Muslim Space Research Articles

TAQNĪN AL-AHKĀM (Telaah Sejarah Legislasi Hukum Perdata Islam dalam Hukum Nasional Indonesia)

In establishing law (istinbath al-hukm) Islam uses an approach to the al-Qur'an and al-Hadith, where both are references to all legal problems. Indonesia is a country with the largest majority of Muslims in the world. Not so, the existence of Indonesia as a law state that adheres to a democratic system requires the existence of Islamic legal legislation from living law to legal law. Where, Fiqh began to be formulated into constitution. Therefore, Indonesia, which is known as the trias politica government system (Judicative, Executive and Legislative), must also provide space for Muslims in the National Legislation Program (Prolegnas) to form Islamic law in Indonesia. This legislative process in Islam is known as Taqnīn Al-Ahkām (legal legislation).

The split Arab/Jew figure revisited

ABSTRACT In this essay, Shohat argues that the question of the Arab-Jew, in contrast to present-day ethnonationalist common sense, must be rearticulated as mutually constitutive categories, so as to address the complex imaginaries of both ‘the Arab’ and ‘the Jew’. Elaborating on her earlier dialogue with Edward Said’s account of the bifurcated Oriental/Semitic myth—one rendered as the Orientalist (the Jew) and the other as the Oriental (the Arab)—Shohat offers a genealogical reading of this gradual splitting, locating it prior to the partition of Palestine and even to the emergence of Zionism, and tracing it back to the dissemination of a colonial-inflected Enlightenment discourse. More crucially, Shohat asks where the indigenous Jew of ‘the Orient’, and more specifically the Arab-Jew, might fit conceptually within this split. Today, with the epic-scale reconceptualization of belonging in the wake of partition, diasporization and competing nationalist imaginaries, the Arab-Jew figure silently occupies an ambiguous position within the bifurcation. Yet a critical analysis of the Orientalist splitting that sidesteps the question of the Arab-Jew risks reproducing the fixed ethnonationalist lexicon that posits Jewishness and Arabness as irreconcilable. At the same time, this very ambiguity, Shohat argues, was already fomented with the imperial ‘translation’ of the Enlightenment project into a racialized idiom, now applied differentially to the Muslim and the Jew-within-the-Orient. This essay traces such representational ruptures back to the nineteenth century, examining various instances of what the essay regards as ‘the de-indigenization of the Arab-Jew’. To illustrate her thesis, Shohat examines the gendered imagining of both Jewish and Muslim communities within a relational and transnational comparative framework. Orientalist tropes such as the odalisque, the hammam and the un/veiled female had long been projected on to Muslim and Jewish women throughout the region but, with the emergence of imperial ‘minorities’ discourse, the exoticized Jew-in-the-Orient became the object of a gendered rescue phantasy, as vividly illustrated in Dehodencq’s painting L’Exécution de la juive. Rather than a document of Muslim antisemitism, however, the colonial visual archive inadvertently registers what Shohat defines as a ‘split-within-the split’, highlighting the novel formation of an ambivalent indigeneity for Arab-Jews within ‘the Orient’. Yet the aesthetic dispositions also inadvertently and paradoxically reveal an underlying, thoroughly syncretic and shared Judaeo-Muslim cultural geography. Here the pivotal figure of the Arab-Jew reveals an intricate landscape of belonging that offers an alternative conceptual framework in which to discuss the ruptures prior to the grand rupture of partition, and to illuminate the post/colonial transformation that dramatically impacted the narrative of Jewish at-homeness within Muslim spaces.

Between the spaces: Experts on Islam in Russia

This paper discusses the question of knowledge construction on Islam in contemporary Russia through the lens of the category of space. Many everyday categories used by Muslims to characterize their identity are linked to spatial references. Starting from the idea of locality and ending in the search of traditional forms of Islam, these categories are highly politicized in the contemporary context. The aim of this paper is to explore the intermediary space between the political and the religious fields, the space of circulation between these fields in which experts on Islam are situated. Indeed, numerous academic specialists engage in expertise on Islam by creating or recycling categories, which circulate between the secular and the religious spaces. These experts have different backgrounds, different profiles and different strategies. Their impact on religious and political processes varies too. In addition, the experts of Islam have different characteristics according to the space they act in. We will compare these experts’ discourses in various regions (Moscow, Tatarstan and Dagestan) to analyse their strategies and the way in which they relate to their environment. Besides blurring the border between the secular and the religious by ensuring a permanent circulation of categories, the experts on Islam activate political and religious notions in a different manner according to their spatial affiliation. This concerns the reference to the local or international Muslim space as well as their normative discourse on acceptable forms of Islam.

