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
Mohja Kahf
Danielle Haque
Article
Muslims and Social Media in North America
Rabia Kamal
Islam in North America is an incredibly diverse phenomenon with a long history and a range of different perspectives on what “American/Canadian Islam” is or should be. While the presence of Islam in the United States dates back to the transatlantic slave trade, Muslim identity in the region is often linked to an immigrant presence and became synonymous with a sense of violent foreignness after the 9/11 attacks. Mainstream Western media has played a fundamental role in the configuration of Islam as the ultimate cultural “other,” leaving Muslims who strongly identify as Muslim and American or Canadian in a precarious position. Representation and debates around Muslim identity have recently shifted to online platforms. Social media has not only impacted how Islam is practiced in the United States and Canada but has also influenced self-presentation, community building, and activism among Muslims across ethnicity, race, generation, and class. From Quranic websites and Muslim dating apps to blogs, Instagram influencers, and Snapchat fatwas, North American Islam has developed a burgeoning presence across the digital landscape. Furthermore, social media provides a central space through which national politics and policies play out, and Muslims in particular have faced challenges ranging from Islamophobia and religious persecution to digital surveillance and censorship. Such phenomena have impacted the online activities of Muslims and deeply inform the day-to-day lives of Muslim communities across the region. Through exploring the various ways in which Muslims in these minority contexts experience the growing interrelationship between their on- and offline lives, we approach the digital as a space where culture is continually produced, performed, and contested.
Article
History of Muslims in the United States
Yasmine Flodin-Ali
During the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Muslims were brought from North and West Africa to what would become the United States. Many of these African Muslims were literate in Arabic. Even in the face of formative obstacles, enslaved people and their descendants continued to observe their faith and to adapt Islamic and Islamically influenced practices in the United States.
In the mid-1800s to early 1900s, Muslims began to immigrate to the United States from the Middle East and South Asia. Muslim immigrants used a variety of tactics to establish communities in the United States while navigating segregation, miscegenation, and restrictive citizenship laws. A few small-scale Muslim institutions were established, including mosques and cultural centers.
Prominent Muslim and Islamically influenced movements flourished in the early 20th century, such as the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community movement. The MSTA was an African American–majority movement born of the Great Migration. The Thesophist movement was largely white. Both movements were similar in terms of their exploration of the occult and emphasis on bodily control as a means of spiritual purification. The Ahmadiyya produced and translated much of the religious literature that circulated in the United States across Muslim sects in the first half of the 20th century, including the most popular translation of the Qur’an, often without attribution. Sunni and Shi’i communities were also present in this time period.
The Nation of Islam (NOI, 1930–1975) surpassed the MSTA and Ahmadiyya to become the largest and most influential Muslim American movement in the secondhalf of the 20th century. The NOI emphasized communal economic empowerment and self-reliance for Black Americans in order to achieve the goal of separation from Whites as a means of achieving racial justice. Prominent figures from the NOI, such as Malcolm X, are frequently invoked by different Muslim American groups in the 21st century. When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, NOI members went in different directions. Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad, led a large portion of the community to Sunni Islam. Other members joined Louis Farrakhan’s NOI.
The Harter-Celler Act of 1965 opened up non-European immigration, leading to a large increase in Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Due to the law’s stipulations, these immigrants were largely upper-class and well-educated. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was also a push by many different Muslim American groups toward Sunnism.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis increased anti-Muslim hostility in the United States and created the stereotype that all Muslim Americans were immigrants from the Middle East. The 9/11 attacks amplified this backlash, but also led to the creation and strengthening of nationwide Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations.
Advocacy campaigns and heated debates have also taken place within the Muslim American community in the 21st century. Professor of Islamic Studies Amina Wadud has been particularly influential in shaping conversations around gender and Islam, both in the United States and globally. Wadud is also well-known for leading a mixed-gender congregational prayer in New York City in 2005, which sparked a global debate over the permissibility of women leading prayer. In the early 21st century, so-called third spaces proliferated, including art spaces and gatherings facilitated through online groups such as Meetup, where Muslims who felt left out of more traditional mosque spaces found community. This entry ends in 2010, almost a decade after 9/11 and before the rising presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump.
