Making Muslim Space in North America and Europe

Barbara Daly Metcalf

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN:
  9780520204041
• eBook ISBN:
  9780520917439
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Focusing on the private and public use of space, this volume explores the religious life of the new Muslim communities in North America and Europe. Unlike most studies of immigrant groups, these essays concentrate on cultural practices and expressions of everyday life rather than on the political issues that dominate today's headlines. The authors emphasize the cultural strength and creativity of communities that draw upon Islamic symbols and practices to define "Muslim space" against the background of a non-Muslim environment. The range of perspectives is broad, encompassing middle-class professionals, mosque congregations, factory workers in France and the north of England, itinerant African traders, and prison inmates in New York. The truism that "Islam is a religion of the word" takes on concrete meaning as these disparate communities find ways to elaborate word-centered ritual and to have the visual and aural presence of sacred words in the spaces they inhabit. The volume includes 46 black-and-white photographs that illustrate Muslim populations in Edmonton, Philadelphia, the Green Haven Correction Facility, Manhattan, Marseilles, Berlin, and London, among other places. The focus on space directs attention to the new kinds of boundaries and consciousness that exist not only for these Muslim populations, but for people from all backgrounds in today's ever more integrated world.

Table of contents

• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• TOWARD ISLAMIC ENGLISH? A Note on Transliteration
• Introduction: Sacred Words, Sanctioned Practice, New Communities
• PART ONE. Making a Space for Everyday Ritual and Practice
• 1. Muslim Space and the Practice of Architecture: A Personal Odyssey
• 2. Transcending Space: Recitation and Community among South Asian Muslims in Canada
• 3. "This Is a Muslim Home": Signs of Difference in the African-American Row House
• 4. "Refuge" and "Prison": Islam, Ethnicity, and the Adaptation of Space in Workers' Housing in France
• 5. Making Room versus Creating Space: The Construction of Spatial Categories by Itinerant Mouride Traders
• 6. New Medinas: The Tablighi Jama'at in America and Europe
• PART TWO. Claiming Space in the Larger Community
• 7. Island in a Sea of Ignorance: Dimensions of the Prison Mosque
• 8. A Place of Their Own: Contesting Spaces and Defining Places in Berlin's Migrant Community
• 9. Stamping the Earth with the Name of Allah: Zikr and the Sacralizing of Space among British Muslims
• 10. Karbala as Sacred Space among North American Shi'a: "Every Day Is Ashura, Everywhere Is Karbala"
• 11 . The Muslim World Day Parade and "Storefront" Mosques of New York City
• 12. Nationalism, Community, and the Islamization of Space in London
• 13. Engendering Muslim Identities: Deterritorialization and the Ethnicization Process in France
• NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
• INDEX