Experts have recognized the potential for religion to shape environmental attitudes. In recent decades, the world has seen the rise of faith-based organizations in tackling issues of sustainability, particularly those following Islamic ecotheology. Embedded in Islamic scripture is an emphasis on responsibility and accountability towards the Earth; Islamic environmental organizations...
In an 18-month ethnographic and interview-based study of Afghan Americans in the greater Bay Area, California, I explore the relationship of culture and religion amongst this refugee community. As a majority of refugees in the past decade have been Muslim, it is important to understand what their process of integration...
This dissertation takes up Islam’s relationship to Black nationalism across the Atlantic diaspora of Muslims that I call “the Fugitive Islamicate.” Scholars most often have described this relationship as commencing in the twentieth century with the rise of “Black Muslim religion,” a U.S. religious movement that begins with Noble Drew...
This essay provides an introduction to eight papers on the theme of Islam and the Public Sphere in Africa that resulted from two conferences organized by the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa (ISITA) in 2007. The author argues that these papers challenge the dichotomous thinking that...
This dissertation examines the ways in which performance forms articulate with urban identities in the context of transnational economic and cultural exchange. In this multisited historical ethnography, I explore the links between late 19th-century Ottoman and contemporary Turkish public spheres fractured by morality battles and political transformation. Both periods are...
In Muslim West Africa, food-producing villages also produced literate scholars. This study examines how such unlikely intellectuals acquired and gave meaning to Islamic knowledge through one village's experience from 1900 to the 1960s. Unlike the colonial sources underlying conventional approaches to West African Islam, libraries and oral sources from Ruumde...