Article
Media Interactions with Muslims
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
Exhibitions and Displays of Religious Art
Maia Wellington Gahtan
Exhibitions and displays of religious art have been an integral part of religion since the manufacture of the first religious objects and the adornment of the first sacred places. Growing more complex and varied with time, such manifestations within religions provided models for art exhibitions associated with academies, galleries, museums, and other institutions with secular purposes by the mid-18th and 19th centuries. Typically organized around the works of an artist, a group of artists, art academies, or the holdings of private lenders, such exhibitions included works with both sacred and secular subjects. Exhibition design drew on the shapes and materials of the works, privileging formal qualities over meanings, including any religious content, even for works that had once belonged to sacred settings but had migrated to private collections. The final decades of the 19th and early 20th centuries were characterized by both exhibitions organized by religious authorities for the general public and exhibitions of specific genres of sacred art organized by museums and galleries. These, together with international exhibitions and World’s Fairs which showcased non-Western religious objects, helped form the modern notions of material religion that would find voice in the exhibitions of recent decades which have focused on particular faiths in geographical, historical, cultural, and iconological terms. These exhibitions have addressed the major religions of the world, especially Christianity and Islam, in both multi-faith and single-faith contexts. Input from practitioners and source communities at the planning and installation stages, as well as for public programming and events, has helped ensure greater authenticity in the displays and encouraged a movement away from considering religious objects exclusively in terms of art.
Article
Race and Religion in the United States
Ryan P. Jordan
For centuries before the European colonization of North America, sectarian, ethnic, and racial discrimination were interrelated. The proscription of certain groups based on their biological or other apparently ingrained characteristics, which is one definition of racism, in fact describes much religious prejudice in Western history—even as the modern term “racism” was not used until the 20th century. An early example of the similarities between religious and racial prejudice can be seen in the case of anti-Semitism, where merely possessing “Jewish blood” made one inherently unassimilable in many parts of Europe for nearly a thousand years before the initial European conquest of the New World. Throughout Western history, religious values have been mobilized to dehumanize other non-Christian groups such as Muslims, and starting in the 16th century, religious justifications of conquest played an indispensable role in the European takeover of the Americas. In the culture of the 17th- and 18th-century British colonies, still another example of religious and racial hatred existed in the anti-Catholicism of the original Protestant settlers, and this prejudice was particularly evident with the arrival of Irish immigrants in the 19th century. In contemporary language, the Irish belonged to the Celtic “race” and one of the many markers of this race’s inherent inferiority was Catholicism—a religious system that was alternatively defined as non-Western, pagan, or irrational by many Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who similarly saw themselves as a different, superior race. In addition to the Irish, many other racial groups—most notably Native Americans—were defined as inferior based on their religious beliefs. Throughout much of early American history, the normative religious culture of Anglo-Protestantism treated groups ranging from African slaves to Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants as alternatively unequal, corrupt, subversive, or civically immature by virtue of their religious identity. Historians can see many examples of the supposedly dangerous religious attributes of foreigners—such as those of the Chinese in the late 19th century—as a basis for restricting immigration. Evangelical Protestant ideas of divine chosen-ness also influenced imperial projects launched on behalf of the United States. The ideology of Manifest Destiny demonstrates how religious differences could be mobilized to excuse the conquest and monitoring of foreign subjects in places such as Mexico or the Philippines. Anglo-Protestant cultural chauvinism held sway for much of American history, though since the mid-1900s, it can be said to have lost some of its power. Throughout its history, many racial or ethnic groups—such as Hispanic Americans, African-Americans, or Asian Americans in the United States have struggled to counter the dominant ethnic or racial prejudice of the Anglo-Protestant majority by recovering alternative religious visions of nationhood or cultural solidarity. For groups such as the 20th-century Native American Church, or the African American Nation of Islam, religious expression formed an important vehicle to contest white supremacy.
