The Cambridge Companion to American Islam

Description

The Cambridge Companion to American Islam offers a scholarly overview of the state of research on American Muslims and American Islam. The book presents the reader with a comprehensive discussion of the debates, challenges and opportunities that American Muslims have faced through centuries of American history. This volume also covers the creative ways in which American Muslims have responded to the myriad serious challenges that they have faced and continue to face in constructing a religious praxis and complex identities that are grounded in both a universal tradition and the particularities of their local contexts. The book introduces the reader to some of the many facets of the lives of American Muslims that can only be understood in their interactions with Islam's entanglement in the American experiment.

Juliane Hammer is Associate Professor of Religious Studies and Kenan Rifai Scholar in Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research focuses on American Muslims, discourses on gender and sexuality, and Sufism. She is author of Palestinians Born in Exile (2005) and American Muslim Women, Religious Authority, and Activism: More than a Prayer (2012). Her work has appeared in The Muslim World, Hawwa, Contemporary Islam, and Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, as well as in several edited volumes. She is currently working on a research project analyzing American Muslim efforts against domestic violence. Omid Safi is Professor of Islamic Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, specializing in contemporary Islamic thought and classical Islam. He is author of Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam (2006) and Memories of Muhammad (2010). He is also editor of two volumes, Progressive Muslims: On Justice, Gender, and Pluralism (2003) and Voices of Islam: Voices of Change (2006). He has a forthcoming book on the famed mystic Rumi and is currently working on a monograph discussing contemporary Islamic debates in Iran.

'The twenty chapters of this superbly edited volume etch American Muslims at the crossroads - between immigrant past and citizen future, between indigenous African-American and global Arab-Asian. Neither secular nor Sufi nor Salafi but contingent, mobile, and engaged, they define in their piebald quest the distinctly American path to emancipatory pluralism.' Bruce Lawrence, Duke University 'This important collection is likely to inform discussions on Islam in America for generations to come. If nothing else, it shows how 'Islamic Studies' as a whole is being redefined as we speak.' Sherman A. Jackson, University of Southern California 'A constructive and timely overview of current research on American Islam.' The Times Literary Supplement