INTRODUCTION
1. Anonymous, interview with author, August 12, 2008. I spoke with this person under the auspices of a joint Duke University and University of North Carolina project, Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans. The project’s report is available at https://fds.duke.edu/db/attachment/1255 (accessed December 2, 2014).
2. Qurʾan 80:1. There is disagreement among Muslims about the identity of the person who “turned away.” The Egyptian teacher, like me, was Sunni. For most Sunnis it is common knowledge that the person reprimanded by God in this passage was the Prophet Muhammad. Many Shiʿi exegetes remember the episode differently and teach that it was someone else. See, for example, Tabatabai, “Surah abasa 80, verses 1–16.” (Many thanks to Jawad Bayat for reminding me about this detail.) On a different note, throughout the book, I adhere to a simplified version of the International Journal of Middle East Studies transliteration system. In chapters 3 and 4, the transliterations are often phonetic: when appropriate, they convey how transliterated Arabic words sounded when speakers uttered them, as opposed to how they are written.
3. My engagement with American Muslim discourses had begun earlier. A Muslim from Russia, I immigrated to the United States in 1993 and since then have been studying and working with American Muslims. This experience is one of the sources for this book.
4. Prager, “America, Not Keith Ellison.”
5. Swarns, “Congressman Criticizes Election.”
6. Kuo, “America’s ‘Holiest Book’?”
7. Spellberg, Thomas Jefferson’s Qurʾan.
8. In this book I employ the terms “the Hadith,” “the hadith literature,” and “hadith.” By “the Hadith” and “the hadith literature,” I mean collections of written-down memories of Muhammad’s actions and words. The word “hadith” designates an individual record from such collections, one single record of a particular action, or an expression attributed to the Prophet.
9. Martin, “Inimitability,” 526–36.
10. The same expression, “my Qurʾan,” can be found, for example, in Qutb, al-Taswar, 8, as quoted in Abu-Rabiʿ, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence, 104.
11. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 17.
12. Alryyes, Muslim American Slave.
13. Loguen protesting the Fugitive Slave Law at the steps of Syracuse City Hall in 1851, as quoted in George, “Widening the Circle,” 156.
14. Gade, Perfection Makes Practice.
15. Qurʾan 94:5–6. In this instance I use T. B. Irving’s translation, The Noble Qurʾan. Elsewhere in the book, I employ translations that were used by the individuals whose works I examine. In chapters 1 and 2, it is mostly the translation by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall. In chapters 3 and 4, it is the translation by Yusuf Ali. These translations are available online. See, for example, http://www.islamawakened.com/index.php/qur-an (accessed March 4, 2015).
16. Bakhtin, Toward a Methodology, 68.
17. Two notable American translations are Irving, The Noble Qurʾan, and Bakhtiar, The Sublime Qurʾan.
18. Eck, New Religious America.
19. See, for example, Schlund-Vials, Modeling Citizenship.
20. Nabokov, Speak, Memory, 275.
21. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 59.
22. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, xii, 8.
23. This pattern is present, for example, in Qurʾan 21, sura “Prophets.”
24. Qurʾan 3:110.
25. Donner, Narratives of Islamic Origins, 75.
26. Robinson, Islamic Historiography, 10.
27. Graham, Beyond the Written Word, 16.
28. Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting, 494, 55.
29. Manguel, History of Reading.
30. Koselleck, Futures Past, 220.
31. When modernity began is not easy to say. Its origins are often traced to the invention of the printing press, the European conquest of the Americas in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, or the European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In many non-European settings, it is associated with the history of European colonialism and emergence of industrialized societies, which transformed the world most drastically in the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. For a particularly informative discussion on the subject of modernity, see Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.
32. Koselleck, Practice of Conceptual History, 221–23.
33. Hadith Bukhari, vol. 3, bk. 48, no. 819.
34. See, for example, Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous.
35. Ernst and Lawrence, Sufi Martyrs of Love, 11–14.
36. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 205.
37. McAuliffe, “Tasks and Traditions of Interpretation,” 181–210.
38. al-Suyuti, Al-Itqan, 191, as quoted in Ayoub, Qurʾan and Its Interpreters, 1:5.
39. To be fair, Graham briefly reflected on how the Qurʾan infuses Muslims’ everyday speech. He also suggested that people who live in linguistic environments saturated with Qurʾan-based discourses “absorb … more than a passing knowledge of scripture.” His use of “absorb,” however, is unfortunate, because the word deemphasizes the dialogical nature of Muslim engagements with the Qurʾan. Graham, Beyond the Written Word, 114.
