Muslim Bodies

Drawing upon law, politics, sociology, and gender studies, this volume explores the ways in which the Muslim body is stereotyped, interrogated, appropriated and demonized in Western societies and subject to counter-terror legislation and the suspension of human rights. The author examines the intense scrutiny of Muslim women’s dress and appearance, and their experience of hate crimes, as well as how Muslim men’s bodies are emasculated, effeminized and subjected to torture. Chapters explore a range of issues including Western legislation and foreign policy against the ‘Other’, orientalism, Islamophobia, masculinity, the intersection of gender with nationalism and questions about diversity, inclusion, religious freedom, citizenship and identity. This text will be of interest to scholars and students across a range of disciplines, including sociology, gender studies, law, politics, cultural studies, international relations, and human rights.

In Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds, Parin Dossa explores the lives of Canadian Muslim women who share their stories of social marginalization and disenfranchisement in a disabling world. She shows how these women, who are subjected to social erasure in policy and research, define their identities and claim their humanity using the language of everyday life. Based on narrative ethnography, Racialized Bodies, Disabling Worlds makes a case for positive acknowledgement of perceived differences of nationality, religion, multiple-abilities, and gendered and race-based identities. It offers a powerful argument for bridging two disparate bodies of work: disability studies and anti-racist feminism. Most significantly, it shows how racialized Muslim women with disabilities are redefining the parameters of their social worlds and developing a distinctively pluralistic understanding of abilities. This ground-breaking work gives presence to the lives of people who are otherwise rendered socially invisible.

Der Sammelband ist aus einem Panel beim Deutschen Orientalistentag in Marburg 2010 hervorgegangen und beleuchtet aus unterschiedlichen Perspektiven Körpererfahrungen, -kulturen, -diskurse und -techniken in islamisch geprägten Kulturen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Leitgedanke ist dabei die Frage danach, wie Individuen ihr Wissen über Körper/Sexualität im sozialen Feld konstruieren und welche Deutungssysteme (z. B. Islam, graeco-islamische Medizin) dabei wirksam werden. The present volume, product of a conference panel at the German Orientalists' Conference in Marburg 2010, aims at throwing light on the experiences, discourses and body techniques prevailing in Muslim bodily culture. It combines historical with contemporary case studies and explores the individual and collective patterns of knowledge construction related to body and sexuality, in a social field where different and sometimes conflicting knowledge systems (e.g. Islam, Graeco-Islamic Medicine) can be found at work.

This book investigates ways of dressing, style and fashion as gendered and embodied, but equally as “religionized” phenomena, particularly focusing on one significant world religion: Islam. Through their clothing, Muslims negotiate concepts and interpretations of Islam and construct their intersectionally interwoven position in the world. Taking the interlinkages between ‘fashionized religion,’ ‘religionized fashion,’ commercialization and processes of feminization as a starting point, this book reshapes our understanding of gendered forms of religiosity and spirituality through the lens of gender and embodiment. Focusing mainly on the agency and creativity of women as they appropriate ways of performing and interpreting various modalities of Muslim clothing and body practices, the book investigates how these social actors deal with empowering conditions as well as restrictive situations. Foregrounding contemporary scholars’ diverse disciplinary, theoretical and methodological approaches, this book problematizes and complicates the discursive and lived interactions and intersections between gender, fashion, spirituality, religion, class, and ethnicity. It will be relevant to a broad audience of researchers across gender, sociology of religion, Islamic and fashion studies.

The concept of the body is of special importance in Islamic and Arab societies. Much of the daily interaction between peoples in these societies is related to the strict Islamic division of the universe into different spaces; the "feminine" and "masculine," the "pure" and the "polluted," the "private" and "public." Fuad I. Khuri explores the different meanings and images related to the body in Islam and how these permeate religious practices and social attitudes among people, and the numerous ways the body communicates messages, attitudes and feelings through unspoken language.

In our turbulent times, all varieties of bodies face serious dangers. Bodies of water are disappearing before our eyes; bodies politic risk suppression, lying on the razor's edge of the democratic struggle; human bodies fear annihilation at the hands of hate and xenophobic fascism. The biological body is no longer a husk for the intellect, but itself a vital piece of identity. The black body and female body, tethered to historical narratives, have become a cause worth fighting for in the BLM and #MeToo movements. More broadly, posthumanism and changing sexuality and identity politics are challenging our conceptions and limitations with regards to bodies. And the monolithic human body, once seen as divine perfection--a gift from above--is today quickly cast aside for the next, more advanced model. In this issue, we explore the bodily familiar, the celestial bodies, the invisible bodies of metaphors, and those under the microscope--all with the power to start and stop our fragile little world on a whim. As we walk into the future, this issue challenges readers to prepare for a new type of body, fit for a world beyond our present predicaments. About Critical Muslim: A quarterly publication of ideas and issues showcasing groundbreaking thinking on Islam and what it means to be a Muslim in a rapidly changing, interconnected world. Each edition centers on a discrete theme, and contributions include reportage, academic analysis, cultural commentary, photography, poetry, and book reviews.

Islam is often described as abstract, ascetic, and uniquely disengaged from the human body. Scott Kugle refutes this assertion in the first full study of Islamic mysticism as it relates to the human body. Examining Sufi conceptions of the body in religious writings from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century, Kugle demonstrates that literature from this era often treated saints' physical bodies as sites of sacred power. Sufis and Saints' Bodies focuses on six important saints from Sufi communities in North Africa and South Asia. Kugle singles out a specific part of the body to which each saint is frequently associated in religious literature. The saints' bodies, Kugle argues, are treated as symbolic resources for generating religious meaning, communal solidarity, and the experience of sacred power. In each chapter, Kugle also features a particular theoretical problem, drawing methodologically from religious studies, anthropology, studies of gender and sexuality, theology, feminism, and philosophy. Bringing a new perspective to Islamic studies, Kugle shows how an important Islamic tradition integrated myriad understandings of the body in its nurturing role in the material, social, and spiritual realms.

Muhammad's Body introduces questions of embodiment and materiality to the study of the Prophet Muhammad. Analyzing classical Muslim literary representations of Muhammad's body as they emerge in Sunni hadith and sira from the eighth through the eleventh centuries CE, Michael Muhammad Knight argues that early Muslims' theories and imaginings about Muhammad's body contributed in significant ways to the construction of prophetic masculinity and authority. Knight approaches hadith and sira as important religiocultural and literary phenomena in their own right. In rich detail, he lays out the variety of ways that early believers imagined Muhammad's relationship to beneficent energy—baraka—and to its boundaries, effects, and limits. Drawing on insights from contemporary theory about the body, Knight shows how changing representations of the Prophet's body helped to legitimatize certain types of people or individuals as religious authorities, while marginalizing or delegitimizing others. For some Sunni Muslims, Knight concludes, claims of religious authority today remain connected to ideas about Muhammad's body.