Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence (by Juliane Hammer)

On Transdisciplinary Possibility: An Interstitial Exploration of American Religious History and Religious Ethics

“…Hammer's Peaceful Families engages ethnographic research among American Muslim communities to pursue multiple, interrelated levels of ethical inquiry directed toward ending domestic violence. Throughout the text, Hammer appeals to what she terms an “ethic of non‐abuse” as an orienting principle among Muslim activists doing antidomestic violence (DV) work, highlighting personal experience, rather than scriptural or religious authority, as the foremost and most foundational motivation driving the activism she encounters (Hammer 2019, 10–11). However, she is thoroughly attentive to the ways that this experiential grounding for ethical activity is often interwoven with appeals to Qur'anic scripture and institutional Islamic ethics more generally.…”

“…By observing the areas where these different ethical commitments reinforce, nuance, and clash with one another, Hammer is able to flesh out the complexities of Muslim anti‐DV efforts as tangible, lived practices. As an additional layer of ethical analysis underwriting the work, Peaceful Families addresses concerns regarding the ethics of scholarship, pushing toward an understanding of research and activism as intertwined projects that are fundamentally affective and political (2019, 21–24).…”

“…However, due in large part to the ethical concerns she raises throughout the text (articulated in the sentences following this note), I read Peaceful Families as a work that speaks to and within the discipline of religious ethics. My decision to characterize the book in this way is also informed by the attention the text garnered from scholars of Christian ethics and Islamic ethics in a 2020 book forum published on Maydan (see Hughes 2020). 21 This turn to ethnographic and anthropological scholarship is most pronounced in virtue and comparative religious ethics.…”

“…To explore the potential and limitations of this kind of transdisciplinary work, with a particular focus on the relationship between the disciplines of American religious history and religious ethics, this essay examines four books published within the last 4 years—two loosely situated on each side of the disciplinary rift. Each of these texts— Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum (2022); Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism by Peter Coviello (2019); Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence by Juliane Hammer (2019); and The Sex Obsession: Perversity and Possibility in American Politics by Janet R. Jakobsen (2020)—raises questions that hover at the intersections of ethics and history, offering glimpses into various connections and challenges that come to light when they are placed in conversation. Through an engagement with these books and the avenues for transdisciplinary discourse that they create, I argue that scholarship in both American religious history and religious ethics can be strengthened through a destabilization of the disciplines themselves, creating a greater capacity for historical‐ethical responsiveness to the demands and challenges of a dynamically complex, religious society.…”

“…To explore the potential and limitations of this kind of transdisciplinary work, with a particular focus on the relationship between the disciplines of American religious history and religious ethics, this essay examines four books published within the last 4 years-two loosely situated on each side of the disciplinary rift. 12 Each of these texts-Heathen: Religion and Race in American History by Kathryn Gin Lum (2022); Make Yourselves Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism by Peter Coviello (2019); Peaceful Families: American Muslim Efforts Against Domestic Violence by Juliane Hammer (2019); and The Sex 10 This stance is typified in Aldrich 2014, where he contends that interdisciplinary work must "necessarily [take] disciplines as given" prior to the pursuit of disciplinary integration that ideally creates a "single, new, intellectually coherent whole" (2-3).…”