Religious literacy and relationship building between religious groups and individuals remain a crucial need in the United States. This need is particularly acute in 'diversity deserts,' such as religiously exclusive college campuses. Colleges must respond to this need and course curriculum can provide an advantageous and effective starting point. The new and emerging field of Interfaith Studies provides useful language, concepts, and methods that can be applied to research and sources within established academic disciplines to create new pedagogical models to better equip students to live well in a religiously diverse America. By demonstrating how educational objectives from the field of Interfaith Studies can be integrated into existing curricular models that utilize ethnographic narratives, an innovative model of interfaith pedagogy can be created. This method, called the shared experience model relies primarily on the work of Oddbjørn Leirvik and Eboo Patel, two leading thinkers in the field of what is being called Interfaith or Interreligious Studies. When applied to four ethnographic narratives of young Muslim Americans constructed from methods rooted in ethnography and narrative inquiry, the shared experience model can result in a reader's development of, appreciative knowledge and narrative imagination, two key capacities from Interfaith theory. Acquisition of appreciative knowledge and narrative imagination through engagement with a narrative fosters empathy and admiration - moving the reader from tolerance to appreciation. Ultimately, it results in a self-reflection that prepares the reader to begin to consider and articulate their own narrative identity.

Abstract The Moorish Science Temple of America: A Study Exploring the Foundations of African American Islamic Thought and Culture By Paul H. L. Easterling One of the reasons religious studies is important to the academic process is because it seeks to understand the intricacies of well known human systems of meaning. Also important is research on those religious systems not well known. Herein lies the purpose of this dissertation, to exam a religious movement within the African American community, which has not received the academic attention it deserves, the Moorish Science Temple of America, Inc. (MSTA). Therefore, the primary thesis for this dissertation: to expand the current study of African American Islam to include the intricacies of the movement and organization of the MSTA through attention to primary materials and secondary literature.

Thesis advisor: Peter Skerry / This thesis is a further study of Peter Skerry’s 2011 article, “the Muslim-American Muddle,” in which he argues that not only non-Muslim Americans are worrying about Muslims’ loyalty issue due to the fear of radical Islamism and terrorism, but also Muslims are confused. My basic argument is that Muslims are still suffering from their muddled loyalty. It is not because they are disloyal but because, in light of Grodzins, their organizations guide them in different directions which are not always en route to national loyalty as non-Muslims expect. Inspired by Morton Grodzins’s theory on social structure and national loyalty in liberal democracies and James Q. Wilson’s insightful study on political organizations, this research has sought to understand the Muslim muddle with an in-depth inquiry and examination on one of the most common and important Islamic organizations—Islamic centers and mosques with an ethnographical method. The evidence of this thesis was collected between April 2016 and December 2017. In fact, I almost visited every mosque in Massachusetts. However, I was not always lucky to build strong connections with many centers for various reasons. In this thesis, I only select those mosques that I had visited more than three times. And I try my best to interview as many leaders as possible. I also manage to keep a geographical and sectarian balance in my sample. I hope to cover all types of mosques in Boston area. My findings are interesting, though of course often confusing and may contradicting with each other but I am duty-bound to report them even if it may had negative impact on the generalization power of my argument. I find that Islamic centers have different goals and offer different incentives to overcome collective actions problems. Both solidarity and political engagement are valued by Islamic centers in general, but individual organizations have different preferences which are results of divergent immigrant experiences. So the organizational aspect of Muslims community is fragmented. However, the increasing external political pressure in the post 9/11 period did not overcome the problem but aggravated it by simply empowering purposive mosques like ISBCC in public sphere. / Thesis (MA) — Boston College, 2018. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Political Science.

