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

This thesis is an analytical exploration of the influence of medieval theology on contemporary scholastic traditionalist polemics within Sunni Islam. Intra-Sunni sectarian polemics as an emerging area of study is relatively untouched as opposed to sectarian violence. A detailed mapping of the theological terrain from the genesis of Sunni ‘orthodoxy’ and the perennial tensions within the classical theological tradition and how they have manifested parochially into the contemporary scholastic traditionalist trends of the Barelwi, Deobandi, Ahl-i-Ḥadīth and Wahhābī within the backdrop of the Sufi-Salafi contestation of Sunni authenticity is timely. Concern regarding growing extremism prompted Muslim Ulama, academics and political leaders to create unity initiatives such as the Amman Message and the Sunni Pledge in dealing with this problem and also delineating ‘orthodoxy’. The theological basis for these neo-credos can be explained as doctrinal ‘minimalism’. Minimalism is a growing social construction of scholastic traditionalists through which the warring factions are attempting to salvage the historical continuity with ‘orthodoxy’ and placate Sunni infighting. The thesis aims to examine the theological veracity of the minimalism project and explore its doctrinal, methodological and ethical facets. Polemicism and excommunication is the current state of affairs within Sunni theological discourse. Minimalism is deemed as the antidote to this problem.