40. Abu Zayd, “Qurʾan in Everyday Life,” 80–98.
Chapter One: TIME
1. Rahman, “Some Islamic Issues,” 285, as quoted in Berry, “Fazlur Rahman,” 39.
2. On Rahman’s international influence, see Saeed, Approaches to the Qurʾan and Taji-Farouki, Modern Muslim Intellectuals.
3. Berry, “Fazlur Rahman,” 37–48.
4. Sayyid M. Syeed, e-mail correspondence with author, March 22, 2009. Quoted with permission.
5. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 191.
6. Webb, introduction, Windows of Faith, xi.
7. Barazangi, “Muslim Women’s Islamic Higher Learning,” 30–31.
8. Mattson faculty profile, Hartford Seminary website, http://reweb.hartsem.edu/pages/faculty/profiles/mattson.aspx (accessed April 20, 2014).
9. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 267.
10. Abu-Rabiʿ, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence, 98.
11. See, for example: Nasr, Young Muslim’s Guide.
12. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 268.
13. Cadge, Heartwood, 9.
14. This project generated much press. See, for example, Curtis, “Islam Has Long History in Downtown.”
15. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 257.
16. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 1, 18, 10, 14.
17. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, xii, xi.
18. Rahman, Islamic Methodology in History, 6.
19. For assessments of this theory and its impact on contemporary Qurʾanic interpretation, see Ebrahim Moosa, introduction, Revival and Reform, 1–29, and Hallaq, A History of Islamic Legal Theories, 241–53.
20. Moosa, introduction, Revival and Reform, 15.
21. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 7.
22. A well-known example of naskh has to do with interpretations of the Qurʾanic passages that speak about wine. At one point in an earlier verse, the Qurʾan proscribes its audience from drinking it before prayers. Yet, in a verse revealed at a later point, it outlaws its consumption completely. For most Muslim exegetes, it meant that the later passage abrogated the earlier one. Hence, they ruled, no Muslim ever—even if she were to sober up before praying—could consume wine and, by extension, other intoxicants as well.
23. Mir, Coherence in the Qurʾan.
24. Rahman, Islam and Modernity, 7.
25. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 47. Emphasis on “the religious source” is Rahman’s.
26. While Rahman stated that translations appearing in Major Themes were by Muhammad Marmaduke Pickthall, he also noted that he rendered them with “with some modifications.” Typically, such modifications rephrased Pickthall dramatically.
27. United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”
28. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 49. The translation of the verse is entirely Rahman’s. In the Arabic text, in this particular portion of the verse, there is no corresponding word for “rights.” Rahman took it as a grammatical continuation from a preceding phrase that has a similar word.
29. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 48.
30. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 49. Rahman relied here on Qurʾan 4:124, 40:40, 3:35 and a number of other verses.
31. Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History, 228. “Progress,” of course, is an ideal behind our sense of history or, as Rahman would put it, its “normative” theme. We tend to feel betrayed when things fail to improve or when our progress is destroying our planet. But even when the problems we face are intertwined with our technological advancements, we keep trying to resolve them with more futuristic technologies. As moderns, we are stuck in the time of progress. See Latour, We Have Never Been Modern.
32. For a concise and insightful review of Iqbal’s engagement with the Qurʾan, see Lawrence, The Qurʾan: A Biography, 151–62. For more in-depth studies, see Schimmel, Gabriel’s Wing, and Mir, Iqbal.
33. Halbwachs, On Collective Memory, 175.
34. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge, xi.
35. On “pedagogic [uses of the] past,” see Lowenthal, Past Is a Foreign Country, 371.
36. Schwartz, Abraham Lincoln and the Forge, x.
37. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 22.
38. Rahman, Islamic Methodology in History, x.
39. McDonough, “Fazlur Rahman’s Response to Iqbal,” 68.
40. Iqbal’s name appears in Major Themes once, in a tangential comment. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 22.
41. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 1.
42. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 55, 14.
43. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 56, 23.
44. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 47.
45. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 47.
46. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 47–48.
47. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 12, 15, 66, 34.
48. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 68.
49. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 67.
50. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 96, 109, 56, 62, 6.
51. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 13, 7.
52. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 62 and 194.
53. Fischer and Abedi, Debating Muslims, 109.
54. Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, 13.
