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Migration and Islamic Ethics Issues of Residence, Naturalisation and Citizenship Edited by Ray Jureidini Said Fares Hassan

MIGRATION AND ISLAMIC ETHICS

Book’s Introduction

A principal concern of the authors in this collection of papers is how Islamic ethical and legal traditions can contribute to current global debates on the di-lemmas of migration and displacement. Can the Muslim tradition provide an alternative international moral and legal paradigm where others have proven inadequate?

 Abou El Fadl, in this volume, argues that the Muslim tradition is replete with “powerful virtuous ethical impulses that could make substantive contributions to the field of forced migrants and displacement.”

The ethics of muʾākhā (brotherhood), ḍiyāfa (hospitality), ijāra (providing protection and support), amān (providing safety), jiwār (neighborliness), sutra (protection, esp. in case of marriage), kafala (to guarantee someone) among others, may provide common ethical grounds with other religious traditions, moral phi-losophies and social customs that can go beyond the technical applications and procedural standards of international law.

The argument that these moral principles or “ethical potentialities and trajectories” are only entitled to fellow Muslims and not applicable to non-Muslims, contradicts the general historical trajectories and normative understanding in Islam.

These ethics, according to the authors of this volume, are inclusive and not context-specific. They present “a normative imperative for Muslims that would apply whenever there is an obligation to escape oppression or injustice,” and represent “purposeful construction of social and political virtues” (Abou El Fadl, Chapter One).

Unfortunately, post-colonial Muslim scholars have been more occupied with the apologetic discourse of either reinterpreting classical concepts (such as the division of the world into dār al-Islām and dār al-ḥarb) to relate to the political conceptualization of contemporary nation states, or proving an essential compatibility and reconcilability between Islamic theology and international law.

The better task is to turn the moral imperatives inherited from the Islamic tradition into significant theological and ethical engagements with modern discourses on human rights and dignity.

This volume provides scholarly attempts to achieve this task by reviewing questions of migration, residence, naturalisation and citizenship from multi-sided perspectives, thus more broadly defining the Islamic tradition to cover not only theology but to also encompass ethics, customs and social norms, as well as modern political, humanitarian and rights discourses.

The movement of people—individuals, families, tribes and entire communities—has shaped and transformed the history of humankind. Groups of people have migrated for many reasons: economic, religious, political, as well as for education and cultural exchange.

Masses have also migrated to escape conflict, persecution, natural disaster and harsh living conditions. The scholarly field of migration studies has been developing for over a century, primarily in the English speaking West in both colonial and post-colonial contexts, but pri-marily within established social science disciplines such as Sociology, Anthro-pology, Politics and Demography, but also in Labour Economics, Industrial Relations and International Relations.

 Migration studies also include forced migration and refugee studies with a proliferation of university departments and research centers in the last few decades teaching and researching migration issues—but rarely, perhaps never, from an Islamic ethical and juridical perspective.

This is a curious phenomenon since a large proportion of global migration and refugee movements are related to Muslim-majority states—as origin, transit and destination countries (Castles et al. 2014).

For example, as of 2015, the majority (65%) of the 21.3 million refugees worldwide were Muslim (including 5.2 million Palestinian refugees).

Almost 40 per cent of the 65.3 million classified as forcibly displaced (that includes internally displaced persons), were hosted in the Middle East and North Africa. Excluding Palestinians, around 54 per cent of registered refugees were from 3 Muslim countries—Syria (4.9 mill), Afghanistan (2.7 mill) and Somalia (1.1 mill) (UNHCR 2015).

As of June 2016, most Syrian refugees were being hosted by the neighbouring countries of Tur-key (2.8 million), Lebanon (1.02 million), Jordan (655,000), and Iraq (230,000). Around 900,000 Syrians filed asylum claims in Europe, while resettlement countries have taken relatively few—USA (18,000), Canada (40,000), Australia (12,000) (Migration Policy Centre, 2016).

 The GCC states (excluding Oman) have admitted around 620,000 Syrians since 2011, although there are claims of having taken more. The GCC countries do not, however, classify them as “refu-gees,” partly because they are not signatories to the 1951 UN Refugee Conven-tion (see De Bel Air 2015; Jureidini and Reda 2017).

In the same way that it has shaped many communities across the globe, migration also shaped the history of Islam from its very beginnings. Indeed, the question of the legality of Muslims residing in a non-Muslim state was the first of the “juridical” problems facing Muslim minorities.

Hijra in the Islamic tradition has been seen as the starting point of Muslim civilization and set the foundations for an Islamic society. It was one of the