American Mosque Research Articles

Mosque Involvement and Political Engagement in the United States

AbstractConfronted by a number of home-grown Islamic terrorist attacks, many Americans incorrectly assume that Muslim religiosity correlates with anti-American values and that the American mosque is the center of radical socialization efforts. This paper examines the nature of the relationship between mosque involvement and political engagement. It finds that mosque attendance is positively associated with political engagement only when the attendance engages congregants in ways beyond religious ritual. Attending mosque to pray does not significantly impact political identities or engagement like following politics, registering to vote, voting, or party membership, while participation in other social or religious activities at a mosque is associated with an increased probability of engagement. These results suggest that not all mosque involvement is equally beneficial for promoting political engagement and that religious participation must proactively engage with the social lives of the congregants to have a substantive political effect.

Exploring the Giving Practices in American Mosques: Why Do Muslims Give So Little to Their Mosques?

<p>This paper explores the giving practices of Muslims in American mosques, based on two studies: the previously published “The American Mosque 2011” study which consisted of 524 interviews of mosque leaders; and the second study is the previously unpublished 2013 study of three mosques and the 2016 follow-up interviews with donors from the three mosques. The results show that mosque attendees give much less than their counterparts in churches. Giving rates were generated in three different way: dividing a congregation’s income by the number of people who attend the main congregational service; using self-reports of money donated to a congregation; and determining a giving rate by calculating the amount donated as a percentage of the donor’s income. Using the first method of looking at the budget and number of attendees, mosque attendees give a median figure of $405 per year and the median figure of giving in the FACT 2000 study of all religious congregations is $1429. Using the second method of looking to self-reports of giving, the highest giving rate of the three mosques is $671 and the lowest giving rate in Hoge’s study of giving (<em>Money Matters</em>) is the Catholics who reported giving $1032 per year. Using the third method, Christians give an average of 2.3% of their income to churches, while mosque attendees give 0.7% of their income. While the income level of mosque attendees is associated with higher levels of giving, higher rates of mosque attendance is not associated with higher rates of giving, which means that Muslims who are motivated to attend the mosque are not motivated to give. Interviews with donors in the three mosques seem to indicate that the one of the underlying factors for the low rate of giving is that they do not have a clear theology for giving to the mosque, and a culture of giving to mosques does not exist among immigrant Muslims.</p>

Gender and Cultivating the Moral Self in Islam: Muslim Converts in an American Mosque

Gender and Cultivating the Moral Self in Islam: Muslim Converts in an American Mosque

Contextualizing from Within: Perceptions of Physical Disorder in a South Central L.A. African American Mosque

Physical disorder is fundamental to how urban sociologists understand the inner workings of a neighborhood. This article takes advantage of ethnographic and historical research to understand how, over time, participants in an urban mosque in South Central Los Angeles develop patterns of meaning–making and decision–making about physical disorder. I examine how specific negative physical conditions on the property came to exist as well as the varied processes by which they changed—both improving and worsening—over the community's long history. Contrary to dominant “social disorganization” and “broken windows” theories that argue disorder is always a destructive force, I find that members saw specific signs of physical disorder as links to their collective past as well as placeholders for a future they hoped to construct. I then analyze how these shared imaginings shaped the ways members responded to physical problems in the present. The strength of this “contextualizing from within” approach is that attention to context and period allows researchers to better theorize why communities may or may not organize to repair physical disorder.

The mosque and black Islam

■ This ethnographic study of a predominantly African American, Sunni Muslim mosque and the surrounding African American Muslim community explores the role that Islam plays in an inner-city neighborhood in the northeastern US. It seeks to understand the culture of the African American mosque, to shed light on why great numbers of African Americans are turning to Islam, and to determine what effects Islam has on contemporary black communities. This article draws on six months of fieldwork centered on the mosque, immersion in the mosque’s community, conversations with the mosque’s male and female leadership, and African American members’ accounts of how they were drawn to Islam. The larger study seeks to identify ongoing social, political, and economic problems faced by the black community in the inner city and to illuminate how religion in general and Islam in particular succeed or fail in creating community solidarity, stimulating community mobilization, and serving as a driving force for social change.

