The intricacies of existentialism and its multicentered accumulations are often scattered across larger impersonal worlds. In her fascinating first book, Here, There, and Elsewhere, migration scholar and first-generation Bangladeshi immigrant Tahseen Shams maximizes this experience through a critical lens on the dualistic relationships between global geopolitical discourses and the local spaces of identity formations. Her lucid and dense social analysis of projecting and revealing Islamic residues prompts readers toward a novel framework of interpreting complex locations of South Asian Muslim American or “immigrant” selfhood, social personality, and collective group affinities. Launching from the normative attributions of “here” and “there” that focus on the circumstances of immigrants’ sending and receiving countries, Shams argues for the important implications of spaces and places beyond these binaries, which she addresses as “Elsewhere.” In the perpetual “reconstruction” of a South Asian Muslim immigrant living in the United States, “Elsewhere” may refer to sites in Africa or the Middle East that are perceived by other US citizens to be contexts of Islamist violence. This lends a spaceless ontological reality to an ethno-religious identity-in-making.

Shams's conception of Elsewhere helps one reenvisage the ways in which larger social, cultural, economic, and political processes impact the experiences of internal immigrants and minorities in general. She carefully erects a distinction in question while making attributions toward practicing the moral version of Islam by its primary group and a politico-nationalistic version of Islam propounded by an outsider community, that is, state-centric agents of the United States. With a multicentered relational framework, she analyzes the ways in which immigrant South Asian Muslim Americans are associated with Islamic Elsewhere, while articulating immigrants’ identification as subjects (actors) rather than victims of Islamophobia in the United States.

This alignment of South Asian Muslims with Islamic Elsewhere is not a single disparate process.Footnote ¹ Rather, the conception of “Elsewhere” is intrinsic to that of Islam, which draws on Ummah or imagined Muslim solidarity across nations, consolidating “a sense of community and collective identity” based on shared Islamic tenets (p. 6). Shams describes Ummah as a nonradicalized weapon of experiencing culture through one's own senses. She identifies Islam as an analytical lens, under which other forms of social stratification (i.e., gender, ethnic identity, and homeland nationality) operate in an important way, thus impacting the experiences of South Asian Muslim Americans. However, social stratifiers are culturally placed and globally varied. Shams acknowledges this through an indication of how, in order to present themselves as moderate, “good” Muslims, South Asian Muslim immigrants perform their Islamic identity through social stratifiers. For instance, some Muslim immigrants may avoid political conversations related to Islam and focus on apolitical interactions instead; others may distance themselves from Muslim friends and neighbors who wear conservative clothing, display Islamic practices, or are more assertive about their faith. They may avoid particular mosques during Eid or religious conversations over the phone. Despite the worldview of Ummah, the various levels of attachment to religion compete with various levels of attachment to conformity.

Shams takes an intriguing approach to the topic of body performativity and its variations across Islamic culture. Her interviews indicate a constant contestation between the autonomy of the South Asian Muslim immigrant participants and attachment to shared religious consensus. Along similar lines, the hijab and its connotative meanings surface several times across the text and bring to the fore questions about the perceptions and performances of femininity within Islam. She also presents the multiple ways through which individuals skillfully manipulate circumstances in social settings to overcome concerns such as consumption of halal food, alcohol, and the offering of prayers, such that they do not draw attention to their Islamic identity. These practices reflect the diverse perspectives adopted by the South Asian Muslim immigrants toward their religion in the “everyday” United States.

Capturing the cross-cultural divide, Shams points to the Islamic Society of North America, which reinforces an American Muslim identity by emphasizing the values of Islam while conforming to American democratic culture. Shams is also quite careful in pointing toward the disjuncture of American democracy. She indicates that government machinery uses surveillance and compels South Asian Muslims to reconvert and interrogate their public inclination, as well as conform to the rules of being “good Muslims” at the individual and organizational levels. Participants in Shams's interviews articulate “Performances,” “presentations of the self,” as well as “performatives” that constitute day-to-day enactments. Shams's presentation delineates the ways in which interviewees exercise self-surveillance to avoid becoming victims of scrutiny in the public spaces.

By weaving powerful examples of personal narratives with analysis and reflection, Shams's book thus illustrates how both a Muslim and a non-Muslim conception of Islam reciprocally connects individuals. It causes actions, events, and conditions in host lands, homelands, and Elsewheres to be inextricably linked, while also adding a substitutive cultural filter to the ways individuals navigate other facets of identity, such as race and gender. This evokes a feeling of memory for readers on how Islam is lived and relived as a transnational concept impacted by the intersections of global-local paradigms. However, based on my observations of working with the South Asian community as a scholar, the solidarity one might expect from the concept of Ummah does not always translate to the unification of identity or the benefit a community ensures for the individual followers. Many South Asian Muslims fail to form alliances with Ethiopian, Somalian, and the “other” Muslims because of concerns surrounding skin color and appearances. The alliance with “others” comes in only when they realize their religion is being attacked by other fundamentalist groups. In this way, the diversity of skin colors, languages, foods, and cultures that exists among Muslims in fact acts as a hindrance in forming alliances. So, it appears that the perception of Elsewheres and the important linkages they create paradoxically serve to reveal which Elsewheres and social constructs are left out of the individual's conception of self and community.

For immigrants, a necessity as complex and intangible as belonging cannot be fulfilled and resolved merely by acquiring a set of official documents and being designated as citizens. Rather, a set of nonofficial preconditions and scripts of sociocultural belonging continue to contour the lives of South Asian Muslim immigrants in the United States. In a plot-centered vision, Shams's contribution to migration scholarship succeeds in illustrating this complexity, while also proposing a structurally sturdy framework for studying it. In drawing attention to the theoretical conception of “Elsewhere,” Here, There, and Elsewhere forges a unique viewpoint and a welcome tool to help bridge the gaps in migration scholarship by introducing a new level of nuance, from the scale of the international community down to the very individual who participates across the bridges.