Muslim university students and graduates navigating Nairobi:The poetics and politics of religious coexistence

With a focus on Muslim university students and graduates, this article considers how their educational trajectories (have) necessitate(d) mixing with (religious) ‘others’ and asks what their experiences can tell us about modalities of multi-religious cohabitation in Nairobi more broadly. The ethnography challenges the notion of mixing as a liberal ‘good’ or a choice, as western multicultural discourse holds. Instead, it reveals both how young Muslims navigate encounters with ‘others’ through a mix of shared aspiration, proximity, and necessity, and how, post-graduation, multiple factors preclude or undermine such ‘spaces of commonality’ (Hage 2014). Their experiences suggest that urban coexistence is not about tolerance, but pragmatism, which neither denies (religious) difference nor centres it. In doing so, it contributes to discussions of everyday life amidst socio-religious diversity in Africa and beyond.