An Imagined Geography Sierra Leonean Muslims in America by JoAnn D’Alisera (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. 181 pages.)

Abstract

The civil war in Sierra Leone broke out just as JoAnn D’Alisera arrived with
the intention of studying a rural Islamic community. Instead, she eventually
decided to study Sierra Leonean Muslims in Washington, DC. Based on her
ethnographic research, An Imagined Geography is a sensitive depiction of
immigrants who must negotiate their accommodation and allegiance to three
separate imagined loci: the United States, in which they live; their Sierra
Leonean homeland; and the ummah, the global Islamic community of which
they are a part.
Much of the book centers on the experiences of five individuals, two
men and three women, through whose eyes the author explores the tensions
involved in being Muslim and African in the United States. Such a closegrained
focus allows her to provide a very visceral depiction of how they
live out their religious commitments in their everyday interactions with
each other, with other Sierra Leoneans, and with Anglo-Americans. The
men, for instance, are particularly apt to choose driving taxis as a career, even though some of them are highly educated and qualified for more prestigious
and more remunerative jobs. However, their taxis allow them to construct
a religious space that they can decorate with Islamic paraphernalia or
keep a supply of religious pamphlets to hand out to interested passengers,
and to align themselves with religious time so that they can take prayer
breaks and even drive to the mosque to pray. The many women-run hotdog
stands provide women with a similar freedom, if admittedly less mobility ...