Surveying Muslims & Surveys About Muslims

Last week, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public life published the results of a survey titled “The World’s Muslims,” exploring the views of 38,000 Muslims from 39 countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa who were interviewed, in person, in …

Battlefield Mosque: Patriotism, Space and Faith in American Mosques

Last week, in the first part of our series on Muslim-American religious spaces, we briefly explored the history and function of mosques. As the piece discussed, mosques were not just places of ritual worship but functional worship; they were the …

The Mosque: History, Representation and Role

The sacred architecture of Islam par excellence is the mosque which is itself but the ‘recreation’ and ‘recapitulation’ of the harmony, order, and peace of nature which God chose as the Muslims enduring house of worship. In praying in a …

Representing Women in the Arab Revolutions And Beyond

Two years ago, Mohammad Bouazizi’s self-immolation set an inferno across parts of the Middle East and North Africa, changing the course of the region’s assumed history. We know what happened and we know what has been happening since. Egypt, Tunisia…

Fajr Ruminations on Ramadan in the Middle of Nowhere

I’m in a weird place this Ramadan. Not just spiritually but geographically as well. Almost exactly a year ago I finished my MA thesis and moved back home: home being wherever so my parents were living, regardless of roots and …

Re-Engaging with the Other “Liberation Theology”

Complete with your standard extreme close-up of a hijab-clad woman confusingly looking at the voyeuristic lens before her, the Guardian’s “Comment is Free” section recently featured a piece by writer Nadiya Takolia, entitled: “The Hijab has Liberated Me From …

Foursquaring the Hajj

Recent images of a newly rebranded cosmopolitan Mecca show Islam’s holiest site lit by skyscrapers towering over the Ka’aba, the shrine built by the Patriach Abraham and his son Ishmael. The Ka’aba is a modest but overpowering, cubed brick building, …

Selective Shivers in the Islamist Winter

The election of the so-called ‘moderate Islamist’ party, Ennahda, to the head seat of the government, has put Tunisia at the center of the discussion on the rise of Islamist post-Arab Spring. Media coverage has focused primarily on the …

No Space in the American Narrative