55. As Talal Asad noted, most contemporary human beings embody this dilemma: they live their everyday lives in “secular time” and yet think that their “religions speak” from a different type of time, the time of eternity, “in light of which … [they] attempt to cultivate their bodies and souls.” Asad, “Response to Connolly,” 223.
56. This is how Taylor characterized eternity and “secular time.” Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 97. While groundbreaking, his writing sometimes comes across as more static than its overall dynamics suggest. He often expressed himself, quite naturally and unsurprisingly, through the very grammar of his and our modern sensibilities, which he attempted to change. (My hunch is that Taylor never read Iqbal.)
57. This insight was likely an outcome of Rahman’s engagement with the works of the Persian philosopher Ibn Sina (d. 1037). See Rahman, Prophecy in Islam.
58. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 126, 131, 49.
59. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, 15, 138.
60. Iqbal, Reconstruction of Religious Thought, vi.
61. On how routine this consensus was at the time, see Turner, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, 67–76.
62. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 81.
63. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 23, 80.
64. This precise phrase does not appear in the Qurʾan. Variations of it can be found in many verses, such as 21:105, 39:74, and 44:28.
65. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 59.
66. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 12, 1.
67. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 28, 37.
68. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 28, 34.
69. Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 194.
70. Rahman, Islam, 225–26.
71. al-Hibri, “Islamic and American Constitutional Law,” 492–527.
Chapter Two: JUSTICE
1. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 126.
2. For an insightful study on the politics of Wadud’s prayer and the issue of women’s authority, see Hammer, American Muslim Women.
3. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 162.
4. Arkoun, Unthought in Contemporary Islamic Thought, 12.
5. Wadud, “Amina Wadud.”
6. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, xxii.
7. Later, Wadud noted that the book “reached number one on a best-seller list in al-Qalam, a Muslim newspaper” in South Africa. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, xvi.
8. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, 6, 52.
9. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, 80.
10. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, 94, xvii.
11. Weielandt, “Exegesis of the Qurʾan,” 124–42.
12. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, xvii.
13. Brown, “The Triumph of Textualism,” 55.
14. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, xvii.
15. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, xxii, 36.
16. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, xii, 48, 63.
17. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, 66.
18. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, 69.
19. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, 73.
20. al-Hibri, “Study of Islamic Herstory,” 207–19.
21. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, 73.
22. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, xiii, 49, 91.
23. Wadud, Qurʾan and Woman, x.
24. For reflections on the American and global legacy of Wadud, see Ali, Hammer, and Silvers, eds., Jihad for Justice, and Hammer and Spielhaus, eds., “Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority,” a special issue of the Muslim World.
25. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 102.
26. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 4.
27. See Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 158–73, and Esack, Qurʾan, Liberation and Pluralism, 246–48.
28. Haddad, Smith and Moore, Muslim Women, 122. This book provides an excellent survey of the early-twenty-first-century gender dynamics in American Muslim communities. An earlier excellent study that traces similar developments on a congregational level in the Shiʿi community in Dearborn, Michigan, is Walbridge, Without Forgetting the Imam.
29. Cadge, Heartwood, 173.
30. See, for example, Nadell, Women Who Would Be Rabbis.
31. Schwartz, The Rabbi’s Wife.
32. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 161.
33. For a parallel example from a sermon by a Jordanian preacher, see Antoun, Muslim Preacher in the Modern World, 67–106.
34. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 159.
35. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 159.
36. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 249–250.
37. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 251.
38. Shakir, “Examination of the Issue of Female Prayer Leadership,” 244–46.
39. “Women Friendly Mosques,” ISNA website, http://www.isna.net/Leadership/pages/Guidelines-Womens-Participation.aspx (accessed February 20, 2010).
40. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 79–80.
41. Turner, “God is a Negro,” 347–48.
42. See Cone, Risks of Faith; Cone, Martin and Malcolm and America; and Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering.
43. Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad, 257.
44. Yuskaev and Stark, “Imam and Chaplain,” 47–63.
Chapter Three: REDEMPTION
1. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
2. Cone, Cross and the Lynching Tree.
3. For estimates of the Muslim population in the United States, as well as African American affiliates of W. D. Mohammed’s ministry, see Bagby, “Imams and Mosque Organizations,” 19–36.
4. Nance, “Mystery of the Moorish Science Temple,” 123–66.
5. King, “Letter from Birmingham Jail.” This line of argument was not limited to King. Another example is Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.
