Finding Mecca in America

Finding Mecca in America PDF Author: Mucahit Bilici
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922871
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

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Book Description
The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on American society, but they had an even more lasting effect on Muslims living in the United States. Once practically invisible, they suddenly found themselves overexposed. By describing how Islam in America began as a strange cultural object and is gradually sinking into familiarity, Finding Mecca in America illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape. In this book, Mucahit Bilici traces American Muslims’ progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, Bilici develops a novel sociological approach and offers insights into the civil rights activities of Muslim Americans, their increasing efforts at interfaith dialogue, and the recent phenomenon of Muslim ethnic comedy. Theoretically sophisticated, Finding Mecca in America is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.

Finding Mecca in America

Finding Mecca in America PDF Author: Mucahit Bilici
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226922871
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 271

Get Book Here

Book Description
The events of 9/11 had a profound impact on American society, but they had an even more lasting effect on Muslims living in the United States. Once practically invisible, they suddenly found themselves overexposed. By describing how Islam in America began as a strange cultural object and is gradually sinking into familiarity, Finding Mecca in America illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, the book is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape. In this book, Mucahit Bilici traces American Muslims’ progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, Bilici develops a novel sociological approach and offers insights into the civil rights activities of Muslim Americans, their increasing efforts at interfaith dialogue, and the recent phenomenon of Muslim ethnic comedy. Theoretically sophisticated, Finding Mecca in America is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.

The Women’s Mosque of America

The Women’s Mosque of America PDF Author: Tazeen M. Ali
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479811289
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 335

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Book Description
Analyzes how American Muslim women assert themselves as religious actors in the US and beyond, using the Qur’an as a tool for social justice and community building The Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning. Tazeen M. Ali explores this congregation, focusing on how members contest established patriarchal norms while simultaneously contending with domestic and global Islamophobia that renders their communities vulnerable to violence. Drawing on textual analysis of WMA sermons and ethnographic interviews with community members, and utilizing Black feminist and womanist frameworks, Ali investigates how American Muslim women create and authorize new conceptions of Islamic authority. Whereas the established model of Islamic authority is rooted in formal religious training and Arabic language expertise, the WMA is predicated on women’s embodied experiences, commitments to social and racial justice, English interpretations of the Qur’an, and community building across Islamic sects and in an interfaith context. Situating the US at the center rather than at the margins of debates over Islamic authority and showing how American Muslim women assert themselves as meaningful religious actors in the US and beyond, Ali’s work offers new insights on Islamic authority as it relates to the intersections of gender, religious space, and national belonging.

Claiming Belonging

Claiming Belonging PDF Author: Emily Cury
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501753606
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
Claiming Belonging dives deep into the lives of Muslim American advocacy groups in the post-9/11 era, asking how they form and function within their broader community in a world marked by Islamophobia. Bias incidents against Muslim Americans reached unprecedented levels a few short years ago, and many groups responded through action—organizing on the national level to become increasingly visible, engaged, and assertive. Emily Cury draws on more than four years of participant observation and interviews to examine how Muslim American organizations have sought to access and influence the public square and, in so doing, forge a political identity. The result is an engaging and unique study, showing that policy advocacy, both foreign and domestic, is best understood as a sphere where Muslim American identity is performed and negotiated. Claiming Belonging offers ever-timely insight into the place of Muslims in American political life and, in the process, sheds light on one of the fastest-growing and most internally dynamic American minority groups.

Religion in America

Religion in America PDF Author: Julia Corbett Hemeyer
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317283902
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
Religion in America, 7th Edition provides a comprehensive yet concise introduction to the changing religious landscape of the United States. Extensively revised and updated to reflect current events and trends, this new edition continues to engage students in reflection about religious diversity. Julia Corbett-Hemeyer presents the study of religion as a tool for developing appreciation of communities of faith other than one’s own and for understanding the dynamics at work in religion in the United States today.

Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History

Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History PDF Author: Karen J. Johnson
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 0299346307
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
Religion is deeply embedded in American history, and one cannot understand American history's broad dynamics without accounting for it. Without detailing the history of religions, teachers cannot properly explain key themes in US survey courses, such as politics, social dynamics, immigration and colonization, gender, race, or class. From early Native American beliefs and practices, to European explorations of the New World, to the most recent presidential elections, religion has been a significant feature of the American story. In Understanding and Teaching Religion in US History, a diverse group of eminent historians and history teachers provide a practical tool for teachers looking to improve history instruction at the upper-level secondary and undergraduate level. This book offers a breadth of voices and approaches to teaching this crucial part of US history. Religion can be a delicate topic, especially in public education, and many students and teachers bring strongly held views and identities to their understanding of the past. The editors and contributors aim to help the reader see religion in fresh ways, to present sources and perspectives that may be unfamiliar, and to suggest practical interventions in the classroom that teachers can use immediately.

