Lived Islam: Embodied Identities and Everyday Practices among American Muslim Youth

Abstract

This article explores lived Islam in the context of two young American Muslim women’s everyday lives. Although much of the scholarship on Muslim geographies is grounded in people’s everyday lives, the focus has been to situate and examine the specific meanings and expressions of “Muslim” identities. Whereas scholars intentionally have been writing against anti-Muslim racism and with the commendable aim of gaining extensive knowledge, our focus on “Muslim” has at times been at the expense of other salient identities, activities, and interests of interlocutors. Drawing on the broader scholarship on lived religion, this article offers geographers an approach to lived Islam influenced by feminist geographical and phenomenological frameworks. Through ethnographic methods, lived Islam offers a detailed picture of subjective everyday life, with a focus on embodied and emotionally charged memories, intersecting identities, and practices. Such a feminist approach to the lived enactment of religious faith rejects inherent identity categories as well as binaries such as religious–secular. Lived Islam contributes importantly to Muslim geographies and feminist geographies of religion by elaborating on the complexities of Muslim lives and identities, how being Muslim is integral to different kinds of nonreligious identities and practices in different secular and nonreligious spaces within specific social and political contexts.