Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper concentrates on the interaction of Islam and secular nationalism in the modern Middle East. Although the political power of Islam diminished with the rise of nationalism, it largely remained as a strong social force in the Middle East. While several Muslim political leaders spent efforts to create secular state structures, they still relied on the power of Islam for many practical reasons. From the 1920s on, the Middle East states aimed to take Islam under state control. Islam was taken under control so that secular nationalism could be initiated smoothly. However, based on the political conditions after WWII, the place of Islam in the Middle East was reevaluated by almost every Islamic state so that it could be used to promote the national interests. State control of Islam could be achieved only if Islam was nationalized through state propaganda and public education systems. Throughout the Middle East several Muslim states initiated projects to nationalize Islam. In this paper, I propose that the Muslim states’ desire to use Islam for their political interests paved the way for the rise of political Islam. What were the conditions that forced the political leaders to appeal the socio-political power of Islam? How the projects to nationalize Islam were carried out in the Middle East? Along with answering these questions, I will conclude my paper by answering two crucial questions: Why did the nationalization of Islam fail? Did the failure of these projects cause further Islamization of the Middle East.

Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: In the proposed paper, I analyze the negotiations of religious belonging in the contemporary period of American state surveillance of Muslim citizens and non-citizens through the ethnographic case study of a Muslim immigrant youth gang in Houston, Texas. I draw on ethnographic research with a Muslim immigrant youth gang consisting of Pakistani, Somali, Jordanian and African-American Muslim men to critically discuss the conditions that contribute to emergence and appropriation of radical Islam. Although my research amongst Muslim-Americans and recent Muslim immigrants reveals a sustained and variegated engagement of Muslim immigrants in mainstream American civil and political society and participation in protests over Islamic militancy and fundamentalism, the politics of Muslim immigrant youth gang members reveal a radicalized imagining, interpretation and appropriation of Islamic traditions, histories and symbols. This appropriation and interpretation is premised on a perceived morality of contemporary American society and the unequal power relations between America and the Muslim World. Importantly and ironically, such appropriations of radicalized Islam co-exist with an active participation in mainstream American public cultural life. For example, all gang members drank alcohol, routinely visited clubs and bars, maintained romantic relationships with non-Muslim women and attempted to find employment in the mainstream private sector. I argue the apparent contradiction between espousing radical politics and everyday life is: a) a product of American state projects of objectification, persecution and criminalization of Muslim citizens and non-citizens following 9/11; and b) a performative strategy to mediate the alienation and disenfranchisement of Muslim immigrant youth—all unemployed or amongst the working poor—from mainstream American political and economic community.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Islam is going through a fundamental diffusion of religious knowledge and authority. Media technologies like the Web and satellite television are facilitating the emergence of a new breadth of Islam in the public sphere in Muslim societies and amongst Muslims in diaspora. Deeply influenced by the global and local dynamics of consumer culture, the proponents of this new Islam are more media-savvy and less dogmatic on how Islam should be mediated than their conservative counterparts. Unlike in the politically engaged Islam, the architects of this new trend are younger Muslims with more business skills than religious knowledge. From websites advertising the latest fashions in Islamic dress and others offering halal versions to non-Islamic foods such as the Italian Salami, the German Sausage or McDonald’s burger to television shows encouraging Muslims to use their religion as a success formula for spiritual self-fulfillment and material achievement, the new economic liberalism of Islam is certainly modern in its mediation, but is its substance as liberal as the form?
This paper examines how the new religious media are constructing the image of the modern Muslim and what kind of religious identities and subjectivities emerge as a result of a purely material consumption that is religiously committed. My analysis is based on a textual analysis of a popular Islamic television show on Iqra’, a 24-hour Saudi religious channel that prides itself in being the first Islamic entertainment television.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The Horn of Africa country of Somalia has experienced a long and protracted civil war during most of the past sixteen years with various actors vying among themselves for power. A succession of warlords, pseudo-counterterrorists and Islamists fought bloody and protracted wars to that effect. None of these actors got nearly as close to materializing their dream of gaining national power as did the now defunct Union of Islamic Courts whose six months aspiration to establish an Islamic state was thwarted, in part, by an American backed Ethiopian military intervention. This after the courts anchored themselves on a strategy of domestic extremism and displayed expansionist tendencies regionally creating strange bedfellows united solely in their desire to prevent the UIC.
This paper will explain the fall from power of the Union of Islamic Courts by analyzing the convergence of these powerful domestic and international interests that conspired to stop the then ascendant group from establishing an Islamic state in Somalia.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The rapid economic changes of the past 25 or 30 years have been accompanied by the broad dissemination of social, cultural, and political information to all corners of the globe. This phenomena has contributed to a number of important socio-political dev