Even though the earliest Muslim immigrants did not plan on permanently settling down in their new host countries, by the 1980s, post-1960s Muslim migrants accepted the reality that they were in the West to stay, and they gave up all plans of returning to their countries of origin. Later, serious plans to form a new (i.e., American, Canadian) Muslim identity were in the making. Discussions amongst community leaders who were committed to the welfare of Muslims, to Islam, and to preserve their Muslim identity and culture. Therefore, Muslims became convinced that they were becoming permanent settlers in the West, that they were home, and that they needed to produce a modified version of Islam that suits their needs. As a manifestation of this reality, Muslim youth also started to distance themselves from their parents’ heritage and to move toward a more inclusive identity that contained both their Islamic and their Western heritage. Cesari refers to this as “cultural globalization,” which involves the “deterritorialization” of communities. In this context, Western Islamic identity becomes a powerful source of collective solidarity, recreating connections between groups otherwise separated by widely diverging doctrines, sects, histories, and cultures. Nonetheless, since the early 2000s, Western Muslims have faced significant levels of prejudice and discrimination in host countries—sometimes to an extent that threatens the orderly functioning of society.
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Article
A special ministry was established soon after the declaration of the independence of the Republic of Indonesia to have the specific task of managing the religious affairs of particularly Muslim-majority population. First seen as a contentious move but later regarded as a political compromise between those advocating for a secular state and those promoting an Islamic state for Indonesia, the ministry continues to provide a variety of programs and activities that shape the dynamic development of Muslim education, law, ritual (including the hajj), and intra-Muslim as well as interreligious relations. The ministry offers a case study of the bureaucratization of religion and its impact in the politics and culture of a Muslim majority country and provides opportunities for further research.
Article
Felipe Medina Gutiérrez and Odette Yidi David
Arabic-speaking peoples, including Palestinians mostly Christian from Ottoman-controlled lands and later living under European mandates in greater Syria, migrated to the Americas, during the last quarter of the 19th century and until the end of the World War II. The creation of the State of Israel in May 1948 meant the expulsion and forced migration of yet more Palestinians, some settling in refugee camps in the region and others moving to distant countries, such as Colombia. This new wave of Palestinian immigrants was overwhelmingly Muslim. The Palestinian diaspora in the 21st century comprises about ten million people around the world and is highly diverse in terms of religious identity. Some communities have organized around supporting the development of their host countries and homeland; nonetheless, not many people are aware of these stories. Also, it is common in the “West” to witness accusations that Palestinians, Muslims, and Arabs in general are violent by nature, as a result of a series of orientalist misconceptions about a people and a religion that, despite exceeding 1,600 billion believers around the world, remains misunderstood. Something similar happens with the Palestinian diaspora in Colombia, where little research has been undertaken to historicize their presence and interactions. Primary and secondary sources illustrate how the Palestinian Muslim immigrant community in Colombia has integrated into the local society and strengthened its ties on a social level beyond the political and economic issues, with consideration of its religious identity and minority condition.
Article
Atiya Husain
Even among those most invested in defining “terrorism,” there is an inability to agree on a shared definition. This suggests the political nature of the concept. Terrorism is best understood in relation to other social phenomena, particularly colonialism and capitalism. This essay discusses several questions on the topic of terrorism and violence: What is at stake in the definition of terrorism? What is the relationship of Muslims and Islam to terrorism? What is the scope of counterterrorism? In addressing these questions, the article discusses a range of topics including Black Power, paper terrorism, “Barbary” pirates, the Christian Identity Movement, black identity extremism, racially motivated violent extremism, and the permeation of terrorism concerns into sectors, including education and natural disaster management.
Article
Jennifer A. Selby
Diverse Sunni, Shia, Ahmadiyya, Sufi, and other Muslims have lived in Canada since before its Confederation in 1867. The first were likely slaves being moved along the country's Atlantic coast, but there is little historical record to date. Settlers to Alberta have been examined to a greater extent, in part because there are more records of their presence. The first Canadian census in 1871 documented eight Muslims in Northern Alberta who likely worked as merchants and fur traders. There were, however, surely more than eight; Canadian Muslim minorities have long had reason to not be counted. The first officially recognized mosque followed, also in Alberta, in 1938. Immigration policies have long shaped Canadian Muslim life. War Measures Acts in 1914 and 1939 and policies that overtly preferred British Protestant subjects (until 1952) sharply limited Canadian religious diversity, including for Muslims. Initially, most of the early Muslim community were of Middle Eastern origin, but post–World War II immigration policy shifts meant that, beginning in 1968, Muslim Canadians became the country’s most ethnically, racially, linguistically, and socioeconomically diverse religious group. The largest Muslim population growth to date in Canada came in the 1990s, with a 130-percent increase, the same period in which there was greater institutionalization of Muslim organizations across the country.
