Islam And America

is the enemy of future progress." --Daniel Martin Varisco, Hofstra University, author of Islam Obscured: The Rhetoric of Anthropological Representation --

A recognized expert on the religion of Islam and Muslim beliefs and practices gives Americans answers to the 31 most-asked questions about the religion and its adherents.

"Muslims have always been part of the United States, but very little is known about how Muslim Americans practice their religion. How do they pray? What's it like to go on pilgrimage to Mecca? What rituals accompany the birth of a child, a wedding, or the death of a loved one? What holidays do Muslims celebrate and what charities do they support? How do they learn about the Qur'an? [This book] introduces readers to the way Islam is lived in the United States, offering ... portraits of Muslim American life passages, ethical actions, religious holidays, prayer, pilgrimage, and other religious activities"--Back cover.

"A tour de force that underwrites and shifts the petrified image of Islam disseminated by mainstream media."--Walter D. Mignolo, author of The Darker Side of Western Modernity "Gives us an entirely different picture of Muslims in the Americas than can be found in the established literature. A complex glimpse of the rich diversity and historical depth of Muslim presence in the Caribbean and Latin America."--Katherine Pratt Ewing, editor of Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the United States since 9/11 "Finally a broad-ranging comparative work exploring the roots of Islam in the Americas! Drawing upon fresh historical and ethnographic research, this book asks important questions about the politics of culture and globalization of religion in the modern world."--Keith E. McNeal, author of Trance and Modernity in the Southern Caribbean In case studies that include the Caribbean, Latin America, and the United States, the contributors to this interdisciplinary volume trace the establishment of Islam in the Americas over the past three centuries. They simultaneously explore Muslims’ lived experiences and examine the ways Islam has been shaped in the "Muslim minority" societies in the New World, including the Gilded Age’s fascination with Orientalism, the gendered interpretations of doctrine among Muslim immigrants and local converts, the embrace of Islam by African American activist-intellectuals like Malcolm X, and the ways transnational hip hop artists re-create and reimagine Muslim identities. Together, these essays challenge the typical view of Islam as timeless, predictable, and opposed to Western worldviews and value systems, showing how this religious tradition continually engages with local and global issues of culture, gender, class, and race.

Traces the history of Muslims in the US and their waves of immigration and conversion across five centuries.

Islam: An American Religion demonstrates how Islam as formed in the United States has become an American religion in a double sense—first through the strategies of recognition adopted by Muslims and second through the performance of Islam as a faith. Nadia Marzouki investigates how Islam has become so contentious in American politics. Focusing on the period from 2008 to 2013, she revisits the uproar over the construction of mosques, legal disputes around the prohibition of Islamic law, and the overseas promotion of religious freedom. She argues that public controversies over Islam in the United States primarily reflect the American public's profound divisions and ambivalence toward freedom of speech and the legitimacy of liberal secular democracy.

Vivid, dramatic portraits of Muslims in America in the years after 9/11, as they define themselves in a religious subculture torn between moderation and extremism There are as many as six million Muslims in the United States today. Islam (together with Christianity and Judaism) is now an American faith, and the challenges Muslims face as they reconcile their intense and demanding faith with our chaotic and permissive society are recognizable to all of us. From West Virginia to northern Idaho, American Islam takes readers into Muslim homes, mosques, and private gatherings to introduce a population of striking variety. The central characters range from a charismatic black imam schooled in the militancy of the Nation of Islam to the daughter of an Indian immigrant family whose feminist views divided her father's mosque in West Virginia. Here are lives in conflict, reflecting in different ways the turmoil affecting the religion worldwide. An intricate mixture of ideologies and cultures, American Muslims include immigrants and native born, black and white converts, those who are well integrated into the larger society and those who are alienated and extreme in their political views. Even as many American Muslims succeed in material terms and enrich our society, Islam is enmeshed in controversy in the United States, as thousands of American Muslims have been investigated and interrogated in the wake of 9/11. American Islam is an intimate and vivid group portrait of American Muslims in a time of turmoil and promise.