6. See, for example, Ramirez and Brachear, “Imam’s Views Created Rift.”
7. Malcolm X and Haley, Autobiography of Malcolm X, 364.
8. Mohammed, “Interview with Imam W. Deen Mohammed.”
9. On Elijah Muhammad’s exegesis, see Berg, Elijah Muhammad and Islam.
10. Mohammed, as quoted in Lee, Nation of Islam, 83. On Mohammed’s use of the term “resurrection,” see Jackson, Islam and the Blackamerican.
11. Martin, “W. Deen Mohammed, 74, Top U.S. Imam, Dies.”
12. This is a widely used phrase in W. D. Mohammed’s community. One telling example is a thread devoted to the compatibility of the Qurʾan and the U.S. constitution on the “Students of Imam W. Deen Mohammed” listserv: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/The-Students-of-Imam-W-Deen-Mohammed (accessed January 28, 2010).
13. Mohammed, “2003 Ramadan Session Transcript.”
14. The CD sets became available for purchase in 2007 on Darnel Karim’s website: http://islamicstudiesmaterials.com (accessed January 28, 2010).
15. Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience.
16. Muhammad Ali, Translation of the Holy Quran. Yusuf Ali’s translation of the same verse reads: “The day when the Trumpet is blown. On that day we assemble the guilty white-eyed.”
17. See, for example, Jackson, Islam and the Problem of Black Suffering.
18. Ayoub, Redemptive Suffering in Islam.
19. Rahman, Major Themes of the Qurʾan, 63.
20. Raboteau, Slave Religion, Long, Significations; Lincoln and Mamiya, Black Church in the African-American Experience.
21. Mohammed, Al-Islam, 110. For an in-depth analysis of the concept of redemption in Elijah Muhammad and W. D. Mohammed’s interpretations, see Yuskaev, “Redeeming the Nation.”
22. Muhammad, “Savior’s Day Address, 1975.”
23. Mohammed, Challenges That Face Man Today, 86–87.
24. Mohammed, Challenges That Face Man Today, 55.
25. Mohammed, “Life: The Final Battlefield, Part 2.” The audio recording of the speech is available at http://www.newafricaradio.com (accessed September 29, 2011).
26. Mohammed, “Live in Harlem.”
27. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
28. Rosenberg, The Art of the American Folk Preacher.
29. Muhammad, Supreme Wisdom, 283.
30. This was the Nation’s official policy. In practice, it was indeed involved in politics, as when it tacitly supported politicians such as Adam Clayton Powell.
31. See, for example, Mohammed, Al-Islam, 102, and “Live in Harlem.”
32. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
33. The verses with the tone of lamentation are Qurʾan 2:213, 5:48, 10:19, 11:118, 16:93, and 42:8. The exceptions are Qurʾan 21:92 and 23:52, whose grammar Mohammed echoed when he said, at the end of his statement, “ummatan wahida.”
34. Mohammed, Al-Islam, 102.
35. Mohammed, “Live in Harlem.”
36. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
37. Ayoub, Qurʾan and Its interpreters, 2:295.
38. Mohammed, Challenge, 36. He used similar lines in many of his subsequent speeches, such as his “Savior Day” address in 2002 in Charleston, South Carolina.
39. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
40. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
41. Mohammed and Mustafa, Focus on Al-Islam, 4.
42. Mohammed, “Life: The Final Battlefield, Part 2.”
43. Mohammed, “The Day of Religion.”
44. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
45. Mohammed, “The Temple of Islam.”
46. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
47. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
48. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
49. Qurʾan 32:30.
50. Mohammed, “Live in Harlem.”
51. Mohammed, “National Imams’ Meeting.”
52. LaRue, Heart of Black Preaching, 72–82.
53. Shuaibe, “Response to ‘Government Agent’”; Shuaibe, “Message to Those Who Condemn.”
54. Faheem Shuaibe, telephone interview with the author, August 24, 2009. The emphasis on “this” and “that” was Shuaibe’s.
55. For example, in 1987 Shuaibe set up the first “United Taʾleem,” a teach-in for immigrant and African American Muslims. See Simon, “Interview with Imam Fahim Shuaib.”
