Ritual, Solidarity, and the Barzakh Moral Imagination in American Muslim Community Organization IMAN (Inner-city Muslim Action Network)

In this presentation, I explore the role of ritual in a Muslim ethics of community organizing as a means to cultivate solidarity with the Muslim and non-Muslim other. In order to accomplish this, I focus on the “Faithful Fridays” interfaith gatherings held by contemporary American Muslim community organizer IMAN (Inner-city Muslim Action Network) in the Chicago area. Such ritual performances not only cultivate solidarities across religious, racial, and class-based lines; they also function as forms of “prefigurative politics” foreshadowing a world not dominated by state, capitalist, or racial supremacist logics. 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 new ways of conceiving the self and other. Consequently, a barzakh moral imagination offers promising insights into how we might understand solidarity.