Ho Wai-Yip

Much of the contemporary scholarly debate on issues related to theMuslim minority and the diaspora focuses on the cultural adaptation of Muslims in the West. However, it is interesting to note that the media representation of Muslim groups in the West is geographically, culturally, and ethnically limited. For instance, the media commonly refers to Muslim ethnic groups in Britain as being from Pakistan and India, or the Arab world and Turkey, or as Black (members of the Nation of Islam).1

Of course, the recent soaring numbers of Eastern European refugees and asylum seekers and local converts are becoming more visible in the European context. Nevertheless, the existing literature pays inadequate attention to Muslims who do not come from any of those regions.

The livelihoods and cultural identity struggles of other ethnic Muslims are hardly mentioned in the existing literature. For example, Muslims of Southeast Asian heritage are rarely identified as being part of Islamic communities in the West. In a more colloquial Chinese language term, this article will try to ground the findings of the Muslim diaspora within the wider context of Nanyang (South Sea), which in contemporary international discourse is known as Southeast Asia. Nanyang is neither a political nor geographical concept; rather, it carries a business connotation that refers to the naval outreach from Mainland China and within the South China Sea. Without strictly defining this geographical image, Nanyang is a wider geographical concept than the conventional definition of Southeast Asia, for it covers areas from the coastal areas of ancient China, the islands of Indonesia, British Borneo, and the Philippines.2

In this article, I conduct an exploratory study on the life history of a Southeast Asian Muslim family living between Britain and Hong Kong and its implication for the transnational network. By referring to Nanyang, we discuss the history of maritime commercial interactions before and after the various European empires. Within the context of the discussion, this article explores my interviewees’ narratives within the Muslim diaspora.

In-depth interviews and participant observation were conducted in my field research. Through interviewing two Muslim brothers from an ethnic Muslim family, who now live separately in Hong Kong and Britain, respectively, their life history narratives were recorded. The study examines and compares their everyday experiences, the elder brother’s reasons and motivations for migrating to Britain, and the younger brother’s decision to stay in postcolonial Hong Kong; their attitudes toward the host government and society; and their distinctive interpretation of Islam as a religion and a way of life.

For privacy and the protection of my respondents, their identities are concealed to a certain extent and not all of their personal particulars are disclosed. Accordingly, their names are kept in pseudonymous manner, namely, Ahmed’s family. Thus, the article adopts Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutical theory of narrative and relation between life and story. As a result, their life stories are told with specific characters and, finally, their lives are narrated as a plot. The respondents’ characters are expressed through this narrative strategy.3 In this vein, the two subjects are then dramatized as “Ahmed the Hermit” (the elder brother in Britain) and “Ahmed the Radical” (the younger brother in Hong Kong).

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