TIBETAN MUSLIMS A MINORITY WITHIN A MINORITY From a Kashmiri Muslim Immigration to Tibet to A Tibetan Muslim Forced Migration to India - Institut de Recherches et d'Etudes sur le Monde Arabe et Musulman
Pré-Publication, Document De Travail Année : 2023

TIBETAN MUSLIMS A MINORITY WITHIN A MINORITY From a Kashmiri Muslim Immigration to Tibet to A Tibetan Muslim Forced Migration to India

Résumé

Following the first study, Behind the Bridge (LIT Verlag, 2019) which presented through a visual perspective of the general context of Tibetans forced migration to India, this second publication focusses on a minority of the Tibetan Diaspora, Tibetan Muslims. Most people automatically associate Tibet with Buddhism and the Dalai Lama who has become the main voice of the exiled Tibetans in India. As a religious and political leader, he is a physical embodiment of the Tibetan space, territory, population, religion, and identity, who has helped create the impression among the Western public of a monolithic vision of a pure Buddhist Theocracy. Layers of migration by Christians and Muslims have nevertheless impacted Tibet. This book is based on field research and focusses on the Tibetan Muslim Diaspora. The number of Tibetan Muslims living in North India is less than 3,000, two-thirds of whom live in Kashmir. Tibetan refugees in India, estimated at less than 100 000, form one of the largest populations of refugees from Tibet, and are mostly Buddhist. The Muslim minority within this refugee population comprise no more than three hundred families. The Tibetan Muslims are thus an important minority within the minority communities of Tibetan refugees in India. This study invites readers to listen to the Muslim communities’ narratives about the genesis of Islam in Tibet and their exile experiences. Originally from Kashmir, Muslims settled in Lhasa and then migrated in the sixties to India following the Chinese invasion of 1959. My book emphasizes the hybridization of Tibetan Muslims’ culture which we can see and understand by means of Deleuze’s concept of “rhizome.” People’s narratives of uprooting and settling, of a Tibetan cultural Buddhist heritage combined with Kashmiri Muslim rituals creates hybrid cultural practices and traditions explained as rhizomic. I use Deleuze’s concept to explain the multiple cultural roots as they combine and mutate in episodes of exile and in diasporic lives.   Author: Dr. Fabienne Le Houérou lives and works in Aix-en-Provence, Southern France. Her academic field is Contemporary History, Visual Anthropology; she is a specialist of International Migrations. She is a Research Director at CNRS (French National Center for Research (CNRS), Institut de Recherches et d’Etudes sur les Mondes Arabes et Musulmans (IREMAM), Fellow at the Institut Convergences Migrations/ Global. Film theorist, Dr. Le Houérou coordinates a methodological seminar, “Film Methodology in Social Science”, at Aix-Marseille University (AMU). Currently, Dr. Le Houérou edits “Science and Video”; a Human Sciences review, and serves as the director of a publishing collection on Humanitarian Affairs, “Mondes en mouvement”, at L’Harmattan Éditions in Paris. Her current research focuses on migrations and mobilities, and she is particularly interested in using film as a methodological tool. She has published twelve books in Social Science (four in English) and directed eight ethnographic films. In 2019, she published at Lit Verlag editions, in Berlin, a book on The Tibetan Migration in India: https://www.lit-verlag.de/publikationen/kulturwissenschaft/72956/behind-the-bridge.   Preface Originality of the subject In Tibet, they were called Kache (Kashmiri), a name that designates the original land of the Muslim immigrants in Tibet. They were deeply rooted in the country and completely assimilated as urban elite and followed the Dalai Lama in exile in the 1960s but did not really get them absorbed in Kashmir. They were settled in Kashmir in the 1960s and despite their ancestral Kashmiri origins, and the shared Muslim religion, they did not melt, dissolve and fuse with local inhabitants of Srinagar. This shows a paradox in the two migrations. The first wave of Kashmiri migrations to Tibet from 15th to 19th century led to deep fusion of the immigrants in Tibet while the second forced migration of the Tibetan Muslims to India in 1960s did not attain this assimilation. This first book on Tibetan Muslims is an analysis of what are the pushing factors for a hybridist process highlighting the interstitial spaces between the new migrants and their host society to understand the logical process of a social fusion. It also focuses on the variety of migrations and argues out the difference between a forced migration and a voluntary migration in term of an “accepted” or “rejected” exile. The present manuscript is also based on original sources. Fabienne Le Houérou did her research on this subject during 2017-2019 in India and met one key witness who experienced the forced migration to India. Yussuf Naik, the man in question, is a major source for this historical and unknown human adventure. He belongs to a famous Muslim Tibetan family in Tibet who lived there for centuries. He testified about his father’s .
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hal-04383074 , version 1 (09-01-2024)

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Fabienne Le Houerou. TIBETAN MUSLIMS A MINORITY WITHIN A MINORITY From a Kashmiri Muslim Immigration to Tibet to A Tibetan Muslim Forced Migration to India. 2023. ⟨hal-04383074⟩
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