Search Results

Not central to worship in Islam, representation of the human body has occurred in many forms in Islamic societies: on walls, fabrics, sculptures, and paintings in manuscripts about diverse subjects, including astronomy, history, fables, mythology, medicine, religion, and poetry. Schematically incorporated within narrative or symbolic scenes in most early examples, ruler portraits led to more individualized portraiture even before the adoption of European norms of figural depiction. Not limited by visual verisimilitude, representation of the human form can also be found in lettering, through metonymic representation, and through spatial and sensual modes of embodiment that continue to inform some contemporary art. The relationship between the human body and Islamic art invites two interpretive frameworks. Reflecting the importance of the human body in the European artistic tradition, the first emphasizes figural representation in Islamic visual traditions. Reflecting the distinct role of the body in Islam, the second treats the body as a sensory agent enhancing the capacities of the body in Islamic thought. The vast historical, geographic, and ethnographic range of Islamic cultures further complicates the consideration of the human body in Islamic arts, as each locus of Islamic culture coexists within a multitude of representational and experiential norms reflecting multireligious and multiethnic environments. The role of the body in the arts shifts again with the modernist universalization of European artistic norms and bodily practices, which have been globally met with assimilation as well as resistance. Among the distinct aspects of representing the body in the Islamic world are representations of the human body in the first centuries of Islam, as Islam gained hegemony in regions with diverse religions and ethnic populations. The use of human forms in multiple media is another aspect, as is the emergence of representational restrictions. Additionally, the human body was represented in manuscript painting under the large empires that consolidated much of Islamic culture following the 13th-century Mongol conquests of western Asia. The transition to modern oil-on-canvas representation marks another shift in representations of the body. The mutual representation of body and object that is enabled through Islamic thought has also accommodated and enhanced the sensory role of the body in recognition of the divine.

Sufism in North America is exceptionally diverse, reflecting its heterogenous origins and complex transnational dynamics. It can be found as an essential, if at times subtle, element of Muslim devotional practice, with several North American Muslim networks and organizations integrating Sufism into their teachings. It manifests more explicitly in various Sufi orders, normally led by a lineage-holding shaykh or shaykha, with a spectrum of approaches to Islamic identity and practice. Sufism has further been drawn upon as a niche resource for literature and commodity within the broader spiritual marketplace, intersecting with popular culture. Sufism in North America is thus an integral aspect of Muslim devotional practice, a distinct spiritual path embodied in various lineages and orders, and a literary phenomenon and popular spiritual commodity.

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.

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.