Across the Worlds of Islam

“It’s like we don’t matter,” said José, a Puerto Rican Muslim sitting across from me at an Olive Garden near San Juan. “Most probably don’t even know we are here, let alone care what perspectives we have,” he continued, “what they don’t know is that we are the next stage in the ummah’s evolution.”

My conversation with José continues to shape the way I approach Islam and Muslim communities, in Puerto Rico and elsewhere. From a shrine outside Salalah, Oman to one in the upper reaches of the Scottish highlands, a shelter at the U.S./Mexico border to a massive madrasah (place of study) in Medan, Indonesia, the sunbaked streets outside Havana, Cuba’s only mosque to the frozen parking lot of one of Edmonton, Canada’s largest, my writing and research have taken me to what might be called global Islam’s “margins.” The vast diversity of these encounters has convinced me there remains a pertinent need to further globalize the study of global Islam and place marginalized geographies, traditions and “perspectives” like José’s at the center of the  study of Islam.

This is what drew me to Across the Worlds of Islam: Muslim Identities, Beliefs, and Practices from Asia to America, edited by Edward E. Curtis IV. Whether explaining the emergence of Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam against the backdrop of “the struggle for Black dignity, hope, and liberation” (as Curtis does in chapter 5, 138) or examining what it means for a non-Muslim to teach about Islam (as Kathryn D. Blanchard does in chapter 8), each chapter is animated by one central, organizing question: “What happens if we put Muslims who are socially, culturally, theologically, and politically marginalized at the center of our understanding of Islam and Muslim communities?” (1).

In what amounts to a Festschrift of sorts, honoring the work and contributions of religion scholar Vernon J. Schubel, the contributors—several of them Schubel’s former students—place marginalized Muslims at the forefront of their analysis in order to decenter texts, traditions, and geographies that still tend to predominate in Islamic studies. By letting each of these communities, conversations, and customs speak for themselves, they not only succeed in providing a broader vision for the study of Islam, but also show so-called centers and peripheries to be little more than illusory constructs (260-264).

For example, in the first chapter, Farah Bakaari challenges Muslims and those who study them to consider how popular images and discourses about and around Muslims make “it virtually impossible—or, at least, undesirable—for individual Muslims, especially those residing in the West, to stake a claim or champion the margins of Islam” (17). Bakaari does not argue that Islam has no margins, but contends that Muslims may not want to assert marginality because of how it “can be appropriated and deployed for anti-Muslim purposes” (27). Instead, she suggests that the theme of marginalization might be used to reflect on, and reform, the ways in which Muslims are disciplined—in their own communities, in the media, and in scholarly discourse (40).

In the chapter that follows, Michael Muhammad Knight encourages us to “rethink the possibilities for Islamic studies” (45) by exploring the “multiplicity of local traditions” that exist within the world of Islam and which do not necessarily have “an organic and self-evident center of gravity.” (47) Knight illustrates this multiplicity by interrogating what at first might appear to be one of Islam’s incontestable, orthodox centers: the hadith corpus (records of something the Prophet Muhammad said, did, or tacitly approved of). Examining how hadith are made, their contents, and who makes up their chains of authority and transmission (isnad), Knight cleverly reveals the corpus’ “radical diversity” (64) and its layers of subjectivity, which “require that we think about the generations of reporters who mediate [Muhammad’s] presence” (58).

In chapter 6, Holly Donahue Singh explores the everyday, embodied marginalization (161ff) of Muslim women in India. Focusing on the theme of reproduction, Singh not only foregrounds stories too often treated as peripheral, but illustrates how their narratives are not as marginal as they at first appear. Moreover, Singh’s careful attention to the intimate details of these women’s daily lives underscores the need for ethnographic researchers to go into fieldwork with an ethic of care that transcends “divisions of race, class, caste, gender, religion, ability, sexuality and other human hierarchies” (165). This is not only a methodological outworking of the volume’s stated thesis—to center the marginalized—but a moral summons for researchers to create scholarly work and a world that more fully incorporates perspectives from the vast and rich tapestry of human experience (182).

Other chapters introduce readers to the varied traditions of Muslim tattooing (Max Johnson Dugan, chapter 3), the teaching poetics of Alevi Muslim ashiks (teachers, poets or bards, see Tess M. Waggoner, chapter 4), and the political machinations of 16th-century Central Asia (Henry D. Brill, chapter 7). Together with the contributions above, they accomplish what the volume sets out to do, providing “a much more inclusive and accurate version of the religion and its many interrelated communities” (1) by “centering those who occupy the geographic, pedagogical, social, political, queered, embodied, reproductive, and doctrinal margins of the world of Islam” (27). This, in turn, as Schubel puts it in the conclusion, challenges us to “cease seeing them on the margins if we hope to know them.” (278)

There remain myriad stories to tell as well as perspectives, practices, and people to center. No single volume can span all geographies or tell every story. In other words, much work must still be done to de-center the narratives that dominate both popular apperceptions of, and pedagogical approaches to, what it means to be Muslim.

On that note, I would say that despite the noble intention to reach a more general audience, the volume’s contents still lean in a specialist, scholarly direction. Even so, media producers, teachers, and politicians (to name a few) might take note of the volume’s suggested modus of inclusion, so that additional publics might better appreciate and apperceive the vast diversity that constitutes Muslim lives, past and present.  

Ken Chitwood is a senior research fellow at the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative.

Ken Chitwood

Date Of Review:

January 25, 2024