Introduction: Normative orders and the remaking of Muslim spaces and selves in contemporary Russia

The aim of this special issue is to explore, from the perspective of various notions of space, the manifold ways in which Muslims in Russia live and practice their religion. We aim to analyse how Muslims in Russia are confronted in the practice of their religion with various conceptual and experiential realms. These realms correspond to certain divisions that they must negotiate and navigate. Examples of these include the boundaries between the secular and the religious; the public and the private; the official and the informal or unofficial; the local and the translocal/transregional/transnational; halal and haram, etc. Looking at Islam through the lens of space allows us to explore the dynamic ways in which Muslims in Russia have continued to creatively redefine, negotiate, reinforce, alter and dissolve these boundaries and divides since the fall of the Soviet Union. Diverse experiences and perceptions of Muslim spaces further help us to relate the question of the (re)appearance of these Muslim spaces to the process of de-secularisation that is currently taking place in post-Soviet Russia. In particular, we aim to clarify how the relationship between the secular realm and the Islamic religion is being reconfigured by examining how Muslim lives integrate, transcend and alter the normative dichotomies that are present in official discourses on Islam. We thus want to look ethnographically at the relationship between the ways in which normative categories define and delimit certain realms and the ways in which Muslims live their religion by creatively shaping and experiencing spaces that go beyond these normative divisions. In addition, this special issue explores the question of how the (re)creation of Muslim spaces is linked to processes of becoming Muslim, of cultivating a Muslim self and of experiencing different (but often simultaneous) identities and forms of personhood.

Queer religious geographies? Qu(e)erying Indonesian Muslim selves

Emerging from two periods of fieldwork in Java, Indonesia, this article draws on participant observation and in-depth, semi-structured interviews to address the co-production of queer Muslim spaces and subjectivities through the everyday practices of queer Muslims. What do queer religious geographies mean in this context? Approximations to this question are offered through an exploration of the lived realities of queer Indonesian Muslims who move between their queerness and religion engaging in commute and integration processes. By studying the domestic sphere, religious spaces and participation in LGBTIQ-rights NGOs, I reflect on the possibility to conceptualize agency from within certain degrees of submission to norms.

Becoming Muslims with a “Queer Voice”: Indexical Disjuncture in the Talk of LGBT Members of the Progressive Muslim Community

This article examines LGBT Muslim erasure by hegemonic Islamic and homonormative ideologies and how those involved in nonconformist Muslim groups queer those ideologies in order to forge narratives of belonging. I analyze the work of ‘queering’ Muslim voices among LGBT Muslims and allies involved in a multisited community of nonconformist Muslim face‐to‐face and online groups, and what such queering explains about the relationship among erasure, voice, ideological disjuncture, and resistance. Through analysis of individual and group conversations alongside ethnographic observations, I argue that LGBT Muslims and allies strategically index queerness and Muslimness as a challenge to marginalizing discourses and to create ‘safe’ spaces that also benefit other Muslims on the margins. Narratives of both LGBT Muslim marginalization and its strategic disruption as well as nonconformist group interactions are used to illustrate how the queering of Muslim discourse creates “indexical disjuncture” to make space for both LGBT Muslims and other nonconformist Muslims. I conclude by considering how providing evidence of language’s role in the process of ‘queering’ contributes to ongoing conversations in queer theory.

Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience, Kai Kresse

Reviewed by: Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience by Kai Kresse Nathaniel Mathews BOOK REVIEW of Kresse, Kai. 2018. Swahili Muslim Publics and Postcolonial Experience. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 237 pp. Philosopher Kai Kresse has long established himself as a skillful interpreter of Swahili intellectual discourse on the East African coast. With his latest book, he draws on and expands his earlier work to take us inside the discursive worlds of Swahiliphone Muslim intellectuals in twentieth- and twenty-first-century Kenya. He shows Swahili-speaking Kenyan Muslims wrestling with colonial and postcolonial political dynamics within multiple overlapping frameworks: a localized Swahili discursive tradition of Islamic reform with a genealogy going back to Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui, a transregional Islamic discourse of enjoining right and forbidding wrong, and the widespread political marginalization of coastal Muslims in postcolonial Kenya. He reads and analyzes a variety of texts, including transcripts of radio broadcasts, to show how their authors tried to carve out a pious, modern public space for Muslims in Kenya, and how their sharing of Islamic knowledge aimed to shape a moral community in a context of political marginalization. This analysis highlights the division between various Muslim groups about the proper boundaries of ritual interpretation. The book is divided into two parts: "Conceptualizations" and "Readings." The latter encompasses the three-chapter heart of the book's close readings and translations and will be the focus of the remainder of this review. On the whole, Kresse is successful at showing discursive continuities in Muslim reformist discourse between the colonial and postcolonial eras. Chapter three is about the intellectual production of Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui in 1930s Mombasa. Through a close reading of Mazrui's Sahifa newspaper, Kresse argues for understanding Al-Amin as a "colonial thinker," ambivalently placed as kadhi of Mombasa and later the whole Kenya coastal strip (a position appointed by the British) and preoccupied with internal critique of the community. Mazrui's writings in Sahifa and later al-Islah emphasize the decadence, ignorance, and complacency of coastal Muslims, ominously warning of the long-term consequences of neglect of education and the acquisition of knowledge in general. [End Page 149] Chapter four skips ahead to 1972 and examines the decade-long publication run of Sauti ya Haki, a newspaper published and edited by two of Al-Amin's students: Sheikh Muhammad Kasim Mazrui and Sheikh Abdullah Saleh Farsy. The newspaper was an intellectual heir to Al-Amin's reformist and purist ideas. The virtue of Kresse's analysis is that it reveals how the editors of Sauti ya Haki, even though writing from a postcolonial location, were still deeply implicated in the double bind of colonial modernity: on the one hand, they were at pains to show that the Quran was compatible with modern Western science (113); on the other hand, they critiqued a variety of popular healing and worship practices associated with Islam (126). Yet like Al-Amin, the editors of Sauti ya Haki saw such practices, which included amulet making and spirit possession, not as locally rooted expressions of a powerful Islamicate culture that crossed religious lines, but as a mortal threat to the integrity of Islam itself. Earlier chapters deal with print media, but chapter five analyzes Sauti ya Ruhuma, a Muslim radio program that ran from 2005 to 2007, facilitated by two figures who integrated the intellectual legacy of Islamic reform and purism with the new medium of radio: Abubakar and Stambuli openly and frankly discussed topics like terrorism and coastal political history and the marginalization of Muslims in Kenya, yet they were criticized as Salafis or Wahhabis for their reformist intellectual lineage (154). It is clear from Kresse's analysis that Muslim purist reformism continues to have significant effects locally, though it has failed to bring about the desired unity of East African Muslims. It is also clear that in the context of a global war on terror that demonizes Muslims, the intellectual lineage of purist thought is increasingly linked by others to the tacit acceptance, or even encouragement, of violence. Kresse is aware of this, and I applaud his decision to frame Stambuli's discussion of terrorism as taking seriously "the difficulty … of the internal...

Suburban Islam (By Justine Howe)

