A Material Geography of ‘Dubai Business’: Making and Re-Making Muslim Worlds across Central Asia and the Gulf

Abstract

Tracing the circulation of Korans donated by Saudi Arabia across multiple migratory contexts in the United Arab Emirates, Tajikistan, and beyond, and understanding their transfiguration from a sacred text into a prestigious consumer good, this chapter explores the materialities and immaterialities of Tajik migrant religious, economic and social worlds that meet and intertwine in the context of ‘Dubai business’. Giving impetus to a stronger consideration of the material turn in the research on translocality and transregionality, the chapter illustrates how cultural imaginaries, while travelling via prestigious commodities across geographical regions, and socio-economic contexts mesh with spatial ideas of urbanism, cosmopolitanism, and piety. In the worlds of Dubai’s transregional trading business, tourism and charity, an exclusive notion of ‘bourgeois Islam’ is fabricated – a contested assemblage of knowledge, lifestyle aspirations, cultural hegemony, and social distinctedness, through which Tajik migrants re-fashion an elitist Muslim self along different notions of mobility, work and belonging.