linguistic and cultural hybridity, a con-
cept developed by Bakhtin (1981) and now studied as a feature of post-
colonialism. With the enormous increase in asylum seeking and economic
migration from many countries in the Middle East, Africa and Latin
America, understanding the nature of these new arrivals is of increasing
importance to the societies in which they are now living. Rosowsky’s
research is an important contribution to this urgent task.
Bernard Spolsky
Bar-Ilan University