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Suburban Islam explores how American Muslims have created new kinds of religious communities, known as third spaces, to navigate political and social pressures after 9/11. This book examines how one Chicago community, the Mohammed Alexander Russell Webb Foundation (Webb), has responded to the demands of proving Islam’s compatibility with liberal democracy and embracing the commonalities of their Abrahamic faith. Through dynamic forms of ritual practice, such as leisure activities, devotional practices such as the mawlid, and communal reading of sacred texts, the Webb community offers an alternative vision of American Islam. Appealing to an overarching American culture, the Webb community celebrates religious pluralism and middle-class consumerism, opens up leadership roles for women, and reimagines the United States as an ideal location for the practice of “authentic” Islam. In the process, they also seek to rehabilitate the public image of Islam. Suburban Islam analyzes these efforts as one slice of American Muslims’ heterogeneous and contingent institutionalizing practices in the twenty-first century. Suburban Islam examines how some American Muslims have intentionally set out to enact an Islam recognizable to others as American. Even as Webb intends to build a more inclusive and welcoming space, it also produces its own exclusions, elisions of extant racial and gender hierarchies, and unresolved tensions over the contours of American Muslim citizenship. As a case study, the Webb community demonstrates the multiple possibilities of American Islam. Through evolving practices and overlapping sets of relationships, this group continues to work out what American Islam means to them during a time in which Muslim and American are repeatedly cast as incompatible categories.

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This article uses Sara Ahmed’s concept of “affective economy” to explore the relationship between affect and gender in the transnational Islamic Revival in the 1960s and 1970s. It does so by examining the work of Maryam Jameelah (neé Margaret Marcus, 1934-2012), the American Jewish convert to Islam who moved to Pakistan in 1962 at the invitation of A’la Abul Mawdudi, the prominent revivalist leader and thinker. For her English-speaking audiences, Jameelah was a potent messenger for a revivalist ideology that aimed to reinvigorate an Islamic politics in opposition to Western capitalism and materialism. I argue that the affective economy of Jameelah’s writing help to explain the mobility of her ideas across national borders. Through affect, Jameelah’s writings produce a cumulative set of associations around female bodies that were intended to galvanize Muslim attachments to the umma and to draw absolute boundaries between Islam and the West.

In the contemporary US, religious pluralism has profoundly shaped the ways that American Muslims read and interpret the Qur'an in their daily lives. In particular, they face increasing pressure to affirm, through Qur'anic interpretation, that Islam recognises Judaism and Christianity as salvific faiths and to downplay Islamic claims to superiority. Through a case study of a US Qur'anic study group, this article explores how American Muslims appropriate and contest the logic of pluralism through their interpretations of the Qur'an. Seeking to affirm ecumenicism in the Qur'an, this group of American Muslims appropriated the asbāb al-nuzūl (‘circumstances of revelation’) under the rubric of ‘context’ in order to make the case for the commensurability of Islam and religious pluralism, even as they vigorously disagreed about the terms under which those circumstances could be applied. The ethnographic dialogues presented here demonstrate not only the rich and vibrant hermeneutics that contemporary Muslims bring to the Qur'an, but also the ways that pluralism both opens up and restricts forms of religious engagement.