Reviewed by: Suburban Islam by Justine Howe Emily Regan Wills (bio) Suburban Islam Justine Howe New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 230 Pages. In Suburban Islam, Justine Howe provides a compelling and readable ethnographic portrait of the Muhammad Webb Foundation, a Muslim community organization located in the suburbs of Chicago. The Webb Foundation is structurally distinct from many other sorts of Muslim community institutions. It is not a mosque, though it does host religious educational spaces for adults and children, as well as religious events. It is neither an activist organization nor a political advocacy group that aims to speak for a Muslim community, although its members are highly engaged in the task of thinking about how to speak as Muslims in the public sphere. It is a multi-ethnic and multi-generational foundation that is not organized through a geographically concentrated urban community, whose members are primarily drawn from the large but scattered Muslim communities of the greater Chicago area, particularly those living in the suburbs. The organization aims to move beyond the conservative perspectives and narrow cultural boundaries associated with many Muslim community institutions. Only some members, [End Page 111] however, would describe themselves, or the institution, as progressive or feminist. Since the Webb Foundation is such a unique place, it is a particularly interesting field site for Howe to ask questions about how ordinary Muslims interrogate and/or integrate religious traditions and practices into their daily lives. The book as a whole, shows how the Webb Foundation’s members view it as a space for creating a particularly American Islamic-culture and practice. Howe makes a convincing case that Webb is a forum for its members to create new identities and opportunities for dialogue and spiritual growth. Its members have substantial social capital (and usually financial capital), but they also have good reason to be reluctant to engage with mosque-based Muslim spaces, which they critique as being excessively ethnocentric, disconnected from American reality, and limited in their ability to educate children, and support spiritual guidance sought by their members. Webbies, as they call themselves, share a strong critique of what they call “ Wahhabism” and what Howe calls “ revivalism” (p. 55), the theologically conservative brand of Islamic theology that is primarily supported by Saudi Arabia. However, they are equally unwilling to allow this criticism to authorize an Islamophobic rejection of Islam; instead, their goal is to create an “indigenous” American Islam which is grounded in rationality that fits within the rubric of American religious pluralism, and can support them in their own daily lives and help them represent themselves to outsiders. The community that gathers around the Webb Foundation is diverse in some ways, particularly with regards to ethnicity, but largely homogenous in terms of class position and educational levels, which combines with their shared theological goals to produce a strong bond, even as members continue to interact with other institutions within the Muslim community in the Chicago area. Howe explores the Webb community through a variety of lenses. Her individual interviews and observation at Webb events, particularly its annual mawlid, show that the community is actively self-reflective and engaged in the broader project of representing Islam to others in an American conflict. They struggle with what I have elsewhere called “discursive misrecognition,”1 the inability to speak from their own subject position without being forced into limiting or changing their dialogical position to satisfy powerful interlocutors. But they also struggle with how to find a form of Islamic practice that is authentic to them and that addresses the purposes they want Islam to represent in their own lives. Through detailed observation at adult education classes on Qur’an and fiqh, Howe is able to see how the members engage with text and tradition to find how their ways and daily lifestyles adapt to that sort of practice. The book integrates analysis of gender dynamics throughout, and also dedicates a full chapter to exploring some of the particularities of gendered-practices and contestation within the community. The picture she paints is of a thriving community that is meaningfully engaged with [End Page 112] each other, with scripture, and with the demands of living as Muslims in...

Markets and the Making of Muslim Space in Urban China: Street Portraits from Xi'an's Huimin Jie

This photo essay explores the Muslim Quarter, or Huimin Jie, in the central Chinese city of Xi'an located in Shaanxi Province. It focuses on street life and the vendors who sell a variety of foodstuffs from open-air stalls and shop fronts. The ten black and white street portraits included in the piece convey the Muslim character of this neighborhood as well as its youthful vibrancy.

Towards a Multi-Religious Topology of Islam: The Global Circulation of a Mutable Mobile

Narratives of the origins, the history, and the present state of Islam always entail spatial claims. Accordingly, Islam emerged in the Arabian Peninsula, spread over its so-called heartlands, and became a world religion. A common understanding inscribes Islam onto the Orient and opposes it to Europe, the Occident, or the West. Such spatial claims are faced with fundamental challenges and epistemological shortcomings because neither Islam nor space are naturally given, bounded entities. Rather, different historical actors and observers produce spatialized Islam. In this chapter, I challenge the notion that “Muslim space” is a useful analytical concept, and scrutinize the ways in which academic discourses inscribe Islam onto space and history. As an alternative, I propose a topology that understands the production of space as a multi-dimensional social process, including Muslim and non-Muslim perspectives at the same time. Thus, I delineate the topology of Islam as variegated, dynamic, and multi-religious from its inception. My argument is that Islam’s trans-regional spread turned it into a polycentric, mutable mobile characterized by internal and external diversity. I further argue that images of Islam are an integral, yet often concealed part of European and Western knowledge production and self-understanding. Epistemologically, this perspective argues that the “Islamization of Islam” is nowhere better visible than in the spatial ramifications of discourses that marginalize, exclude, or obfuscate both the multi-religious experiences in Islamic contexts and the continuous presence of Islam in European history.