Article
Muslim–Buddhist Relations and Buddhism in Muslim Sources until the Mongol Period
Anna Ayse Akasoy
The history of Muslim–Buddhist relations has long been underexplored or been dominated by impressions of hostility. Recent scholarship has revealed a long history of contacts, often against the backdrop of trade, mission, and imperial expansion. How early these encounters took place and what their earliest shape was depends on views regarding the westward spread of Buddhism, the religious landscape of pre-Islamic Iran, and the nature of early Islam. Medieval Muslim authors sometimes associated the religious traditions of pre-Islamic Arabia with Buddhism or Indian religions in general. The early Abbasid period (8th–10th centuries) was especially significant for the development of Muslim knowledge of Buddhism. Details about the religion, including descriptions of the Bamiyan Buddhas and religious practices, can be found especially in geographical and historiographical literature, but also book catalogues and surveys of different religions. The family of the Barmakids, formerly keepers of the Buddhist Naw Bahār in Balkh, rose to great power at the Abbasid court and represents the integration of Buddhist elites into the cosmopolitan caliphate. A version of the Life of the Buddha, known as the story of Bilawhar and Būdhāsaf, began to circulate in the Middle East at around the same time. One of the difficulties in assessing Muslim descriptions of Buddhism is to reconstruct and historicize categories of religion and religious taxonomies.
Article
Martin Luther, Islam, and the Ottoman Turks
Adam S. Francisco
The geographical extension of Islam into Christian lands generated a wide variety of responses and a tremendous amount of consternation amidst its subject and neighboring populations. This was the case in the early centuries of Islam as well as the age of Ottoman expansion into Europe at the time of the Protestant reformation. Just as the conflict between Martin Luther and the papacy was beginning, the issue of how Europe should respond to the military campaigns of the Turks in Hungary became increasingly paramount. Luther was initially aloof to the matter. But the farther the Turks moved up the Danube River basin toward Vienna, and the more he heard about the pope clamoring for a crusade and German preachers expressing ambivalence toward and sometimes preference for the Turk, the more he was pressed to address the issue of war with the Ottomans. Unsurprisingly, given his view of the secular realm, he came out strongly in favor of war, for in his mind it was just. He continued to support every preparation for it so long as it was not construed as a crusade. He also believed that physical warfare was not enough. It had to be accompanied by the spiritual disciplines of prayer and repentance. About the time of the siege of Vienna, Luther also began to view the Turkish threat as an apocalyptic threat. He was convinced that the rise of the Turks was foretold in the eschatological prophecies in scripture, especially Daniel 7. He also believed that, while the Turks would be successful for a time, their days were numbered as the last days were soon approaching. Until then, Christians needed to be warned about the dangers of Islam. He had heard and read that many Christians who ended up in the Ottoman Empire eventually became Muslims. So he spent most of his energy in writing about and inquiring into the theology and culture of the Turks for the purpose of encouraging and equipping Christians to resist it. Some of his work was practical and pastoral. His later work was polemical and apologetical. Throughout it all, he remained committed to making as much information on Islam available as possible. This culminated in his involvement in the publication of a Latin translation of the Qur’ān in 1543, a work that was included in the first collection of texts relating to Islam to ever be printed.
Article
America’s Interactions with Islam and Judaism in North Africa
Lawrence A. Peskin
Encounters between Americans, Muslims, and Jews in North Africa played a foundational role in Americans’ early understanding of Islam and Judaism. At a time when the United States population had few Jews and virtually no free Muslims, North Africa was one of the places Americans were most likely to meet individuals from these groups.
Initially, American sailors and diplomats encountered North African Muslims and Jews as the result of frequent ship captures by Barbary corsairs beginning in the colonial period and culminating in the 1780s and 1790s. After 1815, the sailors and diplomats were joined by missionaries journeying to the Mediterranean region to convert Jews and Muslims as well as non-Protestant Christians.
These encounters prompted a good deal of literature published in the United States, including captivity narratives, novels, plays, histories, and missionary journals. These publications reinforced two dominant views of Islam. First, the early focus on Barbary corsairs capturing American “slaves” reinforced old notions of Islam as despotic and Muslims as “savages” similar to Native Americans. Missionary accounts prompted more thoughtful approaches to Muslim theology at the same time that they reinforced existing notions of Islam as a deceitful religion and revivified millenarian hopes that the declining Ottoman Empire foretold the Second Coming.
As a result of the captivity crises, Americans often had to deal with the area’s small but influential group of Jewish merchants in order to get terms and credit to free their countrymen. These fraught negotiations reinforced older European stereotypes of Jews as sharpers and Shylocks. As with Islam, the missionary period brought more thoughtful consideration of Jewish theology as Americans engaged in chiliastic hopes of bringing the Jews to Jerusalem.
