Suburban Islam
Suburban Islam

Author: Justine Howe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 019025887X

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For many American Muslims, the 9/11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror marked a rise in intense scrutiny of their religious lives and political loyalties. In Suburban Islam, Justine Howe explores the rise of "third spaces," social surroundings that are neither home nor work, created by educated, middle-class American Muslims in the wake of increased marginalization. Third spaces provide them the context to challenge their exclusion from the American mainstream and to enact visions for American Islam different from those they encounter in their local mosques. One such third space is the Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb Foundation, a family-oriented Muslim institution in Chicago's suburbs. Howe uses Webb as a window into how Muslim American identity is formed through the interplay of communal interpretive practices, institutional rituals, and everyday life. The diverse Muslim families of the Webb Foundation have transformed hallmark secular suburbanite activities like football games, apple picking, and camping trips into acts of piety--rituals they describe as the enactment of "proper" American Muslim identity. Howe analyzes the relationship between these consumerist practices and the Webb Foundation's adult educational programs, through which participants critique what they call "cultural Islam." They envision creating an "indigenous" American Islam characterized by gender equality, reason, and pluralism. Through changing configurations of ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic class, Webb participants imagine a "seamless identity" that marries their Muslim faith to an idealized vision of suburban middle-class America. Suburban Islam captures the fragile optimism of educated, cosmopolitan American Muslims during the Obama presidency, as they imagined a post-racial, pluralistic, and culturally resonant American Islam. Even as this vision aims to be more inclusive, it also reflects enduring inequalities of race, class, and gender.

Suburban Islam
Suburban Islam

Author: Justine Howe

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-01-02

Total Pages: 304

ISBN-13: 0190863064

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For many American Muslims, the 9/11 attacks and subsequent War on Terror marked a rise in intense scrutiny of their religious lives and political loyalties. In Suburban Islam, Justine Howe explores the rise of "third spaces," social surroundings that are neither home nor work, created by educated, middle-class American Muslims in the wake of increased marginalization. Third spaces provide them the context to challenge their exclusion from the American mainstream and to enact visions for American Islam different from those they encounter in their local mosques. One such third space is the Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb Foundation, a family-oriented Muslim institution in Chicago's suburbs. Howe uses Webb as a window into how Muslim American identity is formed through the interplay of communal interpretive practices, institutional rituals, and everyday life. The diverse Muslim families of the Webb Foundation have transformed hallmark secular suburbanite activities like football games, apple picking, and camping trips into acts of piety--rituals they describe as the enactment of "proper" American Muslim identity. Howe analyzes the relationship between these consumerist practices and the Webb Foundation's adult educational programs, through which participants critique what they call "cultural Islam." They envision creating an "indigenous" American Islam characterized by gender equality, reason, and pluralism. Through changing configurations of ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic class, Webb participants imagine a "seamless identity" that marries their Muslim faith to an idealized vision of suburban middle-class America. Suburban Islam captures the fragile optimism of educated, cosmopolitan American Muslims during the Obama presidency, as they imagined a post-racial, pluralistic, and culturally resonant American Islam. Even as this vision aims to be more inclusive, it also reflects enduring inequalities of race, class, and gender.

Between Islam and the American Dream
Between Islam and the American Dream

Author: Yuting Wang

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2013-11-26

Total Pages: 186

ISBN-13: 1134658869

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Based on a three-year ethnographic study of a steadily growing suburban Muslim immigrant congregation in Midwest America, this book examines the micro-processes through which a group of Muslim immigrants from diverse backgrounds negotiate multiple identities while seeking to become part of American society in the years following 9/11. The author looks into frictions, conflicts, and schisms within the community to debunk myths and provide a close-up look at the experiences of ordinary immigrant Muslims in the United States. Instead of treating Muslim immigrants as fundamentally different from others, this book views Muslims as multidimensional individuals whose identities are defined by a number of basic social attributes, including gender, race, social class, and religiosity. Each person portrayed in this ethnography is a complex individual, whose hierarchy of identities is shaped by particular events and the larger social environment. By focusing on a single congregation, this study controls variables related to the particularity of place and presents a “thick” description of interactions within small groups. This book argues that the frictions, conflicts and schisms are necessary as much as inevitable in cultivating a “composite culture” within the American Muslim community marked by diversity, leading it onto the path of Americanization.

The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities
The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities

Author: Katie Day

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2020-12-31

Total Pages: 393

ISBN-13: 1000289265

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Like an ecosystem, cities develop, change, thrive, adapt, expand, and contract through the interaction of myriad components. Religion is one of those living parts, shaping and being shaped by urban contexts. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is an outstanding interdisciplinary reference source to the key topics, problems, and methodologies of this cutting-edge subject. Representing a diverse array of cities and religions, the common analytical approach is ecological and spatial. It is the first collection of its kind and reflects state-of-the-art research focusing on the interaction of religions and their urban contexts. Comprising 29 chapters, by a team of international contributors, the Handbook is divided into three parts: Research methodologies Religious frameworks and ideologies in urban contexts Contemporary issues in religion and cities Within these sections, emerging research and analysis of current dynamics of urban religions are examined, including: housing, economics, and gentrification; sacred ritual and public space; immigration and the refugee crisis; political conflicts and social change; ethnic and religious diversity; urban policy and religion; racial justice; architecture and the built environment; religious art and symbology; religion and urban violence; technology and smart cities; the challenge of climate change for global cities; and religious meaning-making of the city. The Routledge Handbook of Religion and Cities is essential reading for students and researchers in religious studies and urban studies. The Handbook will also be very useful for those in related fields, such as sociology, history, architecture, urban planning, theology, social work, and cultural studies.