Where Do the Multi-Religious Origins of Islam Lie? A Topological Approach to a Wicked Problem

The revelation of Islam in Arabic, its emergence in the Western Arabian Peninsula, and its acquaintance with Biblical literature seem to be clear indications for Islam’s birthplace and its religious foundations. While the majority of academic scholarship accepts the historicity of the revelation in Mecca and Medina, revisionist scholars have started questioning the location of early Islam with increasing fervour in recent years. Drawing on the isolation of Mecca and the lack of clear references to Mecca in ancient and non-Muslim literature before the mid-eighth century, these scholars have cast doubt on the claim that Mecca was already a trading outpost and a pilgrimage site prior to Islam, questioning the traditional Islamic and Orientalist view. Space, thus, plays a prominent role in the debate on the origins of Islam, although space is almost never conceptually discussed. In the following paper, I challenge the limited understanding of space in revisionist as well as mainstream scholarship. For the most part, this scholarship is not really interested in the multi-religious landscape sui generis, but understands early Islam either as a stable or an unstable entity that either reworked or digested the impact of Judaism and Christianity. In contrast, my contention is based on the view that Islam emerged neither “in” Mecca nor anywhere else, but that Muslims’ practical and symbolic actions produced such places as Mecca, Medina, and the Ḥijāz as the central places of Islam. My argument is threefold: Firstly, the production of the Meccan space and its central meaning for Islam were mutually dependant, gradual processes. Secondly, the creation of an exclusively Muslim space in the Ḥijāz conversely inscribed multi-religiosity into the general topology of early Islam. Thirdly, the early history of Islam hints at practices of un/doing differences, exemplified by instances of sharing, the creation of ambivalence, and processes ofpurification. Moreover, my contribution questions the way in which research on the origins of Islam has become a meaningful object of knowledge about the “true” nature of Islam against the background of populist discourses on Islam.

Fiqh Solutions Against Usury (Riba) Practices In Conventional Banking

The discussion of usury as if there had never been an endpoint, from the time of the companions of the prophet to contemporary Islamic scholars. Especially when the practice of usury appears in banking financial institutions. The majority of contemporary Islamic scholars such as Yûsuf Al-Qaradhāwi, view that the operation of conventional banks based on interest is unlawful, because this is the same as usury. In line with the fatwa of the Indonesian Ulema Council (MUI), which states that all forms of money interest practices within financial institutions are illegal. Over time, financial transactions (muamalah) carried out by someone also need instruments of financial institutions. So, a solution is needed for a Muslim to conduct financial transactions with the banking world. The fiqh study provides space for Muslims to conduct financial transactions both with individuals and with an institution while remaining based on applicable Islamic law.

Citizen Media Practices at the Digital Startup Mvslim

Belgium-based Mvslim.com is a citizen media platform that aims to create a space for Muslims and non-Muslims to contribute content dedicated to challenging stereotypical portrayals of Muslims in legacy media. Launched in 2015, this non-profit digital media startup claims to reach over 10 million unique visitors per month worldwide and is one example of a successful grassroots citizen media initiative that attracts and appeals to a global community. Based on a combination of content analysis and in-depth interviews with the platform’s editors and contributors, this paper examines the citizen media practices used by the editorial team at Mvslim to foster participatory engagement amongst contributors and connect Muslims and non-Muslims. Theoretically, the study takes the practice approach proposed by Stephansen, which enables us to understand “what citizen media do” not only as news-making practices, but also as “public-making practices”. We argue that digitally native citizen media platforms like Mvslim are blurring the boundaries of journalism, as they can fulfil democratic functions once limited to legacy media.

Hip Hop Matters: Race, Space, and Islam in Chicago

AbstractIn this article I examine pious Muslim placemaking against the backdrop of race and class tensions in the United States. I contend that ideologies of anti‐Blackness converge with pious Muslim space and placemaking practices to create a moralized division of space for Chicago Muslims. Specifically, I look at the ways that pious Muslim placemaking in Chicago suburbs by Muslim immigrant parents is entangled in elisions of race and class in the US. I show that whereas a generation of Muslim parents pursued a pious Muslim life in proximity to a White, middle‐class, American dream, groups of young Muslim activists are making Muslim space and place through Blackness in the 'hood. I argue that young Muslim activists embrace hip hop's remaking of space and place to remap the pious geographies of Muslims in Chicago and challenge conceptions of pious Muslim identity that are inflected with anti‐Blackness. I demonstrate how these young Muslims find value in Blackness, as an ethic of social justice and an exemplar of Muslim piety, to contest hegemonic isomorphisms of race, space, place, and morality. Thus, I argue that by reclaiming and remaking space and place, young Muslims oppose anti‐Black racism found within broader US society as well as within the entrenched divisions of pious Muslim space in Chicago.

