Studying Islam in a material world

Since early modern Iran (16th century), the covering with black Muharram banners (Siyah-Poushan) was a visual call for practitioners; a sign for Shias to adopt a solemn attitude at the start of the Muharram annual mourning ritual. Muharram calligraphic banners, like a mnemonic device, evoke emotions and a spiritual environment in Shia Society to honor the martyrdom of Husain-ibn-Ali (680 CE). This paper uses an interdisciplinary approach combining ritual study, art history, material culture studies, and religious history to display Muharram banners as a multi faceted religious object and a symbol of Shia belief that objectively shaped a ritual. Therefore, those are not only sign of sadness and mourning for unjust killing, as reflected in the martyrdom of Husain-ibn-Ali, but also a materialistic conscience that provide a powerful visual signal that creates community through ritual praxis and identity formation.

In a TikTok post, user @sofiapena00 dances to a Mexican cumbia song while wearing hijab, celebrating being the first and only Muslim in her family. She voices her frustration with being perceived as too religious by Mexicans yet not religious enough in hegemonic Muslim spaces. This content is increasingly visible on TikTok, where Latina converts to Islam challenge normative portraits of Muslim piety by reclaiming ethnic and national identities. This paper explores a variety of TikTok performances that intertwine Latinindad and Muslimness to examine how Latina Muslims negotiate their faith and culture against those who deem their identity and practice as “un-Islamic.” I look at how TikTok trends, including music and dance, are utilized to counter claims around social legibility and the discursive formations they foster. Attention is paid to how intersecting layers of marginalization, including race and gender, play a role in the discursive production of this content.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood’s “call” (daʿwa) materialized through multiple forms of print media, including magazines and books. Through textual practices of daʿwa, Brotherhood activists envisioned the sound transmission of Islamic knowledge as resting primarily upon embodied relationships and affective bonds among individuals. The Brotherhood’s bibliocentric approach thus aimed to use textuality to exceed the bounds of print—the media itself was not the message, but was rather a medium consciously embraced to cultivate embodied Islam in everyday life. This presentation demonstrates how modern Islamic print culture combines strategic textuality with the expression of Islamic piety in the supra-textual mundane. A critical aspect of the art of daʿwa, as the Brotherhood understood it, was the demonstration of virtue in lived relationships. Brotherhood activists thus sought to inculcate an affective regime that emphasized the efficacy of charisma and the development of affective power itself as a technique capable of establishing Islam.

This paper analyzes how senses and emotions motivate halal consumption in Philadelphia. Specifically, it focuses on an ambiguous smell at a halal butcher that to one Muslim smells "suss" and to another smells "intimate." I show how these two smells motivate these two consumers in opposite directions, which both emerges from and shapes their respective enactments of Islamic tradition. This paper is based on 12 months of extensive site visits, formal interviews, and digital mapping of halal consumption in Philadelphia. Theoretically, it builds on conceptualizations of Islamic senses (Hirschkind 2006) and affects (Elias 2018; Chan-Malik 2018; Khoja-Moolji 2021) to show how Islamic tradition shapes and is shaped by the local acts of everyday consumption and the emotions that motivate them. Ultimately, I show how ethnographies of Islamic emotions, affects, and material culture can clarify formation of Islamic difference along lines of class, race, and devotion.