In 2021, Canadian Muslims made up approximately 4.8 percent of the national population. Most Muslim Canadians have settled in Canada’s largest and most cosmopolitan urban regions in and surrounding Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. While statistical data show a growth in population, data on the different sectarian branches among the traditions of Islam have been largely inferred based on individual Muslims’ countries of origin. The largest group are Sunnis.
Notable Islamophobia and anti-Muslim racism have been charted since 2001; the number of reported Islamophobic incidents escalated sharply beginning in 2015, when federal-level anti-niqab policies were introduced. In 2019, anti-niqab laws were established in the province of Quebec.
Article
David Rayside
In many respects, the sizeable Muslim populations in the United States and Canada have integrated well into the social and political mainstream. Most of them are first-generation immigrants, and face Islamophobic prejudice based on race as well as religious affiliation. Still, they are a comparatively well-educated population, and identify strongly with the countries they now call home.
Exploring the response of these communities to sexual diversity, and to growing claims for recognition by queer Muslims themselves, goes to the heart of questions about the place of this growing community in North American settings. This inevitably raises questions about gender relations within those communities, in part because discrimination against Muslims is often justified with reference to their adherence to what are thought to be unchanging patriarchal values. Doubts about social and cultural integration are easily intensified by the racialized “otherness” of Muslim populations in the West generally, and these two North American countries in particular.
The Pew Research Center in the United States and the Environics Institute in Canada have conducted surveys of the Muslim populations in their countries, permitting a comparison of attitudes in those communities with those in the general population, and in some cases also providing a view of cross-country differences. What this polling reveals is that Muslims are on balance more politically progressive than non-Muslim populations, and are strongly averse to supporting conservative parties. However, it also reveals relatively negative views of homosexuality, and this is echoed in the public statements, or silence, of the largest Muslim advocacy groups. The strength of such views owes much to the fact that the majority of North American Muslims have emigrated from regions of the world where such opinions are deeply embedded in social and cultural life. Traditionalist views of gender and sexuality are also reinforced by high levels of religiosity, which in other faith currents is also associated with what might be called traditionalist views of family. In the case of Muslims, their religious leadership in Muslim communities remains almost unanimous in its condemnation of homosexuality as an example of “Western” permissiveness. Mosque life, too, retains important elements of gender inequity.
There are, however, important indications of change, induced in part by the urban environments where the great majority of Muslims live, and the increasing willingness of queer Muslims to assert their presence within their ethno-religious communities as well as in lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) networks. Younger Muslims are more inclined than their elders to hold inclusive attitudes, particularly if they have been educated in North America. In the United States, too, the latest of the Pew surveys has shown an important overall shift toward more LGBTQ-positive attitudes. This is in part a result of Muslims’ recognition that exclusionary attitudes on issues related to sexuality are often held by those who are also harbor Islamophobic views, and that policies designed to protect one community are also necessary to protect them.
Article
May Al-Fartousi
Although some research mentions the diversity of Muslims in terms of their religion, culture, and race—and the need to be aware of this diversity in order to understand Muslim students’ experiences—the focus is usually on the boundaries that exist between the social world of Muslims and that of non-Muslims . Specifically, most North American research that examines Muslims’ experiences in schools addresses the hidden practices that influence this diverse group to fit in among Canadian and American societies. Some of those hidden practices—which are internalized by individual acts toward minority Muslims or by institutional racism—are part of an ideology connected to historical settler colonization in which religion and race are interconnected and contribute to viewing other religions as inferior or to political agendas represented through the media. Notably, the Islamophobia discourses that have been occurring in light of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attacks in the West influence the lives of Muslims and non-Muslims who live there. Given global Islamophobia and the increasing numbers of Muslim youth refugees due to ISIS, research and guidelines have emerged emphasizing the psychological impact of the political and social pressure on Muslim youth as evident in mental health issues related to trauma, anxiety, and depression affecting Muslim youth’s sense of belonging in their schools. In some discussionsrelated to the development of Muslim political identities, both internal and external factors contribute to placing Muslims in vulnerable positions and feeding us-versus-them binary discourse, which adds more injustice for, and discrimination against, minority groups. With such diverse discourses that tackle Muslim experiences within different spaces, there is a need to thoroughly investigate how Muslim educational experiences of everyday religion, with internal personal values and external societal values, are negotiated with the hope of eliminating the misunderstandings that may emerge due to the complex diversity of this group and their different levels of acculturation.
