Word: migrant
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...particularly bad time. Every year, in what is often called the world's largest annual migration, an estimated 180 million mainlanders go on holiday or travel home to be with their families to celebrate the Spring Festival, also known as Chinese New Year. Millions of these travelers are migrant workers - the real dynamo driving China's economic boom - who leave behind their jobs in factories and construction sites across the country for one of the few vacations many are allowed to take. But this year is different. Bad weather is making travel impossible; millions have been stranded on their journeys...
...answer lies in the subtle nuances of Western Muslim lives. What non-Muslim Europeans often see as alienation among their Muslim populations is often integration in disguise. The second and third generation are more confident Europeans than their migrant parents - and they're more confident Muslims, too. In the media, debates over Muslim women being allowed to wear veils in schools, courts and government jobs have been read as a clash between European and alien values. In fact, they're signs of Westernization, flaring up when the daughters of Muslim migrants, armed with European educations and passports, edge toward...
...Europeans, at work. The war on terror may create tensions for European Muslims, but in globalized cities and sectors, the war for talent gives them opportunities. On Fridays, the shoe racks at the mosque near Paris' glittering corporate suburb, La Défense, are increasingly filled not just with migrants' sandals, but executives' lace-ups. Prayer rooms at London's multinationals are no longer used by migrant janitors and support staff, but by lawyers, accountants and bankers. Umar Aziz, a litigator in London, recalls a clutch of law firms courting a top-flight Muslim candidate. Aziz's firm, with...
...learned to apply on the job to hard drives or computer models. In his recent book about life inside Hizb ut-Tahrir, British Muslim Ed Husain contrasts the aggressive, intolerant Islam he found in Hizb ut-Tahrir to the "Islam of the heart," the tolerant, humanistic Sufism of his migrant parents. In modern Islamic radicalism, custom and humanism are jettisoned in favor of logic and politics. Hizb ut-Tahrir, which targets youth on college campuses, promotes itself as the thinking Muslim's alternative to blindly following parents, mullahs or tradition...
...professionals from a completely different culture to you, really nice people to work with, but with whom you don't feel any emotional connection. You have to constantly turn inward, and your circle becomes smaller and smaller." Navigating the gap between a European workplace and the expectations of a migrant community can be intensely stressful, says Fuad Nahdi, a commentator and consultant on Muslim issues to Blair's government: "In terms of alienation, nothing succeeds like success." For Muslims who have made it, the loneliness of the corner office can be a cold contrast to the camaraderie of the mosque...