ABSTRACT This article examines the role of compassion for animals in the earliest Buddhist texts to proscribe meat eating. I argue that compassion features prominently as a justification for vegetarianism in these texts but that it is typically framed as benefiting the practitioner as much as—if not more than—the animals themselves. To clarify how compassion operates in these texts, I propose a new typology: subject-oriented compassion, which emphasizes karmic consequences and the personal benefits of cultivating compassion, and object-oriented compassion, which centers animal suffering and enjoins audiences to have empathy for animals. This approach encourages us to understand Buddhist compassion not as a monolithic concept but as a capacious category encompassing multiple orientations toward sentient life.

ABSTRACT This article examines the role of education in fueling Black American Muslims’ efforts to achieve self-determination. It focuses on the Dar-ul-Islam Movement, a community that was active from 1962 to 1983 and, before 1975, comprised the largest national network of Black Sunni Muslims in the US. I argue that the movement’s educational efforts—which included independent schools as well as programs for youth and adults—were key to actualizing its vision of carving out sacred urban geographies where they could live freely without interference from the state. The Dar’s praxis challenges scholarship that silos Black and Muslim intellectual discourses, as well as those that separate religious ideologies from political visions. Instead, through a focus on the movement’s educational efforts during the Black Power era, I show how the Dar fused theological, moral, material, and sociopolitical concerns to actualize collective liberation for Black Muslims in the urban US.

ABSTRACT Scholars of African American religious history who access traditional archives to narrate Black women’s religious experiences ought not neglect the pertinent material sources available in the photographic archive. In this article, I consider how vernacular photography found in R. C. Hickman’s photographic archive uncovers important nuances of Black church respectability politics in Dallas, TX from the 1940s to 1960s. Though vernacular photography is a complicated source of historical knowledge, I argue that one of Hickman’s photographs in particular puts what Tamura Lomax calls “feminine-ism” on display. By situating this photo within discourse on religion and racial politics in the desegregation era, this article models how scholars can explore photographic archives to fill gaps in African American women’s religious history. Thus, this article prompts scholars of African American religious history to embrace the photograph as a significant material source and, thereby, become scholarly witnesses of Black women’s religious lives.

Abstract This article interrogates the religious personality of the corporation through a case study of Islamic banking in Pakistan. Departing from Eurocentric genealogies that trace corporate personhood to Christian political theology, I examine how Deobandī Muslim jurists sanctioned Islamic banks as rights-bearing persons under the Sharī‘a. Whereas proponents justified accommodating corporations by locating their “likenesses” (naẓā’ir) in the Sharī‘a, critics argued that corporate personhood and limited liability violated the Sharī‘a’s commitment to distributive justice. Drawing on these Deobandī debates, I theorize the corporation’s religious personality as produced through both figurative (analogical) and performative (constitutive) operations of legal discourse. This perspective reframes the corporate form as a legally constituted artefact rather than an archetype linking religious and economic collectives. The article advocates for an approach to studying religion and capitalism in the Global South that centers local struggles with corporate power, while remaining attuned to structural inequalities steering them in capital’s favor.

ABSTRACT This article argues that the “Navigating Differences” letter, in which North American Muslim leaders denounced homosexuality as incompatible with Islam, mark a defining moment of shift and fracture in Muslim legal subjectivity. Over the past twenty-five years, American Muslim organizations oriented themselves around war on terror legal activism. In this period, which I call the juridical epoch of American Islam, Muslims became steeped in a progressive civil rights tradition. In a historical turning point, some legally minded American Muslims now utilize the rhetorical tactics of conservative Christian lawyers in the letter. Using the writings of Saba Mahmood on secular hermeneutics, I reimagine what politics the Navigating Differences letter propounds. Much of Mahmood’s work focuses on liberal Muslim figures, yet her arguments assist as well perceiving how more conservative political operations emerge from secular hermeneutics. Understanding the letter’s rhetoric teaches scholars about shifting conversations about law and Islam.

ABSTRACT This article argues that Moses Mendelssohn’s brief but significant reference to Deaf people in Jerusalem: or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783) is central to his theory of Judaism as a “living script” and its place in the civic life of the modern nation-state. His ambivalent position as a German Jew mirrors that of Deaf people, some of whom used sign language, which—like Jewish practice—was viewed as incompatible with Enlightenment ideals of disembodied reason. By placing Mendelssohn’s philosophy—and particularly his lesser-known essay on “stuttering”—in dialogue with eighteenth-century debates on Deaf education, I show that his thought challenges the “oralist” view that audible speech is essential for thought. He presents Judaism as an embodied “language of action” that resists assimilationist pressures and envisions an enlightened society grounded in religious and linguistic diversity. I argue that Mendelssohn’s engagement with Deafness reflects broader concerns about religious knowledge, the politics of signs, and European citizenship and underscore the importance of Deaf studies to religious studies—particularly in understanding how bodily difference intersected with religious and civil status in eighteenth-century Europe.