Drawing on immersive fieldwork in the United States, Canada, and Turkey, this ethnographic exploration illuminates the transformative experiences of emerging adult Muslims on their quest for religious knowledge. This book unravels the significance of four residential learning settings, revealing their role as catalysts for reshaping Islamic tradition. Delving into the interplay between technology’s pervasive influence and the decentralized nature of Islamic interpretation, Zainab Kabba unveils a vibrant tapestry of knowledge producers vying to shape religious understanding and practice among Western Muslims. At the heart of this narrative lies the delicate balance between teachers and students, continuously communicating and recalibrating components that bring religious authority to life. Kabba dissects this relationship, highlighting the emergence of a complex landscape that she terms the ‘Muslim Education Industrial Complex’, where religious knowledge has become a commodity. This study offers profound insights into the challenges of intra-Muslim dialogue and the adaptive resilience of American Sunni-Muslim communities. Amidst a digital age and the complexities of global geopolitics surrounding Islam, it showcases how these communities reinterpret classical Islamic narratives, navigating tradition to steer their path forward. This book invites readers to ponder the evolution of Islamic learning, the dynamics of authority, and the enduring quest for knowledge amidst the currents of a rapidly changing world.

"This ethnographic study focuses on emerging adult Muslims engaged in religious learning in Western environments. It draws on fieldwork in the United States, Canada, and Turkey to explore the production of knowledge and the formation of religious identity. The book documents and analyzes the ways in which four intensive pedagogical settings, and the student-teacher encounters within them, act as vehicles to reconceptualize Islamic tradition and provide Muslims with understandings of their past that inform choices for their futures. It considers the pervasiveness of technology and the decentralized nature of juridical interpretation in Islam that fosters competition amongst a myriad of knowledge producers, contouring religious understandings and practice for Muslims in contexts such as America. The author argues for shifting the vertical nature of religious authority by parsing the components between teachers and students that are continuously communicated and calibrated to enable authority to materialize. In addition to contributing to debates on the challenges of intra-Muslim dialogue in relation to the umma, this volume illustrates how American Sunni-Muslim communities readapt classical narratives of Islamic tradition in a digital age despite the tense geopolitics currently surrounding Islam"--

Walking Qur'an: Islamic Education, Embodied Knowledge, and History in West Africa

How do Muslims in Europe acquire discursive and practical knowledge of Islam? How are conceptions of Islamic beliefs, values and practices transmitted and how do they change? Who are the authorities on these issues that Muslims listen to? How do new Muslim discourses emerge in response to the European context? This book addresses the broader question of how Islamic knowledge (defined as what Muslims hold to be correct Islamic beliefs and practices) is being produced and reproduced in West European contexts by looking at specific settings, institutions and religious authorities. Chapters examine in depth four key areas relating to the production and reproduction of Islamic knowledge: authoritative answers in response to explicit questions in the form of fatwas. the mosque and mosque association as the setting of much formal and informal transmission of Islamic knowledge. the role of Muslim intellectuals in articulating alternative Muslim discourses. higher Islamic education in Europe and the training of imams and other religious functionaries. Featuring contributions from leading sociologists and anthropologists, the book presents the findings of empirical research in these issues from a range of European countries such as France, Italy, the Netherlands and Great Britain. As such it has a broad appeal, and will be of great interest to students and scholars of Islamic studies, anthropology, sociology and religion.

Since the Taliban seized Kabul in 1996, the public has grappled with the relationship between Islamic education and radical Islam. Media reports tend to paint madrasas--religious schools dedicated to Islamic learning--as medieval institutions opposed to all that is Western and as breeding grounds for terrorists. Others have claimed that without reforms, Islam and the West are doomed to a clash of civilizations. Robert Hefner and Muhammad Qasim Zaman bring together eleven internationally renowned scholars to examine the varieties of modern Muslim education and their implications for national and global politics. The contributors provide new insights into Muslim culture and politics in countries as different as Morocco, Egypt, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. They demonstrate that Islamic education is neither timelessly traditional nor medieval, but rather complex, evolving, and diverse in its institutions and practices. They reveal that a struggle for hearts and minds in Muslim lands started long before the Western media discovered madrasas, and that Islamic schools remain on its front line. Schooling Islam is the most comprehensive work available in any language on madrasas and Islamic education.

Controlling Knowledge examines the history of West African Muslim society in the Republic of Mali, formerly the Soudan Franais, in the twentieth century. Focusing on the transformation of Muslim institutions especially modernized Muslim schools (mdersas) and voluntary organizations over the the past hundred years, Louis Brenner uncovers the social and political processes that have produced new forms, definitionsand expressions of Islam that are patently different from those that prevailed a century earlier.

Senior scholars of Islamic studies and the anthropology of Islam gather in this volume to pay tribute to one of the giants of the field, Dale F. Eickelman.