Graduate Student Session

*Anā majdhūb, māshī majnūn!* “I am *majdhūb*—not mad!” Attributed to the paradigmatic Moroccan mad saint, ‘Abd ar-Rahman al-Majdhūb (d. 1568), this phrase is enshrined in a plaque hanging behind his tomb in the shrine of the ‘Alawite Sultan Mulāy Ismā’īl (d. 1727). Yet, it also circulates, in Sufi treatises, hagiographic narratives, and casual cafe conversations. It is reiterated to explain a male saint donning women’s clothes and a bearded female saint critiquing the reigning sultan. In each iteration, “*anā majdhūb, māshī majnūn*” invokes then dismisses the specter of madness to justify the deviance of these ecstatic saints. In my dissertation, I ask: What do hagiographic representations and oral narratives of the *majdhūb* reveal about the dynamic of madness, gender, and sainthood? I argue that articulations of the *majdhūb* as deviant illuminate the ways in which anxieties over unreason, gender, and excess shaped the discursive formation of Maghribi Sufism.

My dissertation is an ethnographic study of multiethnic U.S. Muslim civic organizations in the city of Detroit and how such organizations encourage Muslims to cross endemic racial boundaries on the basis of Islamic ethics. Organizations like DREAM of Detroit (“Detroit Revival Engaging American Muslims”) stimulate faith-based commitment to civic action and expose participants to diverse ways of being Muslim, prioritizing just works over specific doctrinal or ritual adherences. Drawing on interviews with leaders and participants as well as participant-observation at organizational events, I show how Muslim civic organizations are not only expressions of Islamic values, but more profoundly, sites of religious cultivation in which what it means to be a U.S. Muslim is taught, negotiated, and debated. I encourage scholars of contemporary Islam to expand normative notions of “Islamic space” and ask how the proliferating Muslim non-profit sector is shaping constructions of Islamic authority in the contemporary United States.

My dissertation investigates how a concept of passionate, mad love—‘ishq—became mainstream in precolonial South Asian popular culture through a genre of narrative poem, the ‘ishqiya masnavi (often translated as ‘romance’), written by Sufi initiates in Persian, Urdu and Punjabi. These stories depicted love as a way to access the divine by revealing the divinity inherent in creation. Lovers’ trials and tribulations—from mystical beasts to jealous relatives—were allegories of the Sufi path.

I bring a material approach to the literary analysis of these poems, to show how song, recitation and the use of illustrations served to instruct communities of reader-listener-viewers in how to use earthly love to access God. Over two centuries, the romance tradition gradually moved out of the Sufi lodge and the court into urban coteries, colonial textbooks, and eventually modern print publics—but the Sufi cosmology that underpinned these stories remained a constant.

Marriage is a central social and religious institution that contributes to family formation and socioeconomic attainment. Little is known, however, about the marriage process for Muslims, the largest religious minority group in the U.S. And even less is understood about how marriage formation occurs for U.S. Black Muslim men and women, who form the largest group of U.S. born Muslims (Pew Research Center 2017). Here, I plan to interview 30 U.S. Black Muslims and ask: How do Black Muslim men and women compare in the ways they connect religion and race in making marriage decisions? I examine how Black Muslims living in the United States think about marriage, what qualities make one “marriageable,” the range in experiences of seeking out marriage partners, and what role religion, gender, race, family origin, and skin tone play in the marriage process. By examining this understudied and vitally important case, this research will offer key theoretical implications to advance sociological literatures on religion, race, and gender.

This dissertation argues that across disparate times and spaces, expressions of the Islamic concept of taqwā (piety, godfearingness, consciousness of God) come to index ruptures, shifts, and unexpected continuities in societal orientations towards God. Through textual and ethnographic research that tacks between two distinct temporal moments, the advent of Islam and contemporary Egypt, I examine the bricolage of inherited texts, traditions, sayings, and embodied practices that collectively signify expressions of taqwā. In the first Hijri century, biblical understandings of godfearingness together with taqwā’s pre-Islamic poetic linguistic inheritances coalesced into the internally and externally embodied concept that permeates the earliest Islamic sources. Navigating anxieties that Egyptian society is heading towards two equally threatening types of extremism, atheism and religious-based violence, in contemporary Egypt this early tradition of taqwā is reimagined and redeployed by religious leaders and their constituencies alongside uniquely modern strategies like cinema clubs, YouTube preaching, and psychological counseling.

The account attributed to the Armenian bishop Sebeos (c. 645) is regarded by scholars as the most coherent and complete account recounting the reasons motivating Arabs and Muslims in marching forward against the Byzantine army inside the Levant. The account is important since it offers a clear picture of the seventh-century venture of empire by Arabs and Muslims. However, there are problems in privileging Sebeos’s account. I, therefore, use Sebeos’s account to discuss the problems inherent in the study of Early Islam inside the western academy. In doing so, I argue how the study of early Islam is ensconced in a deep orientalist lens, ignoring the ‘larger picture’ of regional and global dynamics giving way to the Arab Muslim empire.