While there has been a rich body of scholarship critically examining the global Islamic revival in the last 50 years, far fewer studies have focused on Islamic revivalism in minoritarian contexts such as Europe and the United States. This panel serves as an invitation to a deeper examination of “Islamic revivalism,” addressing two key sets of questions. Firstly, we examine whether “revivalism” is a useful category of analysis in the study of Islamic communities and discourses, and what the concept/phenomenon encompasses. Secondly, we specifically examine Islamic revivalism in Euro-American contexts, and inquire into the legacies and transformations of Islamic revivalism within the conditions of a hegemonic, white, post-Christian secularity. The papers in this panel address these two sets of questions by examining Anglo-American and Francophone religious discourses, from the mid-twentieth century to the contemporary moment. They focus on concerns with secularism/secularization on the one hand, and gender/sexuality on the other.
This paper explores intersecting histories of revivalism, postwar American religious revivals and Islamist revivalist frameworks, in the writings of Maryam Jameelah (1932-2012). Jameelah was an American Jewish convert to Islam who became a leading voice of the global Islamic Revival after moving to Pakistan in 1962. I argue that Jameelah’s vision for Islam emerged first from a critique of American religious revivalism in the 1950s, which she saw as reinforcing nationalistic impulses and rampant materialism. Through her later participation in Islamist networks, she came to see colonialism and materialism as dual evils, and an Islamic revival as the only remedy for the catastrophic effects of modernity. In bringing these two historical configurations of revivalism in conversation, I argue for an expansive definition of Islamic revivalism that traversed disparate political contexts through a set of affects, especially negative collective emotions, that emphasized the nuclear family as the foundation for an Islamic society.
American Muslim public discourse in the 21st century has witnessed a profound communal concern with doubt and loss of faith. This paper examines these pervasive concerns with “crisis of faith,” in connection with the revivalist ethos of influential American Muslim preachers and institutions. More specifically, I explore how constructions of “religion” and “faith” in Islamic revivalist discourses converge with those of American liberal protestant secularity – particularly in the centrality of authenticity to both. I do so by highlighting two key features of Islamic revivalist conceptions of piety and faith: the demand for heightened self-awareness and introspection in individual belief, and the notion of Islam being a simple and comprehensive system of doctrines. These features, reflecting anthropological notions of “objectification” and “authentication,” give rise to a very specific form of the ideal of personal authenticity, both converging and diverging from the more familiar imperatives of personal authenticity built into liberal protestant secularity in the US. Finally, I conclude by raising questions about what this analysis suggests regarding the relationship between projects of revivalism and conditions of secularity.
This paper examines a burgeoning religious movement in Anglo-American Islam spearheaded by three convert shaykhs – Hamza Yusuf, Abdal Hakim Murad, and Umar Faruq Abd-Allah. The shaykhs guide seekers through a paradigmatic critique of modernity that emphasizes the importance of reconnecting with the tradition. This paper examines how the shaykhs’ anti-modernist polemics and in particular the narrative of the decline of metaphysics in modernity relates to politics. Before modernity, they contend, Muslims recognized the metaphysical arrangement of the world – which promoted a sense of harmony. Meaning, the traditional world had a metaphysical arrangement whereby the spiritual, the social, and the political were in equilibrium. This was reflected in everything from architecture, clothing, and it reflected the way people see society and government, gender identities and gender roles, and how traditional people saw tribulations. This paper examines their intellectual and political relationship with other religious conservatives – from teaching the conservative treatise on the civilizational decline by Richard Weaver and holding discussions on meanings of conservatism and the sacred with Jordan Peterson and the late Roger Scruton.
In 2022, a well-known Muslim preacher, Hassan Iquioussen, was issued an order to leave French territory by the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin. Darmanin argued that Iquioussen posed a “grave danger to public order” that legitimated his expulsion. French law makes systematic reference to the maintenance of “public order” as grounds for an exception to numerous laws guaranteeing civil liberties, including the freedom of conscience as outlined in the law of 1905. This paper takes up the case of revivalist preacher Hassan Iquioussen as a site for interrogating the relationship between public order, secularism, gender politics, and the governance of Islam in France. I argue that Iquioussen’s case intensifies a shift to an “immaterial” understanding of public order in a way that allows the state to legislate on the basis of a supposedly shared common morality, grounded in specific understandings of secularism and gender equality.