Participants and Paper Summaries
“Social Justice Advocacy and Muslim American Youth”
Salua Fawzi, McGill University
This paper will analyze the intersection between social justice rhetoric and Islam amongst Muslim university students and will contribute to growing scholarship on a demographic that is critically engaged and socially conscious.
“Betwixt & Between: Shifts in Religious Identity Amongst Muslim American Youth”
Yasmine Flodin-Ali, Harvard Divinity School
The subjects of this paper used to identify as practicing Muslims but no longer do so. Despite their shifts in religious identity many of the interviewees continue to identify with Islam in some capacity, which is indicative of strong communal ties and the racialization of Islam in the United States.
“Landscaping Democracy in Tunisia: Or How Landscapes Resist Power”
Justin Skye Malachowski, University of California, Davis
Tunisians partner with foreign scholars and artists to inscribe democracy into the landscape in attempts to elicit a cosmopolitan Muslim subjectivity. Not only does this project confront moral and temporal contradictions, but it also confronts a Tunisian landscape with its own agendas.
“The Hate and Fear of ‘Trump’ Politics: Navigation of Affective Politics by Muslim-Americans in a Post-9/11 Era”
Hinasahar Muneeruddin, Columbia University
This paper will examine the affective forces in the current environment in America of fear mongering and the dissemination of hateful rhetoric by people such as Donald Trump and mainstream media outlets. I will explore how emotions are dispersed through these affects give rise to the possibility and lived realities of lethal Islamophobic consequences, such as hate crimes.
“Muslim Women in the Sacred Space: Beyond Dusty Curtains and All-Female Mosques”
Seyda Nur Karaoglu, George Washington University
Women’s mosque attendance has often been representative of a broader socio-political and cultural scene, surpassing a mere issue of Islamic jurisprudence. This paper discusses female efforts in the United States to reclaim worship space and evaluates the extent to which these efforts have been shaped by changing societal norms.
“Civilizational Discourse in the Colonial Encounter: Mouridism, Resistance, and French Colonialism”
Cheikh Seye, Emory University
This paper investigate ways in which the civilizational component are articulated in the Mourid-French colonial encounter across a range of issues. In other words, I will probe the civilizational perspectives that underpinned French colonialism through their mission civilisatrice and look at Mourid discourse about civilization in its resistance to colonialism.
“Capturing Shadows or Imitating God? The Islamic Law of Imagery in the Early Twentieth Century”
Wasim Shiliwala, Princeton University
In the early 1900s, Muslim scholars in Egypt and India were frequently asked about photography: does it violate or bypass Islamic law’s ban on images? My paper examines how, in answering this question, they conceptualized this new technology, revisited Islam’s supposed iconoclasm, and factored in their modern image-filled colonial context.
“Ali Shariati and the Limits of Gender Based Reform om the Islamic Revolution of Iran”
Shireen Nazari Smalley, University of Michigan
Ali Shariati was a leading thinker in pre-revolutionary Iran whose work influenced the 1979 Islamic Revolution. While Shariati’s theories on Muslim women challenged the secular monarchy, this paper contends that Shariati’s models of gendered resistance were ultimately co-opted to reinforce discriminatory laws against women in the Islamic Republic of Iran.