From ‘Tourkopolis’ to ‘Metropolis’: Transforming Urban Boundaries in Late Nineteenth-Century Iraklio (Candia), Crete

AbstractThis article examines the case of Iraklio, Crete, on its passage from the Ottoman regime to the Autonomous Cretan Polity in 1898, to interrogate current categories of ethnic boundaries used in historical and social research. It proposes an ‘archaeological’ method of investigating such boundaries in space. It conceives of the city as a field of interaction between the predominant religious groups of Muslim and Christian, and the way these groups have been represented in historical research and public memory. It also shows how understandings of ethnic boundaries were fashioned by colonial, especially British, sanitary and civic planning projects. Finally, it demonstrates how subaltern Muslim spaces, gendered places and ‘dangerous’ neighbourhoods were transformed into paradigmatic cases for understanding spatial segregation in cultural terms.

Bringing Queer into Muslim Spaces: Community-Based Pedagogy in Cape Town

Bringing Queer into Muslim Spaces:Community-Based Pedagogy in Cape Town Afshan Kamrudin (bio) Keyword Cape Town, community-based pedagogy, Muslim, queer Muslims, sexual diversity In South Africa, although the expression of queer sexuality is constitutionally protected, the acceptability of sexual diversity in religious spaces is disputable.1 The clash between constitutional rights and religious freedom is most notable in discussions around queer sexuality, which is often deemed deviant and as having no place within religious institutions. Despite legal protection, representative bodies for Muslims in Cape Town have continued to express resistance to sexual diversity in religious spaces in various ways. For example, in a memorandum submitted to the constitutional court of South Africa opposition to the proposed Civil Unions Bill in 2006, the Muslim Judicial Council (MJC) wrote, "the MJC is of the opinion that the spread of homosexuality and lesbianism will invite the anger of Allah, erode the family structure, and expose young, innocent children to an unnatural lifestyle"—making explicit their view that homosexuality and Islam are incompatible.2 The MJC, however, seems to be reflecting the views of the Cape Town Muslim community at large. In a recent study on attitudes toward sexual diversity among South African Muslims, 86 percent of Muslims surveyed across South Africa reported believing that homosexuality is a choice; at the same time, 66 [End Page 143] percent said they would be willing to engage in a dialogue about Islam and sexual diversity, although qualitative data suggests this dialogue would lean toward trying to rectify homosexual tendencies.3 Over 80 percent of South African Muslims surveyed cite the story of Lut or hadith as the reason for their beliefs that queer sexuality is incompatible with Islam. In light of this information, it seems imperative to develop a community-based pedagogy that aims at conscientization and political literacy in the Freirean sense.4 Paolo Freire emphasized the conceptualization of a problem over its solution as key to disrupting what he terms "the culture of violence" that is exacerbated by excess power of a privileged class and becomes a malady of the oppressed.5 Religion sometimes functions as an omnipotent source of information for contemporary issues. However, as gatekeepers to religious knowledge, imams hold the unique capacity and opportunity to address controversial modern issues through a humanistic and rights-based lens and facilitate community dialogues on issues of sexual diversity in the ummah to create meaningful social change. Social change in the Muslim community of Cape Town often requires a catalyst. In characterizing the apathy of the Muslim community under the apartheid regime, Muslim scholar and activist Farid Esack lamented: "In truth, the community at large was a complacent community, feeble in its responses and going whichever way the wind was going at a particular moment."6 However, social change around the acceptance of sexual diversity in Muslim spaces is taking place in various Islamic institutions around Cape Town. Using the concept of community-based pedagogy and drawing greatly on Freire's work, I address here the current engagements on sexual diversity in the Muslim community at two mosques in Cape Town. By chronicling key recent events that have challenged the Muslim community's views of sexual diversity and its compatibility with Islam, I explore the actions of two imams, both gatekeepers to textual Islamic knowledge but with diverse personal histories. Each imam draws pedagogical content from the experiences of their jam'ah7 (the first step to Freire's method of creating critical [End Page 144] consciousness and literacy), and both use established forums of community gathering to engage in such dialogue. This article explores the process of the conscientization of an oppressed community—in this case queer Muslims—by Imam Muhsin Hendricks of The People's Mosque and the development of political literacy for the mainstream Cape Muslim community by Imam Rasheid Omar of Claremont Main Road Mosque. I discuss the roles each imam has in shaping the dialogue around sexual diversity in the Cape Muslim community by identifying the strengths, challenges, and effects each has had in their respective religious spaces. The People's Mosque Masjidul Umam, or The People's Mosque (TPM), is part of a nongovernmental organization called The...

