This thesis focuses on how Muslim Millennials in Canada and the United States navigate religious identities and research religious matters online. Their attendance and participation at the Reviving the Islamic Spirit (RIS) convention - an annual conference in Toronto - illustrates their desire to meet in person even though they also engage in religious learning and activities online. Through qualitative interviews, I discover that these young Muslims find conducting Islamic research online to be convenient, however, their community needs are not fulfilled in the online Islamic world. Reviving the Islamic Spirit fulfills this need for in-person engagement by creating a suitable environment allowing Muslims to interact with religious authority figures from online spaces. Reviving the Islamic Spirit also allows Muslims to feel a sense of belonging and community in an offline space. All the participants in this study turned to the online Islamic world in search of religious authority. For many Muslim communities, religious authority plays a large role in their everyday lives. Unlike other Muslim minority communities, Sunni Muslims cannot agree on central religious authority. They do not have a central authority figure who they can rely on for inquiring about religious matters. These needs of religious authority and community bring together Muslims at Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention. I argue in this thesis that Reviving the Islamic Spirit creates a "convergent space." In this space, characteristics are highlighted from the online and offline worlds without erasing any of the original elements. Reviving the Islamic Spirit provides space that brings the online religious world into the present offline world, and this in turn influences religious behaviours and lived religious experiences. The research questions guiding this study were: 1) What attracts young Muslims to RIS? 2) Does participation at RIS influence online and offline religious behaviours? 3) How are digital elements of online religion (such as virtual religious practices and religious forum discussions) brought into offline spaces like RIS? and 4) What happens when the two physical and virtual religious spaces come together such as at the intersection at RIS? Participants were recruited from Reviving the Islamic Spirit where I was able to speak with attendees and set up a booth in the marketplace portion where people could approach me with interest about this study. The methodology included conducting 50 in-depth interviews and participant observation of attendees at RIS. The results indicate that Muslim Millennials were fascinated by "celebrity imams" such as Yasir Qadhi, Mufti Menk, Omar Suleiman, and Sohaib Webb. The results also verify that a 'convergence space' exists at Reviving the Islamic Spirit convention.

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

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Univ., Dipl.-Arb.--Graz, 2004. / Literaturverz. S. 295 - 317.

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In the development of Islam in India in the nineteenth century, the impact of the interaction between modernist Muslims and Christian administrators and missionaries can be seen in the writings of three Evangelical Christians on the role of the H&dotbelow;adith and the responses of Indian Muslims. The writings of Sir William Muir, an administrator in the Indian Civil Service, were characterized by European Orientalist methods of textual criticism coupled with the Evangelicals' rejection of Muh&dotbelow;ammad. In his response, Sir Sayyid Ah&dotbelow;mad Khan, an influential Muslim modernist, supported the traditional perception of the H&dotbelow;adith but also initiated a new critical approach. The writings of Thomas P. Hughes and Edward Sell, missionaries with the Church Missionary Society, tended to portray Islam as bound by this body of traditions, with the rejoinders of Sayyid Amir 'Ali and Chiragh 'Ali presenting an increasing rejection of the religious authority of the H&dotbelow;adith and an impassioned defense of Islam.

Diss. av båda författarna Stockholm : Stockholms universitet, 2007. / Includes bibliographical references.

Zugl.: Duisburg, Essen, Universiẗat, Diss., 2008.

Thesis (doctoral)--Universität Kiel, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 325-351) and index.