56. Ali translated this passage as, “If ye help not (your Leader) (it is no matter): for Allah did indeed help him; when the unbelievers drove him out: he had no more than one companion: they two were in the cave, and he said to his companion ‘Have no Fear, for Allah is with us’: then Allah sent down His peace upon him, and strengthened him with forces which ye saw not, and humbled to the depths the word of the Unbelievers. But the word of Allah is exalted to the heights: for Allah is Exalted in might, Wise.”
57. In this section, unless otherwise noted, all of Shuaibe’s quotes are from Shuaibe, Fear Not for Allah Is with Us.
58. See, for example, Mohammed, “How Islam Promotes Healthy Citizenship.”
59. See Qurʾan 15:26 and Mohammed, “The Day of Religion.”
60. A parallel example is a sermon by Mozella Mitchell, pastor of Mount Sinai A.M.E. Zion Church in Tampa, Florida, who built one of her sermons around a contextually specific redefinition of the word “providence.” LaRue, Heart of Black Preaching, 93–97.
61. Goldman, Death and Life of Malcolm X, 70.
62. Another interesting feature of both Shuaibe and Mohammed’s sermons was their use of popular songs, which their audiences would immediately recognize. Such references—either implied or explicit—served to connect the language of the Qurʾan, as the speakers presented it, to the everyday language of their audiences. In one 2006 speech, for example, Mohammed discussed the Qurʾanic idea of human nature while illustrating it by referencing songs by Nat King Cole and Bill Withers. Shuaibe performed a similar move in a 2008 speech that promoted the diversity of Qurʾanic interpretations and defended, through a wide selection of Qurʾanic references and examples from the Hadith, the practice of indigenous, African American exegesis. The title of that sermon was “Different Strokes for Different Folks: The Universal and the Particular in Qurʾanic Translation and Interpretation.” For his audience it was an obvious reference to the song by Sly and the Family Stone.
63. On the practice of predatory lending targeting African American middle-class communities, see Coates, “The Case for Reparations.”
64. Qurʾan 3:104.
65. That book was Omar, Dictionary of the Holy Qurʾan. Mohammed recommended it for his students during his 2007 Ramadan lectures.
66. For more standard translations of this word, see, for example, Penrice, A Dictionary and Glossary of the Koran, and Badawi and Abdel Haleem, Arabic-English Dictionary of Qurʾanic Usage.
67. Yusuf Ali translated this verse as, “Because Allah will never change the Grace which He hath bestowed on a people until they change what is in their (own) souls: and verily Allah is He Who heareth and knoweth (all things).”
68. Faheem Shuaibe, interview with author, August 5, 2009.
69. Ong, Orality, 13.
70. For example, Thomas Carlyle, a witty nineteenth-century Scottish philosopher and historian, remarked that the Qurʾan, which he read in translation, was a “toilsome a reading,” filled with “endless iterations.” Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero Worship, and Heroic History, as quoted in Ernst, How to Read the Qurʾan, 22.
71. Mohammed, “Our Shared Freedom Space.”
72. Mohammed, As the Light Shineth, 67.
73. Qurʾan 49:1.
Chapter Four: POLITICS
1. Yusuf, “Give and Take.”
2. ISNA’s official incorporation was in 1982. Nineteen sixty-three was the date of the establishment of its precursor, the Muslim Student Association of the U.S. and Canada, which was also the antecedent of ICNA.
3. See, for example, Bayoumi, How Does It Feel.
4. For example, according to the 2000 and 2011 surveys of American mosques, in 2000, 86 percent of mosque leaders supported engagement in American politics; in 2011, this number increased to 91 percent. Bagby, American Mosque 2011, Report Number 1, 21.
5. Online discussion thread, “What the heck happened to Hamza Yusuf,” Umma.com, http://www.ummah.com/forum/showthread.php?232275-What-The-Heck-Happened-To-Hamza-Yusuf (accessed September 09, 2014).
6. Schmidt, “Transnational Umma,” 575–86.
7. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, interview with author, July 26, 2008.
8. For example, as of February 12, 2010, one of Yusuf’s speeches, “Changing the Tide,” a 2006 address at ICNA’s New Jersey symposium, accumulated 140,739 views. To the best of my knowledge, this was the most frequently listened-to online speech by any English-speaking preacher during the 2000s. In comparison, as of the same date, the most accessed speech by Siraj Wahhaj, “Muslim Women in Hijab,” had 99,920 views. Siraj Wahhaj, “Muslim Women in Hijab,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wRXm5ttFC_s (accessed February 12, 2010).
