This panel situates contemporary Islamic practice and experience in relation to political economy and material conditions in a variety of contexts: from South Asia, to Central Asia, the Persian Gulf, and North America. Drawing on diverse methodological approaches, the papers offer sophisticated analyses of 21st century political-economic and material developments that shape Islamic ethics, law, ritual, piety, identity, and experience.
This paper examines the role of Islam, local customs, and modernity in influencing Maldivian marriage culture based on ethnographic research. I explore the causes and norms surrounding the divorce rate in the Maldives that is currently the world’s highest and yet unaddressed in Anglophone Islamicist scholarship. While religiously inclined communities are often considered more likely to preserve practices of lifelong monogamy due to their presumed commitment to notions of sexual purity, Muslim societies are thus stereotyped even more frequently not only in orientalist imagination but also by modern Muslims themselves. An increase in marital breakdown in a Muslim society is attributed to Western hegemony and the legacies of colonialism on indigenous legal systems that presumably devalued lifelong marital bonds and encouraged consumeristic, flippant, "transactional" attitudes towards romantic relationships. I question the premises of such binary assumptions by exploring the legal and ethical dimensions of Muslim romantic life in the Maldives.
This paper examines how Islamic jurists on the Shariah boards of Islamic financial institutions in North America adapt Islamic law to local financial regulatory systems. While scholarship on Islamic legal adaptation in North America has focused mainly on family law and arbitration, the ethical dimensions of Islamic finance remain understudied. Drawing on textual analysis and ethnographic research, the paper shows how Islamic law and finance, which prohibit interest, are made workable within regulatory systems structured around it. It argues that jurists use fiqh al-aqalliyyāt (jurisprudential accommodations for Muslims as minorities) to create pragmatic, profitable financial products while preserving claims to Islamic legality. By analyzing how Shariah boards structure financial contracts and justify their legal-ethical reasoning, the paper positions Islamic finance as a key site for understanding how Muslim minorities in North America pursue financial prosperity without compromising religious commitments.
At the behest of the Sunni-Muslim monarchy and state apparatus, the densely-populated, GCC island-nation of Bahrain has undergone accelerated urbanization and architectural programs, particularly since the Arab Spring. This is most visible in Manama, the political capital, and in Muharraq, selected Arab cultural capital for 2018. However, the majority Shi‘i Muslim community has enacted different visual cultural and urbanism projects, largely beyond foreign attention. This presentation will focus on the ma’tam, a commemorative ritual space akin to the Husayniyyas of certain other Ithna‘ashari Shi‘ite societies. We examine why Shi‘ites in Bahrain have begun to adorn or re-adorn such spaces of memory in ornamental and epigraphic programs distinct from those on Sunni mosques. In contrasting their architecture and communal narratives, we investigate the different relations the communities prioritize with foreign interests, but also the different policies and populations that successive US administrations have prioritized in diplomacy with Bahrain and local reactions.
What may be involved in a Muslim’s aspiration to leave Islam? How can experiences of leaving Islam complicate our conceptions of Islam as an object of scholarly inquiry? I ask these questions by drawing on fieldwork among non-observant Muslims in Kyrgyzstan—those estranged from key aspects of Islamic observance by the Soviet state. I focus particularly on the story of Begimai, a woman in her fifties who, after an unpleasant encounter at a mosque, attempted—but did not succeed—to convert to Christianity. I examine several experiential fields that mediated Begimai’s relationship with Islam, including the conceptual legacy of Soviet secularization, the post-Soviet Islamic revival, and the agency of Begimai’s deceased ancestors. This exploration illuminates a relational web of forces through which Begimai’s (in)ability to imagine a future without Islam was articulated. The paper concludes with a broader argument about how non-observant or ambiguous ways of living Islam may be conceptualized.