After 1850 or so, Americans interested in Jews or Muslims looked less frequently to North Africa. Growing immigrant populations, first of Jews and then of Muslims, meant that Americans could encounter people of all three Abrahamic faiths at home. At the same time, missionary interests moved east, into the Holy Land, Syria, Turkey, and ultimately East Asia. Nevertheless, the early impact of North Africa on American thinking retained its influence, as is evident from President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech on American-Islamic relations delivered in Cairo.
Article
Sufi Groups in North America: A History
Jason Idriss Sparkes
North America is home to an extraordinary diversity of Sufi groups. This diversity is especially great in Canada and the United States, largely because of policies that have encouraged immigration from every part of the globe, including the vast regions of Africa and Eurasia where Sufism historically emerged. These liberal immigration policies, which began in the 1960s, opened the way for immigrants and foreign students to establish North American branches of Sufi groups from their countries of origin. It also allowed them to interact with Muslims and non-Muslims of other ethnic backgrounds, including the North American descendants of Western Europeans and Africans. New Sufi groups as well as groups partly influenced by Sufism were born from this interaction. These groups have evolved as a diverse minority within an equally diverse Muslim minority in Canada and the United States. As a result, each group tends to be relatively small and includes between a handful and a few thousand adherents. In Central America and the Caribbean Islands, there are fewer groups despite the presence of Sufism, which dates to the early colonial period.
To understand contemporary expressions of Sufism in North America, it is necessary to examine the contested role of Sufism within the global Islamic tradition. For example, it is useful to consider how Sufis, who consider themselves specialists of the inner or mystical dimension of Islam, have engaged with specialists of other dimensions, such as jurisprudence and doctrine. It is also helpful to examine how Orientalist discourses associated with Western colonialism depict antinomian currents within Sufism as representing a universalist spirituality, closer to Christianity than the purported legalism of Islam.
An understanding of this broader history is crucial to situate the history of Sufism in North America, from the 15th century until the early 21st century. Since the early colonial period, Sufis have been present in the Americas, mostly as a marginalized and discrete population among the millions of African victims of the transatlantic slave trade. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, practitioners of Sufism in North America tended to be largely of Asian origin. Since the mid-20th century , Sufi groups with adherents of extremely diverse origins have developed in a variety of ways, including universalist groups composed of both Muslims and non-Muslims and ethnically homogeneous groups of Muslims operating discretely within local mosques and immigrant communities.
Article
Islamic Bioethics: Birth Control
Zaynab El Bernoussi and Baudouin Dupret
The practice of birth control encompasses several techniques that can be either preventive or corrective. In the premodern Islamic tradition, the ʿazl or withdrawal was the most common method of birth control that often required the woman’s approval. Given the lack of precise condemnation of contraception in the Qurʾān, recent fatwas have allowed contraception and abortion in cases of malformation of the fetus or—(according to some scholars) in extremely exceptional situations—economic incapacity of the parents to raise the child. In the modern states of the Muslim world, the ambitions for economic development have oftentimes been associated with population control. In modern Muslim societies birth rates are influenced not only by modern attitudes and new interpretations of contraception, but also by global dynamics such as an integrated world economy, migration, and statism. The different stances of premodern and modern jurists in Islam regarding questions of birth control also reveal pluralism in these societies.
Article
Islamic Bioethics: Enhancement
Siti Nurani Mohd. Noor
There are varying perspectives within Islam on bodily enhancement and modifications. Still, it is perhaps possible for bioethicists and scholars of Islam to agree that categorical prohibitions on bodily modifications may not work. The way to ethically address this issue is to ensure that good policies and governance are put in place to monitor the safety of the application of such innovations on the human body. The stark reality is that humanity in the early 21st century is poised to change at unprecedented speed with the advent of technological innovations, especially nanotechnology.
Article
Islamic Bioethics: Institutionalization of Bioethical Deliberations
Manfred Sing
The continuous institutionalization of Islamic bioethics is visible in both a growing amount of literature and an increasing number of experts and committees that deal with ethical and social questions in medicine and the life sciences. Muslim and non-Muslim practitioners in the field like to claim that the growing attention for these issues has already turned Islamic bioethics into a separate discipline. Islamic bioethical deliberations obviously form a conglomeration of different methodological and theoretical approaches, it seems also justified to see Islamic bioethics as a multidimensional inquiry cutting across different disciplines. From this viewpoint, the establishment of Islamic bioethics as an institutionalized field of practice, research, reflection, and teaching remains a continuing challenge.
