Living Unthreatening Lives: Muslims at the Polish Catholic Frontier

• In Event: Religious Minorities

Abstract

This paper explores everyday experiences of ethnoreligious, racial, and class marginalization in the lives of ordinary Muslims from Białystok, the largest city along Poland’s eastern frontier. About a thousand Białystokers who identify as Polish Tatars, Romani, and Chechens live in socialist-era working-class neighborhoods scattered across the city. There, they inhabit liminal spaces of vague likeness and sharp difference – of working to belong while embodying distance from the societal norm. Their bodily liminality straddles a socioeconomic and class experience shared with other Poles who live modestly or struggle to make ends meet, even as white Christian Białystokers see Muslims as different or outright foreign to their hometown. While reflexively claiming to belong in the city, locals with “strange Oriental or fake Polish names”, as one Orthodox priest described them, struggle with the tactic of performing social belonging through “hard work” and its contradictory docile-capitalist and resistant-proletarian ethics. This is because their everyday lives entail corporeal expressions that exceptionalize them and reinforce their anxieties over celebrating holidays, applying for mosque construction permits, listening to music, cooking, or praying in benign ways that other Białystokers will not find threatening or inappropriate. At a time when Polish national politics are imbued with clashes over the meaning and status of the Catholic Church, priesthood, patriotism, and the nuclear family, there are Białystokers whose subjectivities are at once distanced from Catholicism, Polish nationalism, familial whiteness, and the middle-class imagery of post-communist progress and “return to Europe”. Lumped together with the elusive figure of the “Afghan asylum seeker” and relegated to the margins of both “high” and “everyday” politics and national culture wars, Polish Tatar, Romani, and Chechen performances of belonging and unobjectionable life are riddled with aporias. They are both aspirational and defensive and, paradoxically, both insignificant to most Poles and deployable as perilous to eastern frontier Poland – allegedly already vulnerable to Eastern European Orthodoxy and the geopolitical specter of Russia. In other words, racialized and classed forms of life (“Muslims”) take place as liminal (both proximate and alien to the social norm) and troubling, which makes them unsettled and riddled with contradictions in subjectivity. The paper argues that these everyday aporias of Muslimness are produced through the politics of Polish religious nationalism, which defines Poland as both an anti-communist Catholic Fatherland and a post-communist European success story with an ever-expanding middle class. Religious nationalism congeals the assemblage of white, middle-class, and Catholic subjectivities as it allows minority forms of life (such as Muslimness) to reproduce themselves insofar as this reproduction is docile, self-constrained to the parameters of “law and order”, and virtuously capitalist. For when the reproduction of “other” forms of life threatens the religious-nationalist assemblage, violent retribution follows – as recent anti-immigration protests and police and crowd violence against pro-choice, feminist, and queer protesters has shown. To substantiate the work of the religious-nationalist assemblage, this paper draws on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Białystok and embeds it in the literature on religious nationalism in Poland (Baker, Porter-Szucs, etc.) and Foucault’s work on Christian-pastoral power. In doing so, the paper shows how the entangled ecclesiastic-governmental power to promise salvation in the afterlife and sanction one’s virtue in the earthly life unfolds through domination and exclusion.

Author

• Bojan Savic, University of Kent, Brussels School of International Studies