9. See, for example, Yusuf, “On Muslim Youth.”
10. Yusuf, “Making Sense of Our Past.” The statistics of online viewership on this speech are difficult to attain. Throughout the 2000s it had been repeatedly flagged as inappropriate by some viewers and removed by YouTube and other services. But then, as a sign of its persistent appeal, it would be immediately reposted, with each posting typically accumulating over ten thousand hits. Its popularity was corroborated through my interviews with his listeners, most of whom identified it as among his best-known recordings.
11. Skerry, “Problems of the Second Generation”; Pew Research Center, “Muslim Americans: Mostly Mainstream”; Pew Research Center, “Muslim Americans: No Signs of Growth in Alienation.”
12. McGreevy, Catholicism and American Freedom, 167, 169. On the tradition of American anti-Catholicism, see Massa, Anti-Catholicism in America.
13. The phrase “completely opposed” is from Pope Pius X’s 1910 “Oath Against Modernism.” On American Catholic critiques of modernity, see Weaver and Appleby, Being Right, and O’Brien, Public Catholicism.
14. During Yusuf’s time this was a global trend, exemplified by the “from the heart” style of Amr Khaled, an immensely popular Egyptian preacher. See Wise, “‘Words from the Heart.’” For an insightful study of the gradual transformation of Muslim preaching styles in the twentieth century, see Antoun, Muslim Preacher in the Modern World.
15. See, for example, Messic, “Media Muftis,” 310–22.
16. My observation is based on online recordings of the speech and its listeners’ comments. In addition, I regularly played video recordings of the first minutes of “Give and Take” in my graduate courses at Hartford Seminary, where the majority of my students were well-versed Muslims. In five years of this informal experiment, the only person to notice Yusuf’s misrecitation was a reciter of the Qurʾan.
17. Yusuf, “Zaytuna Monthly Videocast: Episode 3—Broadening the Scope of the Pope.”
18. At first, he was attracted to an idiosyncratic Muslim group, al-Murabitun, led by the Scottish Shaykh Abdulqadir as-Sufi (Ian Dallas). Within a few years, he separated from that community. As-Sufi’s group belonged to the Traditionalist movement, which was distinct from what Yusuf would later call “tradition.” On the Western Traditionalist network, exemplified by Seyyed Hussein Nasr’s Maryamiyya Sufi order, see Sedgewick, Against the Modern World.
19. Yusuf, “True Spirit of Islam.”
20. Zaytuna Institute, “Knowledge-Based Approach.”
21. Zaytuna’s initial claim of being the first American Muslim college was technically incorrect: three similar American Muslim institutions had been established before 2009. See Schmidt, Islam in Urban America, 84–135. Later, in the mid-2010s, Zaytuna’s administration adjusted its language and began calling their institution “the first Muslim liberal arts college in the United States.” Zaytuna College website, https://www.zaytuna.edu/about/ (accessed February 21, 2010, and December 23, 2015). For an informative outside perspective on the institution, see Korb, Light without Fire.
22. Brown, Rethinking Tradition in Modern Islamic Thought.
23. Kugle, Rebel between Spirit and Law. Zarruq’s memory was incorporated into Zaytuna’s institutional language, as in the “Perennial Faculty” page on its website: https://www.zaytuna.edu/about/perennial_faculty/ (accessed July 10, 2014).
24. Yusuf, “On Muslim Youth.”
25. Yusuf, “True Spirit of Islam.”
26. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, interview with author, July 26, 2008.
27. http://www.sunnipath.com/about/ustadhanourashamma.aspx (accessed February 12, 2010). Later, SunniPath transformed into qibla.com (accessed July 11, 2014).
28. Abdullah bin Hamid Ali, interview with author, July 26, 2008.
29. This translation of the hadith comes from Murata and Chittick, The Vision of Islam, xxvi, as quoted in Kugle, Rebel between Spirit and Law, 11–12.
30. See Kugle, Rebel between Spirit and Law, 11, and Yusuf, Shakir, and Rhodus, “The Way Ahead.”
31. Yusuf, “Reflections on al-Hujurat.”
32. Anonymous, interview with author, August 7, 2008.
33. See, for example, “Muslim ‘Rock Star.’”
34. Yusuf, as quoted in Leonard, Muslims in the United States, 23.
35. Hughes, “Move the New York City Mosque.”
36. In this section, unless otherwise noted, all of Khan’s quotes are from Sadaf Khan, interview with author, July 31, 2008.
