This dissertation analyzes the pluralist religious claims that ethnically and racially diverse Muslim American communities make on the public and political culture of Hamtramck, Michigan. These claims include appeals for recognition, such as in a campaign for municipal approval to issue the call to prayer. They involve bids for resources, such as the use of public funds to establish alternative Muslim-majority public education institutions. They entail struggles for representation, such as political interventions into LGBTQ-rights debates to safeguard a “traditional” moral order in the city. The study also examines how transnational Islamic frameworks for organizing gender and public space influence the civic engagement strategies of South Asian and Arab American Muslim women respectively, in ways that sometimes challenge dominant gendered spatial norms. With this, the study explores women’s leadership in mosques and religious study circles, examining how gender and generation shape female religious authority, and also present opportunities for women to cross racial, class, and ethnic lines within the city. Postulating a charged, dynamic and mutually constitutive connection between the development of religious, racial, and ethnic identities and the production urban space, the study analyzes how individual and collective forms of minority identity find expression in urban public and political projects, and how liberal secular frameworks in turn condition the production of minority religious sensibilities, affiliations, and practices in American cities. In analyzing how these dynamics shape civic life and local politics, the study approaches Hamtramck as a "post-secular city," or a zone of interchange and heterogeneity in which religious, secular, and humanistic frames of reference converge to configure new possibilities for urban change. This work advances interdisciplinary scholarship on how religion impacts the civic engagement of immigrants and minorities; on how gender systems are preserved, challenged, or transformed in migration; and on how diverse communities living in close proximity negotiate conflicting ideas about the common good. / text

American Muslim Philanthropy in flux is concerned with several interlinked ideas. From a discussion of how American Muslim communities have emerged, to the role of identity and philanthropy in creating them, this study is a careful examination of the central role that philanthropy has played in these processes. While mainstream American discourses have had and continue to have a profound impact on how religiously inspired giving occurs, recent scholarship has shown that the ways in which religious giving is changing in America is quite unique. Several discourses impact how we understand charity and philanthropy, including, but not limited to those of religion, economy, social policy etc. I argue, through the papers that comprise this dissertation that philanthropy has a key role in how community is shaped among American Muslims and also that new formulations of philanthropic giving are emerging, that are moving in the direction of more strategic giving, incorporating ideals of a marketized, consumer driven philanthropy. The discourses of giving are impacting practices and I suggest that a close examination of organizational discourses will help us understand how American Muslim identity, civil society and philanthropy are being formulated. / Ph. D.

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

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This dissertation analyzes the development of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), a Muslim-American religious association, from the Iranian Revolution to the inauguration of our nation's first African-American president. This case study of ISNA, the largest Muslim-American organization in North America, examines the organization's institution-building and governance as a way to illustrate Muslim-American civic and religious participation. Using nonprofit research and theory related to issues of diversity, legitimacy, power, and nonprofit governance and management, I challenge misconceptions about ISNA and dispel a number of myths about Muslim Americans and their institutions. In addition, I investigate the experiences of Muslim-Americans as they attempted to translate faith into practice within the framework of the American religious and civic experience. I arrive at three main conclusions. First, because of their incredible diversity, Muslim-Americans are largely cultural pluralists. They draw from each other and our national culture to develop their religious identity and values. Second, a nonprofit association that embraces the values of a liberal democracy by establishing itself as an open organization will include members that may damage the organization's reputation. I argue that ISNA's values should be assessed in light of its programs and actions rather than the views of a small portion of its membership. Reviewing the organization's actions and programs helps us discover a religious association that is centered on American civic and religious values. Third, ISNA's leaders were unable to balance their desire for an open, consensus-based organization with a strong nonprofit management power structure. Effective nonprofit associations need their boards, volunteers and staff to have well-defined roles and authority. ISNA's leaders failed to adopt such a management and governance structure because of their suspicion of an empowered chief executive officer.