The Veiling of Religious Markers in the Sahrawi Diaspora

Abstract

States play key roles in promoting and controlling religious symbols, and yet Soares and Osella note that ‘insufficient attention is devoted to how the state intervenes to promote, co-opt, thwart, or isolate various forms of Islam and (“good” or “bad”) Muslims’ (2009, pp. 10–11). In turn, even fewer studies have analysed the ways in which religious symbols have been strategically mobilised by non-state actors. This chapter addresses this lacuna by examining the case of a non-state actor which has de facto control over a specific refugee population. I explore the ways in which Sahrawi refugees’ political representatives — the Polisario Front and their related government-in-exile, the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic (SADR) — have engaged in a range of representational strategies which ultimately ‘veil’ religious symbols such as mosques, madrasas, and especially the milhafa, arguing that the Polisario Front/SADR does so in order to maximise diverse short-and long-term benefits both inside and outside the Sahrawi refugee camps. More specifically, I argue that the purposeful distantiation from (or ‘veiling’ of) Islamic religious symbols has been enacted during interactions with secular humanitarian audiences to demonstrate the ‘ideal’ nature of the Sahrawi camps in order to ensure the continuation of humanitarian and political support, which both keeps refugees alive in their refugee camp homes and simultaneously maintains international support for the Sahrawi quest for political self-determination (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, 2014).