Article
Danielle Haque
Mohja Kahf is the author of numerous poetry collections, short stories, essays, and scholarly articles. She immigrated from Syria to the United States with her family at a young age, and she identifies as a Muslim American writer. Her writing debunks dominant narratives that construct Arab Americans as perpetual foreigners to US culture and history. Kahf conceives of her work as belonging to a long tradition of Muslim American literature, including the Black Arts movement, diasporic writing, and second- and third-generation literatures. Drawing upon Arabic, Islamic, and mainstream US cultural references and imagery, Kahf’s work meditates on the challenges of hybridized identities. Through her poetry and essays, she confronts Orientalist narratives about Muslim women as perpetual victims of an oppressive religion, and challenges anti-Muslim racism and xenophobia. Her coming-of-age novel, The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf, with its complex relationships and nuanced representations of Muslim American characters, asserts an Islamic feminist ethos and challenges stereotypes of Arab and Muslim Americans. Centering on Muslim women’s embodied experiences, Kahf’s writing celebrates women’s sexuality and desire and condemns the policing of women’s bodies, particularly in her poetry collections, her column “Sex and the Ummah,” and her writings on hijabs. Her scholarly work investigates historical representations of Muslim women, seeking to expand literary cannons to include Muslim women writers and correcting misinterpretations and translations of their work. An antiviolence human rights activist, Kahf writes against US occupation and invasion in the Middle East, and advocates solidarity across racial, gendered, ethnic, and national identities. Her work references Islamic values of mutual vulnerability and is imbued with an ethics of mutual caretaking and social justice.
Article
Irum Shiekh
In the early 21st century, a growing number of Muslim storytellers have written, directed, and produced feature films and television series about their respective communities in North America. Falling under the umbrella of Muslim Diasporic Cinema, these stories settle somewhere between the longing to flee from the essentialized binary identities of immigrant/native, religious/secular, etc., and the desire to claim the performance of a continuously shifting and politically charged Islamic identity. The crux of the Muslim Diasporic Cinema is this dialectical yearning to claim a Muslim identity unapologetically without defining its aspects.
The bulk of this work depicts the everyday lives of multigenerational Black Muslims and their conscious and unconscious relationships to the transatlantic slave trade. Additionally, these narratives revolve around the experiences and identities of immigrants, refugees, and exiles, and their children growing up in the West. Most of these stories feature themes of intergenerational conflicts, coming of age, and hybridity. Shattered memories and imaginings of a distant home, along with desires, conflicts, dreams, and quests, comprise many of these stories. Most of this fictionalized work is inspired by personal experiences and tells gripping and entertaining stories, some political, some humorous. They revolve around the memories of real or imagined forced displacement and its ongoing conflicts with the concepts of home and a desired sense of belonging. Politically subtle yet savvy, these stories normalize the everyday lives of Muslims. By doing so, they create an oppositional space and stand up to the tropes of the Hollywood industry that have dominated the silver screen for over a century. Instead of providing angelic characters that can do no wrong, these storytellers create complex and rounded characters full of contradictions. These artistic expressions reveal a world of possibilities, realized when marginalized communities pick up pens and cameras to shape their own narratives. The success of these visual stories is reshaping the contours of the Hollywood industry and inspiring emerging artists to claim a space within the increasingly diverse tapestry of North America.
Article
The quintessential foil to liberalism in the Western imagination continues to be Islam. Orientalist stereotypes of Muslims as uncivilized and savage justified European conquest that led to centuries of colonialism. The United States followed suit when it replaced Britain and France as the new “Great Power” in Muslim majority countries, but this time through political and military hegemony.