This dissertation investigates trends in Muslim women’s religious authority within and beyond the US context by examining the Women’s Mosque of America (WMA), a women-only mosque in Los Angeles. Muslim women across the globe occupy various positions of authority across different religious networks, including as educators at Islamic institutions, board members at mosques, khateebahs (preachers), and prayer leaders. Shifts in Muslim women’s religious authority result from uneven processes of privatization and individualization of religion, resulting in the decentralization of established religious authorities. In the global Islamic context, scholars theorize this process as a fragmentation of authority and its expansion to a wider range of lay actors. This privatization of religion in the US context shapes religious congregations as civic institutions through which religious actors acculturate to American norms, including women’s increased participation in public religious life, and engagements in interfaith dialogue. This dissertation, which analyzes the WMA at the convergence of these two contexts, intervenes in scholarly conversations on the fragmentation of religious authority and the racialized nature of American religious institutions. Through my analysis of WMA sermons, participant observation, and ethnographic interviews, I argue that the WMA produces new forms of Islamic authority based on women’s experiences and individual relationships to scripture, rather than traditional religious training. This study brings together the Religious Studies methodologies of textual analysis and ethnography with feminist epistemological frameworks that privilege experiences as a valid basis for knowledge. My analysis of the WMA speaks to ongoing debates on Islam and gender, American Islam, and the role of the mosque as a center for religious community. This study situates Muslim women’s authority at the intersections of gender, religious space, and national belonging. I demonstrate how WMA preachers assert themselves as meaningful religious actors in the US in and beyond Muslim communities. Through their interpretations of scripture, the WMA represents an American branding of Islam that privileges individuality, civic engagement, and social and gender justice. / 2026-07-31T00:00:00Z

The experiences of white Muslims are often missing from scholarship on Islam in America, which tends to focus on black and immigrant Muslims. Yet conversion narratives of white American Muslims offer insights into how Islam addresses the spiritual needs of a cohort of white men who, though small in number, exert significant influence over Islam in the United States. This dissertation examines the experiences of several white men who converted to Islam during the 1960s and 1970s, in part in response to the social, political, and cultural upheaval of the time. Their conversion narratives touch on a number of common themes: disaffection with traditional American values, attraction to the counterculture ethos, and a longing for spiritual fulfillment outside the Judeo-Christian mainstream. This study focuses on the lives of Hamza Yusuf and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. Biographical chapters explore the family histories of these two men as well as their early lives, journeys toward Islam, conversions, and later lives as Muslims. The dissertation also provides brief biographies of six additional white American male converts. All of these subjects joined a community of converts led by Abdalqadir as-Sufi, a charismatic Scottish Muslim who was a convert himself. For them, as-Sufi embodied counterculture ideals even as he creatively translated Islam into an American idiom. All eventually left as-Sufi’s community yet remained Muslims. These men demonstrate that Islam in the United States has not been indigenized solely by African Americans and immigrants, but also by white Muslims. White converts add important dimensions to the history of Islam in America not present in the scholarly literature concerning other Muslim Americans. First, they bring together whiteness and Islam in a way that directly challenges how white Americans have historically constructed Islam in opposition to whiteness. Second, because the paths to Islam taken by these men were all heavily influenced by and rooted in the counterculture, their lives demonstrate how the Islamic tradition has interacted with and reacted to American cultural realities in ways that address the spiritual concerns not only of African Americans and immigrants from Muslim countries but also of white Americans. / 2027-01-31T00:00:00Z

In over three decades since their 1993 debut, the hip-hop artists known as RZA and Wu-Tang Clan created a world whose significance (for them) transcends the local contingencies of time, place, race, and religion. Whether it is by their creating a world based on filmic myths, by their conquering the world via hip-hop and finding their destiny in a Chinese sacred landscape, by their making themselves symbolic of a perennial worldview, or by their reimagining of their possibilities against the historical terrors of racism, in each case we find an ongoing quest for transcendence that at least for their leader, RZA, demonstrates the meaning of the Wu-Tang Clan. This study sets out to demonstrate this latter point. Framing its discussion in terms of world and worldmaking, I argue that the fundamental thread of significance that ties together the mythical world of the Wu, especially from the perspective of RZA, is a quest for transcendence, a project that is replete with stylistic, spiritual, existential, cross-cultural, and racial implications. While this is no biography of the Wu-Tang Clan, each chapter, starting with Chapter 2, asks how and why this quest takes shape in a sequentially ordered discussion of Wu’s worldmaking career. In arguing my point, I mainly take a phenomenological approach to RZA and the Wu-Tang Clan’s cultural productions, describing and interpreting various forms of Wu-associated media (songs, compact discs, album concepts and graphic designs, films, books, and more) from 1993 to the early 2020s. Between the practices of cultural criticism and interpretation, the study also draws from and contributes to Afro-Asian studies and Religious Studies. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This is a study of the Wu-Tang Clan, a hip-hop group from Staten Island, New York. It argues that for over two decades since their 1993 debut, the Wu-Tang Clan has come to produce not only a long resume of music and other media but a mythic world. Furthermore, for the purpose of maintaining this world across time, Wu’s leader, RZA (pronounced “Rizah’), has aimed to make the Wu-Tang Clan symbolic of a universal worldview that transcends their local culture, history, place of origin, religion, and race.

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