Chinese Studies, Scholars, and the Post-Pandemic Turn

The racialisation and weaponisation of Covid-19 has raised many significant concerns and troubling issues that invite urgent action from researchers. Informed by socio-political history of modern China, women’s/gender studies, and the sociology and social anthropology of Islam, the author considers the intellectual, academic, and personal responsibility of Chinese studies scholars during the pandemic.

The Quʾran as (Inter)text: Embodiment, Praxis, Critique

The introduction outlines the history of the Maghreb as it pertains to the ideological and methodological biases of Maghrebi Studies, particularly around the bifurcation of Francophone and Arabophone literatures. Arguing for the multilingual accenting of Maghrebi literature both within and across languages, it connects the lack of critical attention to Qurʾanic intertextuality to the privileging of Francophone literatures. The introduction further parses out the ways in which the term secular is often deeply inflected with its own orthodoxies, as well as how the secularization narrative has impacted the study of literary practices and forms—particularly the genre of the novel. It proposes that the classical Arab-Islamic concept of adab provides a valuable corrective, by offering a more expansive model of literature. Bringing in scholarship on the anthropology of Islam, Islamic philosophy, and Qurʾanic studies, the chapter interrogates the ethical, literary, and hermeneutical dimensions of Qurʾanic and Sufi aesthetics. Theorizing the Qurʾan as a literary object, process, and model, introduces ethical ways of approaching questions of writing, reading, and literary hermeneutics. Finally, the introduction explicates the book’s organizational logic of placing canonical Francophone novels into conversation with lesser-known Arabophone ones.

The Anthropology of Islam in Europe: A Double Epistemological Impasse

This article reviews the main trends in the anthropological scholarship of Islam in Europe by examining this body of work through the lens of what I call a double epistemological impasse. The first impasse refers to the historical marking of Islam as Europe's Other, and the second one concerns anthropology's discomfort with the epistemological claim making of monotheistic religious traditions. The literature is organized into three key figures (the Muslim as migrant, as Islamist, and as ethical subject), and through these figures, this article attempts to unearth how this double impasse has affected and informed anthropological scholarship on Islam in Europe.

Aesthetics of Muslim-ness: Art and the Formation of Muslim Identity Politics

The paper explores two opposing yet simultaneous forces of aesthetics as transformative and constitutive force of Muslim identity politics, religiosity and cultural style in Cape Town The ethnography focuses on Muslim artists in Cape Town, namely Thania Petersen and twin brothers Hasan and Husain Essop, whose artworks embody a ‘social drama’ of a lived experience of Muslims’ ongoing individual and collective active engagement with and appropriation of the plurality of competing discourses that are religious and secular, local and global. The discussion unpacks the ways in which the artworks of Petersen and the Essop brothers serve as a transformative force and as a politic of authenticity to Muslim identity, religiosity, and cultural style. The paper offers an appreciative but critical reading of Talal Asad’s idea of an anthropology of Islam. Taking into consideration the incommensurable diversity and internal contradiction that could be conceived as Islamic discursive traditions, this paper argues that the aesthetics of Muslimness is what inspires coherence within and across diverse, contradictory Islamic traditions.

Conclusion

This chapter weaves together the insights from the earlier chapters and discusses the contribution of the work to anthropology of Islam education and gender.

Young Muslim America

This book explores the identities, perspectives, and roles of the second and subsequent generations of Muslim Americans of both immigrant and convert backgrounds. As these younger Muslims come of age, and as distant as they are from historical processes that shaped their parents’ generations, how do they view themselves and each other? What role do they play in the current chapter of Islam in a post-9/11 America? Will they be able to cross intra-community divides and play a pivotal role in shaping their community? Culture figures prominently in the discussions about and among Muslims and is centered on four dominant narratives: 1) culture is thought to be the underlying cause of an alleged “identity crisis,” 2) it presumably contaminates a “pure/true” Islam, 3) it is the cause for all that divides Muslim American immigrants and converts, which could be remedied by creating an American Muslim community and culture, and 4) some Americans fear an “Islamization of America” through a Muslim cultural takeover. In this ethnographic study, Muna Ali explores these questions through these four dominant narratives, which are both part of the public discourse and themes that emerged from interviews, a survey, social and traditional media, and participant observation. Situating these questions and narratives in identity studies in a pluralistic yet racialized society, as well as in the anthropology of Islam and in the process and meaning of cultural citizenship, Ali examines how younger Muslims see themselves and their community, how they negotiate fault lines of ethnicity, race, class, gender, and religious interpretation within their communities, and how their faith informs their daily lives and how they envision a future for themselves in post-911 America.

“Pure/True” Islam versus “Cultural” Islam

This chapter examines the salient idea of a “pure/true” Islam as compared to a presumably “cultural” Islam. It argues that this narrative frame has multiple stories and meanings woven into it by Muslims and non-Muslims alike. Those Muslims drawing on it come from across the ideological spectrum, in groups labeled as “fundamentalists/Islamists,” “modernists,” “traditionalists,” and “secularists.” This chapter explores how this narrative speaks to fundamental questions about the definition of religion in general and to the anthropology of Islam in particular. Are there one or multiples islam(s), and who decides which is pure or true? It shows that younger generations of Muslim Americans, as well as many converts to Islam, invoke this narrative to argue that immigrant Muslim Americans’ understanding and practice of the religion is colored by their “back-home culture,” which privileges certain norms and traditions and relegates anything different, especially Western, to the category of un-Islamic.