The Political Geographies of Muslim Visibility: Boundaries of Tolerance in the European City

Over the past decade, the question of what has somewhat problematically been termed “the Islamization of space” in European cities has come to the fore of political discussion. Much of the debate has focused on public reactions to and punitive state regulations of Islamic spaces of worship. Examples include the Swiss referendum in 2009 on a ban on minarets, voted in by an almost 60 per cent “yes” majority, and a similar ban proposed in Germany in 2016 by the Alternative für Deutschland. Yet opposition to the construction of mosques across Europe is just the most evident crystallization of wider fears surrounding Muslim presence and visibility in the urban landscape, with a variety of studies noting the emergence of racialized “affective geographies” in response to what are perceived to be “Muslim spaces” and “Muslim bodies,” increasingly demarcating city spaces as safe or unsafe, “ours” or “alien.”

Демографический дайджест


 Esteve A., C.R. Schwartz, J. van Bavel, I. Permanyer, M. Klesment, J. García-Román. The end of hypergamy: global trends and implications
 Clark G. Microbes and markets: was the Black Death an economic revolution?
 Van Mol C. Do employers value international study and internships? A comparative analysis of 31 countries
 Niedomysl T., U. Ernstson, U. Fransson. The accuracy of migration distance measures
 Graham C., J.R. Pozuelo. Happiness, stress, and age: how the U curve varies across people and places
 Lennartz C., R. Arundel, R. Ronald. Younger adults and homeownership in Europe through the global financial crisis
 Demintseva E., D. Kashnitsky. Contextualizing migrants' strategies of seeking medical care in Russia
 Kashnitsky I., M. Gunko. Spatial variation of in-migration to Moscow: testing the effect of housing market
 Oparin D.A. Migration and contemporary Muslim space in Moscow. Contextualizing north caucasian loud dhikr and the religious practices of Central Asian folk mullas
 Demintseva E. Labour migrants in post-Soviet Moscow: patterns of settlement
 Schöley J., F. Willekens. Visualizing compositional data on the Lexis surface
 Migheli M. Size of town, level of education and life satisfaction in Western Europe
 Shi Y., J.J. Kennedy. delayed registration and identifying the "missing girls" in China
 Peri-Rotem N. Religion and fertility in Western Europe: trends across cohorts in Britain, France and the Netherlands

関東郊外からムスリムとしての居場所を築く : パキスタン人男性と日本人女性の国際結婚の事例から( 多文化共生と文化人類学)

関東郊外からムスリムとしての居場所を築く : パキスタン人男性と日本人女性の国際結婚の事例から( 多文化共生と文化人類学)

Migration and contemporary Muslim space in Moscow. Contextualizing North Caucasian loud Dhikr and the religious practices of Central Asian Folk Mullas

Over the last fifteen years, the ethnic make-up of Moscow’s mosques has undergone significant change, while the number of practicing Muslims has grown manifold. These quantitative changes are connected with both the internal migration of people from the North Caucasian republics (a migration that had already begun in the early 1990s) and the external migration of natives of Central Asian states, primarily Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirgizia (a mass migration dating from the 2000s). This paper is dedicated to two phenomena of contemporary Moscow Muslim life – the loud dhikr of the Kunta Hajji wird of the Qadiri tariqa, practiced by Chechens and Ingush; and the religious practices of the Central Asian “uninstitutionalized” mullas. Both spiritual practices are popular and have great significance for a considerable proportion of Moscow Muslims, including those who do not directly participate in them. What both practices have in common is also found in their marginal nature with regard both to institutionalized Moscow Islam and to the fundamentalist trend which is now gathering steam here. This is an attempt to identify some specific features of contemporary Moscow Islam through the analysis of certain practices.