Old Islam in Detroit

Old Islam in Detroit PDF Author: Sally Howell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199372012
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
Across North America, Islam is portrayed as a religion of immigrants, converts, and cultural outsiders. Yet Muslims have been part of American society for much longer than most people realize. This book documents the history of Islam in Detroit, a city that is home to several of the nation's oldest, most diverse Muslim communities. In the early 1900s, there were thousands of Muslims in Detroit. Most came from Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and British India. In 1921, they built the nation's first mosque in Highland Park. By the 1930s, new Islam-oriented social movements were taking root among African Americans in Detroit. By the 1950s, Albanians, Arabs, African Americans, and South Asians all had mosques and religious associations in the city, and they were confident that Islam could be, and had already become, an American religion. When immigration laws were liberalized in 1965, new immigrants and new African American converts rapidly became the majority of U.S. Muslims. For them, Detroit's old Muslims and their mosques seemed oddly Americanized, even unorthodox. Old Islam in Detroit explores the rise of Detroit's earliest Muslim communities. It documents the culture wars and doctrinal debates that ensued as these populations confronted Muslim newcomers who did not understand their manner of worship or the American identities they had created. Looking closely at this historical encounter, Old Islam in Detroit provides a new interpretation of the possibilities and limits of Muslim incorporation in American life. It shows how Islam has become American in the past and how the anxieties many new Muslim Americans and non-Muslims feel about the place of Islam in American society today are not inevitable, but are part of a dynamic process of political and religious change that is still unfolding.

Growing Up Muslim in Europe and the United States

Growing Up Muslim in Europe and the United States PDF Author: Medhi Bozorgmehr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 131527907X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
This volume brings together scholarship from two different, and until now, largely separate literatures—the study of the children of immigrants and the study of Muslim minority communities—in order to explore the changing nature of ethnic identity, religious practice, and citizenship in the contemporary western world. With attention to the similarities and differences between the European and American experiences of growing up Muslim, the contributing authors ask what it means for young people to be both Muslim and American or European, how they reconcile these, at times, conflicting identities, how they reconcile the religious and gendered cultural norms of their immigrant families with the more liberal ideals of the western societies that they live in, and how they deal with these issues through mobilization and political incorporation. A transatlantic research effort that brings together work from the tradition in diaspora studies with research on the second generation, to examine social, cultural, and political dimensions of the second-generation Muslim experience in Europe and the United States, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in migration, diaspora, race and ethnicity, religion and integration.

American Immigration

American Immigration PDF Author: James Ciment
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317477162
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 2592

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Book Description
Thoroughly revised and expanded, this is the definitive reference on American immigration from both historic and contemporary perspectives. It traces the scope and sweep of U.S. immigration from the earliest settlements to the present, providing a comprehensive, multidisciplinary approach to all aspects of this critically important subject. Every major immigrant group and every era in U.S. history are fully documented and examined through detailed analysis of social, legal, political, economic, and demographic factors. Hot-topic issues and controversies - from Amnesty to the U.S.-Mexican Border - are covered in-depth. Archival and contemporary photographs and illustrations further illuminate the information provided. And dozens of charts and tables provide valuable statistics and comparative data, both historic and current. A special feature of this edition is the inclusion of more than 80 full-text primary documents from 1787 to 2013 - laws and treaties, referenda, Supreme Court cases, historical articles, and letters.

Following Similar Paths

Following Similar Paths PDF Author: Samuel C. Heilman
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520974565
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 311

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Book Description
Two academics, one Jewish and one Muslim, come together to show how much their faiths have in common—particularly in America. This book provides a braided portrait of two American groups whose strong religious attachments and powerful commitments to ritual observance are not always easy to adapt to American culture. Orthodox Jews and observant Muslims share many similarities in their efforts to be at home in America while holding on to their practices and beliefs. As Samuel Heilman and Mucahit Bilici reveal, they follow similar paths in their American experience. Heilman and Bilici immerse readers in three layers of discussion for each religious group: historical evolution, sociological transformation, and a comparative understanding of certain parallel beliefs and practices, each of which is used as a window onto the lived reality of these communities. Written by two sociologists, one a religiously observant American Jew and the other an American Muslim, Following Similar Paths offers lively insider and outsider perspectives that deepen our understanding of American diversity and what it means to be religious in a modern society.

Culture Wars

Culture Wars PDF Author: Roger Chapman
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317473507
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 2878

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Book Description
The term "culture wars" refers to the political and sociological polarisation that has characterised American society the past several decades. This new edition provides an enlightening and comprehensive A-to-Z ready reference, now with supporting primary documents, on major topics of contemporary importance for students, teachers, and the general reader. It aims to promote understanding and clarification on pertinent topics that too often are not adequately explained or discussed in a balanced context. With approximately 640 entries plus more than 120 primary documents supporting both sides of key issues, this is a unique and defining work, indispensable to informed discussions of the most timely and critical issues facing America today.