When Guinean Muslims leave their homeland, they encounter radically new versions of Islam and new approaches to religion more generally. In Remaking Islam in African Portugal , Michelle C. Johnson explores the religious lives of these migrants in the context of diaspora. Since Islam arrived in West Africa centuries ago, Muslims in this region have long conflated ethnicity and Islam, such that to be Mandinga or Fula is also to be Muslim. But as they increasingly encounter Muslims not from Africa, as well as other ways of being Muslim, they must question and revise their understanding of "proper" Muslim belief and practice. Many men, in particular, begin to separate African custom from global Islam. Johnson maintains that this cultural intersection is highly gendered as she shows how Guinean Muslim men in Lisbon―especially those who can read Arabic, have made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and attend Friday prayer at Lisbon's central mosque―aspire to be cosmopolitan Muslims. By contrast, Guinean women―many of whom never studied the Qur'an, do not read Arabic, and feel excluded from the mosque―remain more comfortably rooted in African custom. In response, these women have created a "culture club" as an alternative Muslim space where they can celebrate life course rituals and Muslim holidays on their own terms. Remaking Islam in African Portugal highlights what being Muslim means in urban Europe and how Guinean migrants' relationships to their ritual practices must change as they remake themselves and their religion. "Resonant throughout Remaking Islam in African Portugal , the ethnographer's deeply informed voice is the one we ourselves need to hear, as we, too, face unprecedented, once hardly imaginable predicaments of closeness and distancing in our troubled times. With the benefit of fieldwork over decades across town and country in Guinea-Bissau and in Portugal's capital, Lisbon, and speaking with great intimacy among immigrant Muslim diasporics, Michelle Johnson asks and answers the salient question. How do originally rural African diasporics in a European capital city navigate their unprecedented predicaments meaningfully through the controversial, tentative and yet, with great passion, intentionally faithful re-creation of Islam in the midst of complex, puzzling and unexpected cultural and social diversity? Outstanding, in my view as an ethnographer of divination, is Johnson's chapter on 'Reversals of Fortune,' in which she explores the surprising ambiguities and uncertainties in the quest for explanation of suffering and for healing with Muslim and non-Muslim consultants as diviners and healers."―Richard Werbner, author of Divination's Grasp: African Encounters with the Almost Said "The gripping narratives and nuanced interpretation found in Michelle Johnson's Remaking Islam in African Portugal demonstrates the considerable intellectual fruits of taking a slower more narratively contoured approach to ethnographic research and writing. Twenty years in the making, this book presents important transnational perspectives on ritual practices, identity formation, and gender and generational relations. In so doing Remaking Islam in African Portugal not only reconfigures our knowledge of changing religious conceptions and practices in diasporic contexts, but also extends and refines our comprehension of the human condition. Given the depth of its analytical insights and the grace of its presentation, this is a work that will be read, savored, and debated for many years to come."―Paul Stoller, author of Yaya's Story: The Quest for Well Being in the World "Written with great sensitivity and reflexivity, Remaking Islam in African Portugal demonstrates that 'Religious processes are at the core of migratory practices and . . . migration is at the heart of religious issues.' This beautifully written book reveals how the tension between the umma of global Islam and the embodied Islamic practices of specific Mandinga and Fula ethnicities plays out in a proliferation of 'ethnic' mosques in Lisbon and increasing collaboration between mosques and cultural clubs. In new diasporic sites, Guinean men and women use food, naming, mobile phones, and lifecycle rituals to rethink the variable relationships among religion and personhood for men and women, boys and girls in Lisbon and its exburbs. This book is a refreshing welcome addition to scholarly conversations on African diasporas and struggles over belonging."―Pamela Feldman-Savelsberg, Broom Professor of Anthropology and Social Demography, Carleton College "Michelle C. Johnson's Remaking Islam in African Portugal presents a detailed, impressive, and eloquent ethnographic account of the global circulation of Muslims from Guinea-Bissau to Portugal and beyond. The book opens with a discussion of Mandinga Islamic rituals of initiation, instruction, and burial in the African context and their gradual diffusion abroad. The analysis of the impact of migrants' internati