Playful Piety: How American Muslims Play with/in Islam

Current trends in feminist Muslim scholarship highlight radical uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity as fruitful ground for theological reflection and Islamic ethics. But what do uncertainty, contingency, and ambiguity look like in practice? How is uncertainty lived and felt, and how might it be a foundation for Muslim piety? Playful Piety: How American Muslims Play with/in Islam explores how contemporary American Muslims cultivate pious subjectivities through various forms of playfulness, and how tradition and authority are negotiated in these processes. I suggest that playing could be the praxis for a feminist theology of uncertainty. My present case study explores how a queer Muslim devotional circle “plays with tradition.” Through analysis of my ethnographic data I argue that playing is a legitimate form of Muslim piety and offers novel epistemological and theological approaches to tradition, especially for marginalized Muslims.