Religious Identification in Transnational Contexts: Being and Becoming Muslim in Ethiopia and Canada
The Harari are a recently formed diaspora of Muslim elites from the walled city of Harar in eastern Ethiopia. Ethiopians as a whole have not had a history of migration—of moving abroad permanently or changing their citizenship (Catholic Immigration Centre 1). The Harari have been particularly localized and were described as late as the mid-1960s as a “one city culture” (Waldron, “Social” 6) because the overwhelming majority of their numbers resided inside the old city wall. Today, only about one-third of the total population lives in the old city, the majority of them elder inhabitants. The largest concentration of Hararis outside Ethiopia is now in Toronto, Ontario: nearly 10% of the entire population lives in this diverse Canadian city. In this paper, I draw upon comparative ethnographic fieldwork with Hararis in Harar and Toronto to explore the ways in which this move from Ethiopia, as asylum seekers or as immigrants to Canada, has affected individual and group identities. Against the backdrop of Ethiopia’s new multiethnic government, Canadian multiculturalism policies, and the refugee and immigrant journeys between the two countries, Hararis and members of more than the seventy other officially recognized qabila, or nationalities, in Ethiopia are struggling to redefine themselves both at home and abroad.