Offering readers an engaging, accessible, and balanced account of the contributions of American Muslims to the contemporary United States, this important book serves to clarify misrepresentations and misunderstandings regarding Muslim Americans and Islam. Unfortunately, American mass media representations of Muslims--whether in news or entertainment--are typically negative and one-dimensional. As a result, Muslims are frequently viewed negatively by those with minimal knowledge of Islam in America. This accessible two-volume work will help readers to construct an accurate framework for understanding the presence and depictions of Muslims in American society. These volumes discuss a uniquely broad array of key topics in American popular culture, including jihad and jihadis; the hejab, veil, and burka; Islamophobia; Oriental despots; Arabs; Muslims in the media; and mosque burnings. Muslims and American Popular Culture offers more than 40 chapters that serve to debunk the overwhelmingly negative associations of Islam in American popular culture and illustrate the tremendous contributions of Muslims to the United States across an extended historical period. Identifies the contributions of Muslims to American fiction, poetry, music, food, architecture, and other cultural forms to document the breadth of their contributions Highlights the ways in which Muslims have been, and continue to be, routinely depicted negatively in American literature, film, and religious discourse, and documents the potential effects that such depictions can have on individual Muslims and their communities Offers readers useful tools that allow them to apply a critical eye to the representations of Muslims in the news

Offering readers an engaging, accessible, and balanced account of the contributions of American Muslims to the contemporary United States, this important book serves to clarify misrepresentations and misunderstandings regarding Muslim Americans and Islam. Unfortunately, American mass media representations of Muslims—whether in news or entertainment—are typically negative and one-dimensional. As a result, Muslims are frequently viewed negatively by those with minimal knowledge of Islam in America. This accessible two-volume work will help readers to construct an accurate framework for understanding the presence and depictions of Muslims in American society. These volumes discuss a uniquely broad array of key topics in American popular culture, including jihad and jihadis; the hejab, veil, and burka; Islamophobia; Oriental despots; Arabs; Muslims in the media; and mosque burnings. Muslims and American Popular Culture offers more than 40 chapters that serve to debunk the overwhelmingly negative associations of Islam in American popular culture and illustrate the tremendous contributions of Muslims to the United States across an extended historical period.

Popular culture serves as a fresh and revealing window on contemporary developments in the Muslim world because it is a site where many important and controversial issues are explored and debated. Aesthetic expression has become intertwined with politics and religion due to the uprisings of the “Arab Spring,” while, at the same time, Islamist authorities are showing increasingly accommodating and populist attitudes toward popular culture. Not simply a “westernizing” or “secularizing” force, as some have asserted, popular culture now plays a growing role in defining what it means to be Muslim. With well-structured chapters that explain key concepts clearly, Islam and Popular Culture addresses new trends and developments that merge popular arts and Islam. Its eighteen case studies by eminent scholars cover a wide range of topics, such as lifestyle, dress, revolutionary street theater, graffiti, popular music, poetry, television drama, visual culture, and dance throughout the Muslim world from Indonesia, Africa, and the Middle East to Europe. The first comprehensive overview of this important subject, Islam and Popular Culture offers essential new ways of understanding the diverse religious discourses and pious ethics expressed in popular art productions, the cultural politics of states and movements, and the global flows of popular culture in the Muslim world.

The connection between popular culture and religion is an enduring part of American life. With seventy-five percent new content, the third edition of this multifaceted and popular collection has been revised and updated throughout to provide greater religious diversity in its topics and address critical developments in the study of religion and popular culture. Ideal for classroom use, this expanded volume gives increased attention to the implications of digital culture and the increasingly interactive quality of popular culture provides a framework to help students understand and appreciate the work in diverse fields, methods, and perspectives contains an updated introduction, discussion questions, and other instructional tools

The essays in Muslim American Hyphenations: Cultural Production and Hybridity in the Twenty-first Century contest the lack of nuance in the public debates about American Islam and reclaim a self-determined identity by twenty-first century Muslim American writers, artists, and performers. Muslim American Hyphenations covers a wide spectrum of cultural representation based upon a shared religion that encompasses multiethnic and polylinguistic communities in the American landscape, challenging both the sacred-secular binary and the confines of multiculturalism. The contributors to this volume explore the codes of belonging in different American spheres, from transnational and local negotiations of immigrant and domestic Muslim Americans with nation, race, class, and gender, to the performance of faith in the creative manifestations of these identities. In their analyses, these scholars propose that Muslim American cultural productions provide an alternative space of dissensus and the utopian potentiality of connections with other minoritarian communities.

The only multicultural survey of established and "new" American religions, this exhaustive three-volume encyclopedia explores the fascinating interactions between religion and ethnicity, gender, regionalism, and popular culture. Religion and American Cultures offers a unique and engrossing journey across our country's religious landscape, past and present. A new spirit of religious diversity and multiculturalism stands alongside traditional institutions in this exhaustive three-volume set. The first volume explores America's multicultural communities and their religious practices--not only Protestantism, Catholicism, and Judaism, but also Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. Spirituality in Latino, African American, Native American, and Asian American communities is covered as well. The second volume focuses on cultural aspects of religions, with topics including film, Generation X, public sacred spaces, sexuality, new religious expressions, and much more. Organized alphabetically, longer general interest anchor essays in the first two volumes are followed by several shorter, more specialized supplementary essays. The third volume is devoted to complementary primary source documents. Written by more than 120 of America's most prestigious religious scholars, these insightful and intriguing entries address contemporary spiritual practice and culture with a historical perspective. - More than 120 essays covering virtually every religion in America - An expert panel of editorial board members and contributors on every major religion in the United States - Richly illustrated images depicting a wide range of religious figures and activities, as well as significant religious sites in the United States - An entire volume of primary source documents illustrating the religious diversity in American culture, including Cecil B. DeMille's essay "The Screen as Religious Teacher" as well as more conventional materials on Christian Science, the New Age, and Buddhism