Without Forgetting the Imam

Lebanese Shi'ism in an American Community

Linda S. Walbridge

• Publisher: Wayne State University Press
• Year: 1996
• Print ISBN: 9780814326756
• eBook ISBN: 9780814338346
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Without Forgetting the Imam is an ethnographic study of the religious life of the Lebanese Shi'ites of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Muslim community outside of the Middle East. Based on four years of fieldwork, this book explores how the Lebanese who have emigrated, most in the past three decades, to the United States, have adapted to their new surroundings. Anthropologist Linda Walbridge delves into the ways in which politics and religion have converged as the Lebanese Shi'i community has remade its identity and accommodated itself to a new environment. She captures a broad picture of religious life within the realm of community living and within the mosques which have proliferated in Dearborn. Walbridge explains how Shi'ites, affected in one way or another by Islamic revivalism, have brought different notions of how their religion should be expressed and carried out in America.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: On Entering Dearborn
• Chapter 1: The Shadow of the Past
• Chapter 2: The Life of the Mosques
• Chapter 3: Islam in the Town
• Chapter 4: Gathering Strength: The Emergence of American Shi‘ism
• Afterword
• Notes
• Glossary
• Selected Bibliography
• Index