37. Qurʾan 16:125.
38. This is a key element in what Charles Hirschkind, after Walter Benjamin, called “effective audition”: “an act that enables the integration of the narrative into the listener’s own experience [and] requires a subordination to the authority” of a preacher. Hirschkind, Ethical Soundscape, 27.
39. Anonymous, interview with author, July 24, 2008.
40. See, for example, Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children.
41. By 2011 their attendance would rival ISNA’s yearly conferences. “Canadian Islamic Convention.”
42. See, for example: Yusuf, “Message to Humanity.”
43. Qurʾan 51:55.
44. In this section, unless otherwise noted, all of Yusuf’s quotes are from Yusuf, “Making Sense.”
45. Qurʾan 10:57.
46. Qurʾan 30:7.
47. This line of argument was not original. In large part it echoed the antimodern rhetoric of Seyyed Hossein Nasr and Yusuf’s original Muslim teacher, Abdalqadir as-Sufi. See Nasr, Young Muslim’s Guide, and as-Sufi, Technique of the Coup de Banque. It also had much in common with Catholic traditionalist rhetoric. See Sedgwick, Against the Modern World.
48. Tottoli, “Korah,” 105.
49. Qurʾan 28:79.
50. For example, one would find many parallels between Yusuf’s articulations and those of Qutb, as in Qutb’s Dirasat Islamiyya, a collection of articles from the early 1950s. See Abu-Rabiʿ, Intellectual Origins of Islamic Resurgence, 130–36.
51. GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 309–16.
52. Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, 10.
53. See, for example: Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity.
54. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 110, 117.
55. See Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” 1–25; Casanova, “Civil Society and Religion,” 1041–80; and Asad, “Response to Casanova,” 207–10.
56. For example, after World War II, Catholics in the United States and other countries fostered a secular-sounding language of the church as a champion of human rights, which allowed its authorities to speak as partners in democratic political systems. See Casanova, “Civil Society and Religion,” 1041–80.
57. Warner, Publics and Counterpublics, 121.
58. Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere,” 124.
59. Harding, Book of Jerry Falwell, ix.
60. The policy of surveillance is documented by, among others, the Associated Press’s Pulitzer Prize–winning investigation of the New York Police Department’s intelligence operations. See “AP’s Probe Into NYPD Intelligence Operations.” On the practice of detaining Muslims crossing the Canadian border, see Bloom, “Border Searches,” 295–28.
61. Bagby, American Mosque 2011, Report Number 2, 9.
62. Yusuf, as quoted in Abdo, Mecca and Main Street, 5
63. See GhaneaBassiri, History of Islam in America, 350–78.
64. In this section, unless otherwise noted, all of Yusuf’s quotes are from Yusuf, “Give and Take.”
65. Qurʾan 17:20.
66. Qurʾan 6:12.
67. Bush, “Remarks by the President Upon Arrival.”
68. Lears, “How a War Became a Crusade.”
69. Qurʾan 53:42.
70. Gallup and the Coexist Foundation, Muslim Americans, 22.
71. Widmer, Young America.
72. Rumsfeld, “Secretary Rumsfeld Briefs.”
73. See, for example, “Diversity—In America” (CNN blog), and the Southern Poverty Law Center’s K-5 curriculum on diversity, “Stitching It Together.” For an analysis of American Muslim appropriations of such language, see Naber, “Muslim First, Arab Second,” 479–95.
74. McNamara, Catholic Cold War.
75. bin Bayyah, “Muslims Living in Non-Muslim Lands.”
76. Yusuf, “Message To Humanity.”
77. Murray, We Hold These Truths, x–xi.
78. Appleby, “Triumph of Americanism,” 40.
79. Pew Research Center, “Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream,” 18.
80. Turner, “Betwixt and Between,” 93–111.
81. Anonymous, interview with author, July 24, 2008.
82. Bercovitch, American Jeremiad, 16.
83. Qurʾan 38:1; Sells, “Memory,” 372–74.
84. Clinton, My Life, 167.
85. For numerous examples of post-9/11 evocations of Qurʾan 5:32, see Kurzman, “Islamic Statements Against Terrorism.”
AFTERWORD
86. Benkong Shi, conversation with the author, May 19, 2015.
87. An exceptional ethnographic study on the subject, which includes analysis of discourses, is Walbridge, Without Forgetting the Imam. For a useful overview of American Shiʿi communities and their history, see Takim, Shiʿism in America.