International human rights, formally developed after World War II by Western nations, became a soft power tool that perpetuated Orientalist portrayals of Muslim societies as illiberal, misogynist, and violent on account of their Islamic values. As a result, some Western lawyers and scholars frame Islam as the cause of international human rights violations, thereby making military and political interventions necessary to protect Muslims’ human rights. That is, Islam is antithetical to universal human rights. Meanwhile, insufficient attention is paid to Western nation’s support for the despots that violate their Muslim citizens’ human rights.
To the extent explorations of human rights and Islam are conducted in good faith, the lived experiences of Muslims offer more insights than abstract debates infected by Orientalist academic training. Accordingly, this article looks to Muslims in America as a case study to show how Islamic principles can and do inform Muslim leaders’ defense of human rights. Muslim elected officials, human rights lawyers, and religious leaders explicitly reference their Islamic beliefs as the basis for their social justice work in the United States. The political environment in which Muslims live, rather than their religion per se, is thus more predictive of compliance with international human rights norms.
Article
Adam Yaghi
Muslim Americans have been producing literature and culture since the arrival of early waves of enslaved Muslims in the New World. Irreducible to a single entity, and yet victims to inexplicable omissions, they and their heterogeneous literary productions cannot be understood without proper historical contextualization. Tracing literary manifestations of Muslim Americans’ presence in the United States from before its inception into the 21st century not only uncovers popular American misrepresentations of Islam but also unveils rich Muslim American narrations that attempt to negotiate an often-contested Muslim America.
Any critical treatment of this body of literature at this early stage can be neither comprehensive nor exhaustive. After all, Muslim American literature is not yet a distinct field or area of study and as such, seeking to authoritatively define the scope of what falls under the phrase “Muslim American literature” might prove a challenging task. Some common parameters, however, range from relying on the declared religious identity of examined authors, the religious themes pervading their texts, and the presence of Muslim sensibilities, to other parameters. In this context, Muslim Americans, Muslims, and Islam are heterogeneous identities; representations therefore vary based on political and other considerations. Indeed, Muslim American literary representations tend to oscillate between narratives and counter-narratives with vast gray areas between.
Nonetheless, Muslim American literary productions demonstrate how a continuous intersection of different forces and currents informs the story of Muslim America: from religion, imperialism, and resistance to belonging, dynamic self-identification, and competing narrations. Muslim American literary texts also frustrate stereotypical misrepresentations, highlight Muslim American anxieties, expose oppressive regimes, debate nationalistic and alternate notions of citizenship, and regularly engage in multiple critiques. Still others ultimately reproduce orientalist, imperialist, or Islamophobic portraits. Muslim American literature therefore allows for and explores the possibility of multiple intersectional identities and critiques that move beyond imagining identity as constructed merely of a cultural, racial, political, religious, or class background. Muslim American literature further provides fertile ground for critiquing Western and hegemonic interests in a complex and transnational form.
Article
Bayyinah S. Jeffries
Muslim business and trade has a long history in North America. Even with the onslaught of Islamophobia and the rising anxiety among non-Muslims concerning a perceived lack of assimilation, as well as alleged threats to Christianity, Muslims of all ethnicities continue to contribute to the political economy of both the United States and Canada. As a multicultural religious group, Muslims in North America have made tremendous strides in institution building, home ownership, wealth accumulation, financial institutions, education, and politics, all of which fuel the American capitalist economy.
Article
Silvia Montenegro
The analysis of representations of Islam and Muslims disseminated in the literature, academic papers, and mass media involves a large tradition of studies and discussions that have highlighted categories such as Orientalism, neo-Orientalism and post-Orientalism. The Brazilian telenovela El Clon, released in October 2001 by Rede Globo and recreated in a new version by the Telemundo network in 2010, conquered the audience not only in Latin America but worldwide. In the creation of the original project, leaders of Islamic institutions played a role as advisors, but the way in which the religion was portrayed satisfied only part of the Muslim audience. In the analysis of the fictionalization of Muslim identities presented in El Clon, it is possible to identify: (a) the earlier examples of telenovelas aimed at Latin American audiences portraying the Arab-Islamic culture, (b) the significance of its release in the context immediately following 9/11, (c) the way of presenting the “core” of Muslim culture, (d) the integration of the telenovela in the wider process of commoditization of Arab-Islamic exoticism, (e) the dissimilar impact on the Muslim audience, and (f) the search for visibility by Islamic communities through a depiction that would not juxtapose Islam and terrorism.
