Abstract
For many Mauritian Muslims the participation in transnational piety movements is inseparably linked to what they consider to be modern and cosmopolitan lifestyles. Taking the growth of Islamic idioms and movements among Mauritian Muslims as an example, in this paper I argue for a more complex understanding of the links between contemporary Islamic piety movements and current trends of globalization. Moreover, the Mauritian state also encourages the growth of transnational religious networks as part of a policy of encouraging “ancestral cultures” in which major, standardized religious traditions have a central place. The example suggests that the intersection of processes at a global scale with state policies towards religion plays a key role in the emergence of religiously grounded cosmopolitanism in the contemporary world.