Article
Islamic Bioethics: Milk Banks
Anke Iman Bouzenita
Breastfeeding (al-riḍāʿah) is a traditionally widespread phenomenon in Islamic culture. As breastfeeding of other than the own biological children establishes a foster relationship which leads to the prohibition of marriage (taḥrῑm) between the breastfed infant, the wet nurse, and a specified number of other persons, there are several religious legal and cultural inhibitions among Muslims regarding the use of donor milk from unidentified sources. This article provides an insight into the reception of milk banks in the Islamic world as against the culturally unique background of foster relations.
Article
Shari’a, Legal Pluralism, and Muslim Arbitration Tribunals in the West
Bryan S. Turner and James T. Richardson
Applications of the Shari’a in Western societies where Muslim minority populations are increasing must deal with growing Islamophobia in those societies. The history of the Shari’a reveals much misunderstanding and confusion about what it is and how it is viewed by Muslims. This has led to controversy concerning Islamic arbitration tribunals in the United States, Canada, and other Western nations where the consequences of increasing legal pluralism are being felt. A theoretical discussion of “legal centralism” taken from the work of major sociology-of-law theorists aids an understanding of this complicated situation of the Shari’a in the West.
Article
Islam and Pop Culture in North America
Sophia Rose Arjana
Islam and popular culture constitute an area of scholarship that explores how Muslims are represented in popular culture. Historically, in the European and North American contexts, products attached to Islam and Muslims have often reflected Orientalist and Islamophobic themes. The study of these items has often focused on negative imagery and pejorative themes attached to Islam and Muslims. In the 21st century, scholars have shifted their attention to more nuanced portrayals of Islam, including those produced by Muslim writers, artists, and musicians engaged with forms of popular culture, such as music, literature, television, and film, through their own creative expressions. In North America, Islamic popular culture features a rich mosaic of music, art, literature, and other forms of expression that challenge the negative portrayals associated with Orientalist and Islamophobic discourse.
Article
Muslims in Russia and the Successor States
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
Islam, Gender, and Sexualities
Yafa Shanneik
Mapping a discussion on gender and sexualities in Islam needs to move beyond an understanding of Islamic law (shariah) and its interpretations that has traditionally been made by male religious scholars (ulamā). It is important to also pay attention to the lived experiences of people on the ground and move away from a homogeneous universal construct of what gender is and what sexualities are. It should include an examination of various power structures that highlights the experiences and voices of not only women but also other subjected and subaltern groups. What are the intersections and overlapping viewpoints and arguments on gender and sexualities in Islam? Who is talking on behalf of which group?
The examination of gender and sexualities within Islam is a complex topic that needs consideration of socioeconomic and political shifts as well as ongoing processes of modernization and globalization. This includes the formation of nation-states, the codification of Islamic law, the shift in family relations and mobility, the increase in level of education and waged labor, and transnational migration. International organizations, such as the United Nations, also exert pressure on governments of Muslim-majority countries to adhere to established international human rights standards. This pressure has played a role in prompting changes in legislations particularly regarding the personal status law that affects women’s and other minority rights.
The aftermath of the latest political uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) since 2011 has placed gender at the heart of not only religious but also political contestations. Displacement and the sociopolitical marginalization of minority groups have contributed to the changing understandings of gender orders within the MENA region and beyond. As a consequence, normative understandings of gender and sexualities have been renegotiated and readjusted and have resulted in new gender power relations. This disruption of conventional gender power relations creates tensions and causes divergences between what, for generations, has been perceived as traditional gender norms. This is primarily evident within familial structures and conjugal relationships where the lived realities do not always reflect current Islamic jurisprudence or the law set by the state.