Exoticism, magic, and mystery as components of the soft Orientalism present in El Clon attracted the curiosity of a mass Latin American audience, becoming a milestone in the increasing visibility of Islam.
Article
Ken Chitwood
It is difficult to speak of “Islam in the Caribbean” in any unified sense. Because the story of Islam and Muslims in the Caribbean is characterized by both a long, multifaceted history and modern miscellany, there is no past or present uniformity in progeny, perspectives, or practices. Nonetheless, the classification offers a geographically focused and categorically complex frame of reference to consider often overlooked aspects in the region and of global Islam. Stretching from the long 16th century to the present day, the narrative of Islam and Muslims in and of the Caribbean is one of colonial power and cosmopolitanization, contested history and concurrent heterogeneity, global connectedness, and local complexity.
Across the region, Muslim experience is significantly linked to the complex nexus of relationships and interactions between peoples and powers in the wider Atlantic world since the 16th century. Yet, because the Anglophone, Dutch, Hispanophone, and Francophone Caribbeans are each marked by colonial lineages and created certain networks by which Islam and Muslims arrived in the region, there are multiple assemblages that mark and make up the various socialities in the region. Thus, their stories are sufficiently diverse to warrant distinct recognition and treatment. At the same time, and thanks to this shared Atlantic world, there are shared themes and common concerns that can be identified across the Caribbean, including but not limited to: diaspora dynamics, migration, minoritization, transregional networks, debates over hybridity and purity, religious diversification, notions of space and place, class issues, questions of indigeneity, and the interstices of race and religion in colonial and postcolonial perspectives.
In addition, there have also been enough interactions at, across, and between the various “Caribbeans” to justify—indeed, necessitate—comparing them and putting them into conversation with one another. Aliyah Khan, in her literary study of the significance, influence, and changeability of Muslims in the Anglophone Caribbean, emphasized both the need to decenter the U.S. in the study of Islam in the Americas and further globalize the study of global Islam by putting different regions into comparative perspective (e.g., the Anglophone Caribbean and the Hispanophone Caribbean). This requires putting connected, yet seemingly disparate, contexts such as Trinidad and Puerto Rico, Suriname and Haiti, the Bahamas and Cuba into comparative conversation. The result of such juxtapositions is not only a richer appreciation of the constitutive aspects of Caribbean history and contemporary culture but a more extensive and entangled understanding of global Islam’s constituent communities and representative sites.
Article
Nofret Berenice Hernandez Vilchis
The so-called “Global War on Terror” shows the tense relationships between mainstream media and Muslims around the world. Islam and Arab culture serve as a contrasting otherness in the construction of Western identity. Orientalism allowed first Europe and then the United States to carry on their civilizing missions and expand their culture through the Arab and Muslim world. Since the 19th century, an Orientalist narrative was built to describe an “oriental other” that justifies domination. This tense relationship can be seen in the way mainstream media reproduces an Orientalist narrative that has “migrated” from the global North to the global South. Here, “mainstream media” refers to the most prominent European and American media, including newspapers, TV broadcasting, and news agencies with global reach such as: The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Independent, The Guardian, Le Monde, Figaro, CNN, the BBC, France 24, DW, the Associated Press (AP), Reuters, and Agence France Press (AFP).
Since the beginning of the 21st century the Orientalist narrative in mainstream media changed from being discriminatory speech into hate speech or Islamophobia. Peripheral media sources reproduce this narrative, as is the case with Mexico’s leading newspapers El Universal, Reforma, and La Jornada. Analysis of the treatment that these newspapers have offered of specific events such as the Second Intifada, 9/11, and the American invasion of Iraq illustrates how the Orientalist-Islamophobic narrative from mainstream media is reproduced to a large degree in the global South. Findings from a current postdoctoral research study involving interviews of Arabs and Muslims living in Mexico make it possible to establish how and to what extent the Orientalist-Islamophobic narrative spread by the mainstream media from the global North affects Arabs and Muslims in the global South.
