Interfaith Solidarity at the Border: Ritual, the Border Mosque/Church, and the _Barzakh_ Moral Imagination

In this presentation, I explore the role of ritual in the interfaith and binational efforts of the “Border Mosque” and “Border Church” in San Diego and Tijuana to express and enact a solidarity with victims of unjust and exploitative immigration systems and practices. The ritual performances by both groups not only served to cultivate solidarities across religious, racial, and national lines; they also functioned as a form of “prefigurative politics” foreshadowing a world free of xenophobia and militarized borders. I unpack the moral imagination cultivated by these performances by drawing on the Qur’anic concept of the _barzakh_ to capture a discursive space which _both_ divides _and_ connects and thus opens up ways of conceiving the self and other that neither presuppose stark opposition nor collapse difference in the name of a liberal modernity. Consequently, a _barzakh_ moral imagination offers promising insights into how we might understand solidarity.