Article
State and Citizenship in Modern Arab Muslim Thought
Louay Safi
Intellectual debates and sociopolitical changes in Arab societies have brought about new political outlooks and consciousness, and have resulted in profound political change and restructuring of state institutions. Reform efforts successfully introduced modern political institutions, but failed in effecting a broad and systematic transformation of political culture, as the latter continues to be guided by notions and practices rooted in the premodern models of authoritarian (“sultanic”) governance. The drive to political reform under the rubric of Tanzimat started around the turn of the 19th century as a matter of necessity by both Ottoman rulers (sultans), and their governors in Egypt and Tunisia, in response to European imperial expansion into Africa and Asia. By mid-20th century, political institutions and state bureaucracies were restructured in the mold of modern political ideas. Yet these ideas, and the ethical foundations on which they stood, failed to mature in post-Ottoman Muslim societies. Conservative forces resisted the new ideas. With the increased disenchantment of Muslim youth with postcolonial states, conservative thinkers reintroduced Islamic notions and values into the debate over the proper form of government in contemporary Muslim societies. The push to modernize society has been intense, empowering Muslim modernists to move ahead to reshape societal institutions. The zeal to bring about quick development effected indeed rapid modernization but led to the rise of autocratic governments, and further polarized Muslims societies. Notions of popular sovereignty and equal citizenship were countered by the sovereignty of Shari`ah and the need for religious differentiation and religious autonomy, thereby demanding the revival of the historical institutions of caliphate and dhimmis. The debate gradually moved toward compromise, whereby Muslim intellectuals and scholars attempted a creative synthesis on the common ground found in both traditional Islam and modern democratic liberal ideas. The transformation into a model that aligns Islamic values with the principles of democracy (or shura) and equal rights of citizens, while profound and increasingly broad, is still incomplete, as current struggles in Muslim societies demonstrate; intellectual and practical battles for the soul of Muslim societies continue to rage. The push back in the last two decades against modern notions of state and citizenship, and the rise in popularity of groups that aim at reviving the premodern institution of caliphate underscore the debate between old and modern notions of political organization and allegiance, and require deeper understanding of the nature of the tensions between premodern and contemporary political ideas and institutions.
Article
Moderation in American Religion
Rosemary R. Corbett
Religious moderation is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when considering the history of the United States. Would one have spoken of the Puritans as moderates? Could one characterize the many great revivals and awakenings that coursed through colonial and early republican American in such terms? And what about the impertinence of Anne Hutchison, the audacity of Jarena Lee, the bold experiment of Prohibition, or the modern political fervor that accompanied the rise of the religious right? When compared to England and many other nominally Christian European nations, the United States generally figures as an example of religious zeal. Yet moderation holds a special place in American religious thought, and not just recently. Since the Protestant Reformation, at least, the concept of religious moderation has been inescapably entangled with concerns about the form and shape of government. Just how much religious “enthusiasm” is safe for a monarchy, a democracy, or a republic? wondered English political theorists in the 1600s and 1700s. Their concerns unavoidably carried to the “New World,” contributing to the persecution or marginalization of Quakers, Shakers, and other religious practitioners deemed too immoderate in their passions and, not infrequently, their gendered practices and sexualities. With the birth of the new republic, Americans also raised questions about the political valences of religious moderation when debating which residents of the nation could fully enjoy the rights of citizenship. Appeals to moderation were used for centuries to exclude not only religious minorities but also racial and ethnic minorities and women. And yet the contours of moderation were continually contested by both those who wielded power and those subject to it.
Since the late 1800s, questions of religious moderation have also been intertwined with questions of modernity and the reconfiguration of public and private spaces. This was especially true with the rise of the fundamentalist movement in the early 1900s, a movement that opposed some of the modernist interpretive measures gaining currency among many American Christians, as well as the idea (increasingly popular over the course of the 20th century—particularly after the failure of Prohibition) that most forms of religion properly belong to the private realm. While fundamentalists were no less technologically savvy or educated than their theological opponents, their positions were nevertheless cast as anti-modern and immoderate, in that fundamentalists ostensibly held more closely to revelation than to modern science. This notion of fundamentalism as the incursion of immoderate anti-modernism, traditionalism, or enthusiasm into politics and public life has continued into the 21st century. While 21st-century arguments for religious moderation are most often directed at Muslims (who, in addition to conservative Christians, are frequently depicted as prone to trampling on the rights of those with whom they disagree), American history has no shortage of incidents involving pressures, often violent, on racial and religious minorities to moderate or privatize their ostensibly uncivilized behavior for the sake of the nation or even for humanity.