The American Mosque in Transition: Assimilation, Acculturation and Isolation

This contribution explores the issues of assimilation, acculturation and radicalism in American mosques and is largely based on a 2005 study of 25 mosques, although data from three other studies are also extensively used. Analysing the demographics of mosque-goers and their views on Islamic conservatism, women, political involvement and pluralism, the essay concludes that American mosque participants are well integrated and acculturated into American society, but that they are resisting a full assimilation of intrinsic religious values and customs. Although fairly conservative, mosque participants neither exhibit radical tendencies nor the literalist Salafi/Wahhabi thinking. The American mosque, therefore, should be viewed as a partner for American law enforcement in preventing the emergence of Muslim radicalism and home-grown terrorist groups.

Survey Research and Islamic Fundamentalism: A Question about Validity

Psychology of religion research has historically borrowed heavily from the quantitative approach of mainstream psychology. This study illustrates difficulties that are sometimes related to this practice, even when using instruments that have proven to be psychometrically sound. We distributed an earlier reliable and valid version of the Intratextual Fundamentalism Scale (Williamson & Hood, 2005), developed with a U.S. Christian sample, in an African American mosque for the purpose of cross-cultural validation. Among the 76 survey booklets initially distributed, 27 were returned and, of those, only 17 had usable information; almost all of these had aberrations including item omissions and handwritten comments. In view of the low response rate and atypical responses, this article presents a qualitative-type, rather than a quantitative, analysis of the data and discusses the important issue of assumed validity as it relates to contemporary religious research in cross-cultural investigations.

Book Reviews

International Journal of Urban and Regional ResearchVolume 28, Issue 3 p. 717-734 Book Reviews First published: 06 September 2004 https://doi.org/10.1111/j.0309-1317.2004.00547.xAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Abstract Books reviewed: Stuart Aitken Geographies of young people: the morally contested spaces of identity Akel Ismail Kahera Deconstructing the American mosque: space, gender, and aesthetics Eric Klinenberg Heatwave: a social autopsy of disaster in Chicago Louise Chawla (ed.) Growing up in an urbanising world Richard Tomlinson, Robert A. Beauregard, Lindsay Bremner and Xolela Mangcu (eds.) Emerging Johannesburg: perspectives on the postapartheid city Bent Flyvbjerg Making social science matter David J. Myers and Henry A. Dietz (eds.) Capital city politics in Latin America: democratization and empowerment Dennis R. Judd (ed.) The infrastructure of play Dominique Malaquais Architecture, pouvoir et dissidence au Cameroun Lydia Morris Managing migration. Civic stratification and migrants' rights Volume28, Issue3September 2004Pages 717-734 RelatedInformation

Akel Ismail. Kahera, Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender, and Aesthetics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. xiii+194 pp. $40.00 (cloth).

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewAkel Ismail. Kahera, Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender, and Aesthetics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002. xiii+194 pp. $40.00 (cloth).Edward E. Curtis IV, Edward E. Curtis IVUniversity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Search for more articles by this author , University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 84, Number 3July 2004 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/424431 Views: 25Total views on this site Permission to reprint a book review printed in this section may be obtained only from the author.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Review: Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender and Aesthetics * Akel Ismail Kahera: Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender and Aesthetics

Review: Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender and Aesthetics * Akel Ismail Kahera: Deconstructing the American Mosque: Space, Gender and Aesthetics

Deconstructing the American mosque: space, gender, and aesthetics

Introduction: The Polemics of Deconstruction Aesthetic Origins and End Conditions Interpretations of Image, Text, and Form Space, Place, and Public Gathering Conclusion: Reversible Space and Linear Time Glossary Bibliography