Muslim Cool
Muslim Cool

Author: Su'ad Abdul Khabeer

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2016-12-06

Total Pages: 285

ISBN-13: 1479894508

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Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 36-2
American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences 36-2

Author: Kareem Rosshandler, Abbas Ahsan, Abu Zayd

Publisher: International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT)

Published: 2019-04-01

Total Pages: 131

ISBN-13:

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This issue begins with an editorial on humanistic education and Islam by the journal editor, Ovamir Anjum. It then features two research articles: Kareem Rosshandler’s “A Review of Contemporary Arabic Scholarship on the Use of Isrā’īliyyāt for Interpreting the Qur’an” is an important exploration of how modern Arabophone Muslim exegetes employ Israelite narratives in their commentaries. The second article, Abbas Ahsan’s “Quine’s Ontology and the Islamic Tradition,” is a meticulous philosophical treatment of a fundamental point: whether naturalist philosophy, particularly in its Quinean form, is commensurable with an absolutely transcendent notion of God as expressed in certain dominant theological traditions of Islam. A review essay on the second edition of Jonathan Brown's celebrated book Hadith: Muhammad's Legacy in the Medieval and Modern World precedes eight book reviews. Finally, in a refreshing and provocative essay, “Islam in English,” Oludamini Ogunnaike and Mohammed Rustom make a case for new vocabulary that could express, not merely describe, Islam in English.

Islam Is a Foreign Country
Islam Is a Foreign Country

Author: Zareena Grewal

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2014

Total Pages: 410

ISBN-13: 1479800562

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Considers the question: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? In Islam Is a Foreign Country, Zareena Grewal explores some of the most pressing debates about and among American Muslims: what does it mean to be Muslim and American? Who has the authority to speak for Islam and to lead the stunningly diverse population of American Muslims? Do their ties to the larger Muslim world undermine their efforts to make Islam an American religion? Offering rich insights into these questions and more, Grewal follows the journeys of American Muslim youth who travel in global, underground Islamic networks. Devoutly religious and often politically disaffected, these young men and women are in search of a home for themselves and their tradition. Through their stories, Grewal captures the multiple directions of the global flows of people, practices, and ideas that connect U.S. mosques to the Muslim world. By examining the tension between American Muslims’ ambivalence toward the American mainstream and their desire to enter it, Grewal puts contemporary debates about Islam in the context of a long history of American racial and religious exclusions. Probing the competing obligations of American Muslims to the nation and to the umma (the global community of Muslim believers), Islam is a Foreign Country investigates the meaning of American citizenship and the place of Islam in a global age.

Muslims on the Margins
Muslims on the Margins

Author: Katrina Daly Thompson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2023-04-11

Total Pages: 165

ISBN-13: 1479814369

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Offers vivid stories of nonconformist Muslim communities The turn of the twenty-first century ushered in a wave of progressive Muslims, whose modern interpretations and practices transformed the public’s perception of who could follow the teachings of Islam. Muslims on the Margins tells the story of their even more radical descendants: nonconformists who have reinterpreted their religion and created space for queer, trans, and nonbinary identities within Islam. Katrina Daly Thompson draws extensively from conversations and interviews conducted both in person in North America and online in several international communities. Writing in a compelling narrative style that centers the real experiences and diverse perspectives of nonconformist Muslims, Thompson illustrates how these radical Muslims are forming a community dedicated to creative reinterpretations of their religion, critical questioning of established norms, expansive inclusion of those who are queer in various ways, and the creation of different religious futures. Muslims on the Margins is a powerful account of how Muslims are forging new traditions and setting precedents for a more inclusive community— one that is engaged with tradition, but not beholden to it.

Islam in Black America
Islam in Black America

Author: Edward E. Curtis IV

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 187

ISBN-13: 0791488594

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Many of the most prominent figures in African-American Islam have been dismissed as Muslim heretics and cultists. Focusing on the works of five of these notable figures—Edward W. Blyden, Noble Drew Ali, Elijah Muhammad, Malcolm X, and Wallace D. Muhammad—author Edward E. Curtis IV examines the origin and development of modern African-American Islamic thought. Curtis notes that intellectual tensions in African-American Islam parallel those of Islam throughout its history—most notably, whether Islam is a religion for a particular group of people or whether it is a religion for all people. In the African-American context, such tensions reflect the struggle for black liberation and the continuing reconstruction of black identity. Ultimately, Curtis argues, the interplay of particular and universal interpretations of the faith can allow African-American Islam a vision that embraces both a specific group of people and all people.

Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West
Routledge Handbook of Islam in the West

Author: Roberto Tottoli

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2022-02-22

Total Pages: 556

ISBN-13: 0429556381

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With new topics and contributions, this updated second edition discusses the history and contemporary presence of Islam in Europe and America. The book debates the relevance and multi-faceted participation of Muslims in the dynamics of Western societies, challenging the changing perception on both sides. Collating over 30 chapters, written by experts from around the world, the volume presents a wide range of perspectives. Case studies from the Muslim presence in the Iberian Peninsula between the Middle Ages and the modern age set off the Handbook, along with an outline of Muslims in America up to the twentieth century. The second part covers concepts around new conditions in terms of consolidating identities, the emergence of new Muslim actors, the appearance of institutions and institutional attitudes, the effects of Islamic presence on the arts and landscapes of the West, and the relational dynamics like ethics and gender. Exploring the influence of Islam, particularly its impact on society, culture and politics, this interdisciplinary volume is a key resource for policymakers, academics and students interested in the history of Islam, religion and the contemporary relationship between Islam and the West.