Article
Khairudin Aljunied
Islam has maintained its presence in Southeast Asia for more than a millennium, dating back to as early as the 7th century. By the 21st century, the estimated total of Muslims surpassed 240 million, making Southeast Asia a site that is populated by one of the largest Muslim communities on the planet. Muslims are majorities in 21st-century Brunei, Indonesia, and Malaysia. In other Southeast Asian countries, namely Myanmar, Cambodia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, Timor Leste, and Vietnam, they remain as minorities, experiencing varying levels of integration and assimilation with the majority non-Muslim Buddhist or Christian populations. The massive though gradual spread of Islam in the region can be attributed to the generally peaceful, multifaceted, and creative ways by which Islam was infused into the everyday life of local societies. Traders, Sufi missionaries, scholars, rulers, and even non-Muslims have all contributed to the spread of Islam in Southeast Asia. Most Muslims in Southeast Asia are Sunnis, adhering to the Shafi’i school of Islamic jurisprudence, Ash’ari theology, and Sufi ethics. Located within this cosmopolitan and diverse religious landscape are Muslims who belong to other schools of Islamic jurisprudence and theological leanings such as Hanafi, Ja’fari, Shi’ah, and Salafi. Viewed from the perspective of the longue durée (long duration), the venture of Islam in Southeast Asia can be divided into four successive phases: gradualist (7th–14th centuries), populist (15th–19th centuries), colonial-reformist (19th–mid-20th centuries), and assertive (mid-20th–21st centuries).
Article
James H. Meyer
The history of Muslim populations in Russia and other former republics of the Soviet Union is long and varied. In a Pew–Templeton poll conducted in Russia in 2010, 10 percent of respondents stated that their religion was Islam, while Muslims also make up a majority of the population in six post-Soviet republics: Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan. Muslims have long lived in regions across Russia, with far-flung communities ranging from distant outposts of Siberia to western cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg. At the beginning of the 20th century, there were more Muslims in the Russian Empire than there were in Iran or the Ottoman Empire, the two largest independent Muslim-majority states in the world at the time.
Historically, the Muslim communities of Russia have been concentrated in four main regions: the Volga–Ural region in central Russia, the Crimea, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. While Muslim communities across former Soviet space share both differences and similarities with one another with regard to language and religious practices, their respective relations with the various Russian states that have existed over the years have varied. Moreover, Russian and Soviet policymaking toward all of these communities has shifted considerably from one era, and one ruler, to another. Throughout the imperial and Soviet eras, and extending into the post-Soviet era up to the present day, therefore, the existence of variations with regard to both era and region remains one of the most enduring legacies of Muslim–state interactions.
Muslims in Russia vary by traditions, language, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and practices, and with respect to their historical interactions with the Russian state. The four historically Muslim-inhabited regions were incorporated into the Russian state at different points during its imperial history, often under quite sharply contrasting sets of conditions. Today most, but not all, Muslims in Russia and the rest of the former USSR are Sunni, although the manner and degree to which religion is practiced varies greatly among both communities and individuals. With respect to language, Muslim communities in Russia have traditionally been dominated demographically by Turkic speakers, although it should be noted that most Turkic languages are not mutually comprehensible in spoken form. In the North Caucasus and Tajikistan, the most widely spoken indigenous languages are not Turkic, although in these areas there are Turkic-speaking minorities.
Another important feature of Muslim–state interactions in Russia is their connection to Muslims and Muslim-majority states beyond Russia’s borders. Throughout the imperial era, Russia’s foreign policymaking vis-à-vis the Ottoman Empire and Iran was often intimately connected to domestic policymaking toward Muslim communities inside Russia. While this was a less pronounced feature of Moscow’s foreign policymaking during the Soviet era, in the post-Soviet era, policymaking toward Muslims domestically has once again become more closely linked to Russia’s foreign policy goals.
Article
Samaneh Oladi Ghadikolaei
Muslim women are an integral part of North American society. However, these women face challenges as they expand on their identities independent from the ones delineated by Western and Muslim communities. Muslim women across North America face multiple tiers of discrimination rooted in patriarchy, Orientalism, and challenges associated with migration. On the one hand, they are confronted with neo-Orientalist portrayals of Muslim women that reduce their identities to submissive subjects and their religion to violence and extremism. On the other hand, these women encounter different intersections of oppression, including sexism and racism, both within and outside of their religious communities. Muslim women have responded to these challenges by actively participating in North American civic and religious discourses. It is crucial to acknowledge that Muslim women’s civic participation is not merely a reaction to the challenges posed by Orientalism, sexism, or racism, but it is also driven by their religious beliefs and values. Muslim women actively participate in civic affairs as a means of fulfilling their faith commitments, and they are active agents of change, motivated by their faith commitments to create a more just and equitable society.
