This ethnographic study explores the ways in which religious teachers use intensive Islamic learning environments as sites to reshape understandings of Islam amongst American Muslims of Sunni orientation. The absence of longstanding traditional Islamic educational institutions in the United States poses challenges for Muslims looking to learn about Islam beyond parental teachings and Sunday schools. However, a range of innovative transmedial learning environments, bridging offline and online spaces, have emerged in recent decades. This is the first ethnographically informed study of such spaces which attends to the role of knowledge and the multidimensional nature of authority in the education of American Muslims. Using 10 months of fieldwork in Canada, the United States, and Turkey, I draw on and explore narratives of students and teachers, revealing the bodies of knowledge that teachers deem relevant for the development of an American Muslim self and how these teachers situate their authority within a tradition of knowledge transmission. These narratives demonstrate how students seek out certain types of knowledge to develop their religious identities, and the ways teachers respond by selecting and deploying these and other bodies of knowledge in their teaching. Teachers and their associated educational programmes use various pedagogical techniques and accessories to link students to the imagined international Muslim community. This leads to an understanding of how teachers situate their authority within a tradition of knowledge transmission. These teachers ground narratives of self and place within religious and regional histories to define religious practice that is ethical and culturally relevant, and justify their own authority. This research contributes to debates on the challenges of intra-Muslim dialogue in relation to the umma. It is a ground-breaking empirical study illustrating how, despite the tense geopolitics surrounding Islam and Muslims, American Muslim communities in the 21^st century sustain Islamic tradition by developing an Islamic pedagogy relevant to its historical roots and contemporary possibilities in a digital age.

Collca and Sapçi: A Perspective on Inka Storage via Ethnographic AnalogyIn the 1970’s Murra proposed studying post-Inka descendants of the Inka storage (qullka) system by following up the colonial term sapçi. Both Guaman Poma (1615) and the Huarochirí Quechua manuscript (1608) used this obscure word to denote stores for communal use. Today, the same villages in which the Huarochirí texts were gathered have buildings called Collcas, which contain storage deposits much like what Guaman Poma pictured under the name of sapçi. Ethnographic observation (1994-2001) at the Collca of Tupicocha suggests that modern local storage systems up to the 20th century bore significant likeness to the sapci, and lesser likeness to qullka. Like Inka warehousing, the Collca is associated with khipus. Like the colonial sapçi, however, the Collca architecturally fuses warehousing with the central structure of the nucleated village on the Toledan reducción model. Also like Guaman Poma’s sapçi, it administers intracommunal holdings rather than serving the state sector. The ritual regimen which governs the Collca, and which has allowed frequent changes in its design and functions, may offer an ethnographic analogy relevant to both Inka and colonial eras. / En la década de 1970, Murra propuso investigar los derivados posttawantinsuyu del sistema inka de almacenes (qullka) mediante el estudio del término colonial "sapçi". Tanto en el texto de Guaman Poma (1615) como en el manuscrito quechua de Huarochirí (1608) utilizan este vocablo oscuro para denominar lo almacenado para uso comunal. Hoy, los mismos pueblos donde se recogieron las narrativas de Huarochirí poseen edificios llamados collcas; ellas contienen depósitos parecidos al que Guaman Poma dibujó bajo el nombre de sapçi. Las observaciones etnográficas (1994-2001) en la collca de Tupicocha sugieren que los sistemas modernos de almacenamiento guardaron similitudes con el sapçi, y en menor grado, con la qullka, hasta el siglo XX. Al igual que el almacenamiento inka, la collca se asocia con los khipus. De similar manera que el sapçi colonial, la collca fusiona dentro de su arquitectura el almacenamiento y la estructura central del pueblo nucleado en forma de reducción toledana. También hay parecido con el sapçi de Guaman Poma en cuanto que la collca administra bienes intracomunales en vez de servir al sector estatal. El régimen ritual que gobierna la collca, y que ha permitido frecuentes cambios en su diseño y sus funciones, puede ofrecer una analogía etnográfica relevante tanto a los casos inka como colonial.