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The area of Los Angeles known as South Central is often overshadowed by dismal stereotypes, problematic racial stigmas, and its status as the home to some of the city’s poorest and most violent neighborhoods. Amid South Central’s shifting demographics and its struggles with poverty, sociologist Pamela J. Prickett takes a closer look, focusing on the members of an African American Muslim community who call South Central home. Believing in South Central examines how believers help each other combat poverty, job scarcity, violence, and racial injustice, providing new insights into the day-to-day lived religion of African American Muslims. The book shows why the mosque has become believers’ key system of social support in a changing neighborhood and how members deepen their spiritual practice not in spite of, but through, conditions of poverty.

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, this book illuminates the growing relationship between Islam and American culture as Muslims find a homeland in America. Rich in ethnographic detail, it is an up-close account of how Islam takes its American shape. The book traces American Muslims' progress from outsiders to natives and from immigrants to citizens. Drawing on the philosophies of Simmel and Heidegger, the book 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. It is both a portrait of American Islam and a groundbreaking study of what it means to feel at home.

This book examines the triangular relationship that during the Middle Ages defined—and continues to define today—the political and cultural interaction among the three Abrahamic faiths. The book looks closely at the debates occasioned by modern Western scholarship on Islam to study the social and political status of medieval Jews and Christians in various Islamic lands from the seventh to the thirteenth centuries. Utilizing primary sources, it balances the rhetoric of literary and legal texts from the Middle Ages with other, newly published medieval sources, describing life as it was actually lived among the three faith communities. The book shows what medieval Muslims meant when they spoke of tolerance, and how that abstract concept played out at different times and places in the real world of Christian and Jewish communities under Islamic rule. Finally, the book looks at what a more informed picture of the relationship among the Abrahamic faiths in the medieval Islamic world might mean for modern scholarship on medieval Islamic civilization and for the contentious global environment of today.

The so-called “Muslim question” of the twenty-first century has come to replace the so-called “Jewish question” of the twentieth, placing ethno-religious minorities at the center of debates over who and what can belong to post-Enlightenment Europe. Mosques in the Metropolis: Incivility, Caste, and Contention in Europe turns this question on its head—focusing instead on the question of Europe through an ethnography of two urban mosques, The East London Mosque and the Şehitlik Mosque, Berlin. Bringing nineteenth-twentieth century Jewish thinkers into conversation with the everyday lives of these mosque communities, the experiences of practicing Muslims speak to enduring questions over the material and sociocultural boundaries of Europe. The postcolonial/postimperial positionality of Muslims in Europe is further theorized as an undercaste, revealing the power of labeling with incivility, which castes Muslims as insider-outsiders, what Georg Simmel termed “strangers,” like Jews before them. Here the mosque and the metropolis emerge as intertwined spaces and places, where collective identities, as well as opportunities to cross superimposed social boundaries are both rooted and made. Mosques in the Metropolis moves between the macro and micro-levels of society, shedding light on Europe’s lasting struggles with its ethno-religious minorities, and yet also a sense of hope found in the metropolis, when Muslims are understood as makers of Europe’s future, present, and past.

This book provides an in-depth analysis of two Islamist parties in Pakistan: the highly influential Jama'at-e-Islami; and the more militant Jama'at-ud-Da'wa, widely blamed for the November 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai, India. Basing findings on thirteen months of ethnographic work with the two parties in Lahore, it proposes that these Islamists are involuntarily facilitating secularization within Muslim societies, even as they vehemently oppose secularism. The book offers an account of the workings of both parties that challenges received ideas about the relationship between the ideology of secularism and the processes of secularization. It particularly illuminates the impact of women on Pakistani Islamism, while arguing that these Islamist groups are inadvertently supporting secularization by forcing a critical engagement with the place of religion in public and private life. The book highlights the role that competition among Islamists and their focus on the state as the center of their activity plays in assisting secularization.