Editorial

Abstract

This issue of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences features twoimportant articles: Sarah Marusek’s ethnographic study of a grassroots Islamicmovement in Lebanon reconfiguring (even resisting) secularism andneoliberalism, and Madiha Tahseen and Charissa S.L. Cheah’s empiricalstudy of the formation of American Muslim adolescents. Also featured isan extended interview with the renowned anthropologist, Talal Asad.Marusek’s study of the interaction of an Islamic movement withinsecular, liberal, and neoliberal structures and practices is innovative andthought-provoking. It shows how certain Shi‘ite clerics and leaders are ableto adapt but also simultaneously resist neoliberalism while providing servicesto the poor, in particular the downtrodden Shi‘a population of Lebanon.The intellectual posture of these movements, she highlights, seeksto separate the rationalistic procedures and procedures of modernity fromwhat they insist are still religious values. But straddling “forces of materialismand spirituality,” Marusek argues, “need not inevitably yield a gospelof wealth. Indeed, these forces may even coalesce into a decolonial project.”The Lebanese “Shi‘i movements,” she concludes, “are each critically engagingwith secular liberalism and neoliberal capitalism on their own terms, inprofoundly interesting, complex, and contradictory ways.” This is an illuminatingstudy which alludes to the contradictions and limits of embeddingreligious values and rationality in neoliberal and secular structures andpractices, which themselves are inevitably instilling their own values andrationality as they must in order to be fully efficient on their own terms. Thestruggle, the author suggests, is ongoing and worthwhile ...