The current article examines women-led Islamic organizations in North America that provide services and support Muslim women in the region in different capacities. These women face unique challenges that are not adequately addressed by Muslim and non-Muslim civil rights advocacy groups and women’s rights organizations in North America. By establishing such organizations, women-led Islamic organizations are attempting to fill this gap and offer interventions in support of Muslim women that disrupt the popular discourse of representation and interpretation of Islam in North America. The services offered by these female-led organizations range from battling sexism in their communities to supporting domestic and sexual abuse survivors to offering Islamic education to Muslim women regarding their rights with the aim of advancing gender justice.
The rise in Muslim women’s activism is redefining and paving the way for the emergence of new identities that bring aspects of these women’s Western and Muslim identities into conversation. While women have contributed to their communities in a myriad of ways without necessarily adopting a reformist agenda, there is a visible increase in activism and involvement in civil society organization that can be interpreted as an emerging impetus for reform in traditionally male-dominated spaces of leadership. Considering that Islamic scholarship and leadership has traditionally been governed by men, women’s activism unsettles normative assumptions about gender hierarchy and marginalization of women in Islamic organizations and communities. By actively engaging in the formation and restructuring of these organizations, Muslim women advance gender justice, both intentionally and inadvertently, in the Islamic tradition and their communities. In a departure from the approach adopted by secular organizations that support women, Islamic women’s organizations regard religion as a means to empower women and an alternative frame of reference for understanding and addressing their unique needs. By addressing women’s issues within an Islamic framework and tackling the central causes of women’s disempowerment and grievances, women’s organizations informed by Islamic principles empower Muslim women to actively participate in constructing their identities and meaningfully contributing to society. Muslim women’s activism and their exercise of authority as leaders of organizations and interpreters of religious knowledge have left a mark on the civic, religious, and political landscape of North America. A steady surge in women’s involvement in Islamic organizations is taking place organically, and women’s contributions to Islamic knowledge carry important implications for societal development and gender relations.
Article
Philipp Bruckmayr
The number of Creole and Indigenous Muslims in Venezuela has been steadily growing in the 21st century, and the number of converts is by now undoubtedly in the thousands. Until the 2000s, this process of conversion concerned almost exclusively Creoles (i.e., the white and mestizo Venezuelan majority population) in urban settings with a strong presence of Arab(-descended) Muslims. Islam in Venezuela had long been strongly associated with Arab ethnicity, and its representatives had shown comparably little interest in proselytization among the local population. This changed in the early 1990s, however, with the greater influx of funds from transnational Islamic organizations. Nevertheless, the process only gained traction once also individual Creole converts themselves became active in proselytization. Among Venezuela’s Indigenous peoples, Islam only began to have a limited appeal in the 2000s. The most prominent case in this regard, are the Wayúu people of the Guajira peninsula, which is shared by Colombia and Venezuela. Due to political factors, however, the conversion process among Wayúu has been greatly exaggerated by observers. Despite pervasive reports of mass conversions, the pattern among Wayúu falls in squarely with that among Creoles, in being one of individual and not mass conversions to Islam. This said, the available evidence suggests that Creole and Indigenous Muslims in Venezuela have so far remained primarily urban phenomena. Nevertheless, the Wayúu represent a remarkable case of how Islam has been preached and adopted among Indigenous peoples in Latin America in the 21st century.
Article
Walaa Quisay
Hamza Yusuf Hanson, better known as Hamza Yusuf, is a prominent American shaykh, public intellectual, and educator. He regularly features in the Muslim 500 as among the most influential Muslims in the world. First emerging as a Muslim public figure in the mid-1990s, his impact on Muslims in the East and West has been far and wide. Yusuf cofounded the United States’ first accredited Muslim college, Zaytuna College, and set up pedagogical institutions that promote classical Islamic education, such as the Rihla program. In 2019, Yusuf was selected as a member of the Commission on Unalienable Rights convened by the Trump administration’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo. Yusuf was also appointed as the vice president of the Forum for Promoting Peace in Muslim Societies and the Global Center for Guidance and Renewal, both of which were founded by his shaykh, Abdallah bin Bayyah, and under the auspices of the United Arab Emirates. There, Yusuf also serves as a member of the Fatwa Council.
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