Contemporary Islam

by Martin Varisco, Daniel

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-010-0115-x
Online Date: 2/13/2010
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by Gilliat-Ray, Sophie

This paper describes how a simple transcription error ‘created’ what appeared to be the earliest recorded mosque in Britain. Research in 2008/9 for a project about the history of Muslim settlement in Cardiff included a check of mosque registration data that revealed the origin of the factual inaccuracy. However, the paper does not simply concern itself with debunking the myth that has evolved concerning a mosque, said to have been registered in the Cathays district of Cardiff in 1860 (which in fact was not registered until 1991). Rather, it seeks to explore its contemporary resonances. The broadcast of the ‘first mosque in the UK’ story and its multiple repetition and embellishment has satisfied a growing need to articulate ideas about the longevity and legitimacy of Muslim settlement. As such it has created an important symbolic ‘space’ for framing contemporary Muslim experience in Britain. The paper contemplates the independent life that this myth has taken on, and the way in which its promotion has been useful for politicians, academics, tourism promoters, and indeed British Muslims themselves. However, there is an important contrast between the promotion of a story about a supposed historic mosque, and the lived reality of actual Muslim community building. The latter has much more substance—and ultimately more relevance—than the ascription of dates to buildings. It is the story of community struggle and achievement that the current Cardiff research is uncovering, and this paper argues that the debunking of the myth has provided an opportunity (and a responsibility) to disseminate awareness of the historic settlement of Muslims in the city.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-010-0116-9
Online Date: 2/9/2010
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by Jiwa, Munir

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork I conducted with Muslim visual artists in New York City. It assumes that art is a particular medium or media form that not only gives us insight into the processes of creative expression, but helps us understand the relationship between global media events and their localized practices. For Muslim visual artists, and Muslims in general, “9/11” has become a significant marker of time in thinking about issues of identity, belonging and representation. Even in the art worlds, the larger tropes of Islam/Muslims—terrorism, violence, veiling, patriarchy, the Middle East—become the normative frames and images within and against which Muslim artists do their work. I outline the ways Muslim artists as cultural producers are not only contesting art world boundaries in terms of new and emerging forms of identification, but also the various sites where they are being forged. Muslim artists explore new ways of thinking about being Muslim, not necessarily as a theological or aesthetic unity, but as a minority identification in the West/America. I focus on the work of two artists, Nigerian-born Fatimah Tuggar and Pakistani-born Shahzia Sikander.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0102-2
Online Date: 12/10/2009
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by Hussain, Amir

This article describes and analyzes the portrayal of Muslims on several North American television shows. Greatest detail is given to the two seasons of Sleeper Cell, the first show on American television created to deal with Muslim lives post 9/11. I deal briefly with Muslim characters on Oz for a look at portrayals of Muslim life pre 9/11. I also mention Muslim characters in Lost and 24 as well as some films to add further insights to my argument. These television dramas are compared with two comedies, Aliens in America as well as Little Mosque on the Prairie, the first Canadian television show to examine Muslim lives. The conclusion is that in dramas, Muslims are not recognized on American television as citizens of their own country, but instead are portrayed as dangerous immigrants with a religion that is both alien and wicked. Moreover, the religion as it is lived out on the television drama is one of violence—there seems to be no other substantive practice that embodies Islamic faith. The case is very different with regard to the television comedy.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0109-8
Online Date: 12/10/2009
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by Aydin, Cemil; Hammer, Juliane

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0098-7
Online Date: 12/10/2009
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by Angeles, Vivienne SM.

Colonial constructions of the Muslim image have affected Muslim–Christian relations in the Philippines for centuries. Spanish colonizers used the term “Moro” as a derogatory term for Muslims and portrayed them in negative terms mainly because of their resistance to Spanish colonial rule and Christianity. The succeeding American administrators perpetuated the negative Muslim image through their description of Muslims in their reports and in cartoons published in the American print media. Both colonizers viewed Filipinos primarily in terms of their religious identification, and through their campaigns against the Moros, have influenced the thinking and attitudes of Christian Filipinos towards Muslim Filipinos. In recent times, ethnic Filipino Muslims have appropriated the term Moro to symbolize instead their determination to chart their destiny as a nation and their rich political and cultural heritage. This recasting of the Moro image is reflected in contemporary Muslim writings in both print and electronic media. This paper argues that the remaking of the Moro image challenges colonial misrepresentations, constitutes a redefinition of ethnic Muslim identity, and appeals to the sense of unity of Muslims.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0100-4
Online Date: 12/5/2009
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by Spielhaus, Riem

This article focuses on the ways in which Muslims actively participate in media debates about Islam and Muslims in Germany, and how they challenge or reinforce representations of themselves. It questions the narrative of powerlessness versus dominant actors in media and politics. Even though they were already perceived as part of a Muslim community, several prominent individuals in the German cultural and political sphere took an explicit position as Muslims—some insisting on their distance to religion. This paper aims at describing the various reasons and reflections accompanying this decision and argues that media images of Muslims steered individuals, who are not members of Islamic organizations let alone representatives of them, to become active or change their self-representation and act as Muslims. By demanding recognition as active members of German society, prominent Muslim individuals are creating new images of Muslims beyond an imaginary that is reducing them to their (alleged) religiosity and positioning them outside German national identity.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0099-6
Online Date: 12/3/2009
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by Sands, Kristin Zahra

The Internet provides a space and medium within which Muslims can shape the relationship between their religious identity and their social and political affiliations. The subjectivities of Muslims who use online space are in turn shaped by the parameters and possibilities of the Internet’s architecture and language. The multiple linkages of online spaces and the particular vernacular spoken in these spaces, a mix of written text, imagery and sound, privilege new kinds of actors and new forms of expressive and rhetorical activities. In this new space and medium, the question of imagining (or rejecting) a global Muslim identity demonstrates the subtle interplay involved in the formation of religious and media subjectivities. Developing a critical understanding of multimodal representation and communication is an essential component in studying Muslim engagement with the Internet.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0105-z
Online Date: 12/3/2009
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by Hammer, Juliane

On March 18, 2005, a group of American Muslim women and men participated in a Friday prayer led by Dr. Amina Wadud, who also gave the Friday sermon. Widely publicized in various media and debated among Muslims around the world, this event was hailed as a turning point in Muslim gender discourses by the organizers and many media representatives. This article describes the prayer as a performance and argues that the organizers, participants, and media representatives all participated in the production of meaning embodied by the prayer. According to the organizers, the achievement of Qur’anic gender justice required changes in Muslim communities, and various forms of media were of vital importance for the discussion and realization of this goal. As such, the prayer was an act of symbolic significance, which despite its discursive, spatial, and temporal limitations, became much more than an act of Islamic worship.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0103-1
Online Date: 11/21/2009
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by Marcotte, Roxanne D.

This paper examines the e-religious discourse that Australian Muslims produce on the internet. The study of two online discussions on MuslimVillage forums—one of Australia’s largest online Muslim communities—about polygamy and homosexuality will illustrate how online interaction within virtual Islamic environments provides both greater and lesser fluidity to e-Islamic normative discourses associated with gender and sexuality. Muslim forums provide opportunities for members to display a variety of views and opinions: on the one hand, they allow Muslims to post views that may challenge, contest, or even transgress Islamic gender and sexuality norms, while equally allowing members, on the other hand, to reaffirm more authoritative normative Islamic views. The various voices that inhabit Australia’s Islamicyberspace’s new Muslim social and networked environments thus need to negotiate virtual normative representations.

DOI: 10.1007/s11562-009-0104-0
Online Date: 11/21/2009
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