Who owns Islam? The prism of authenticity and the specter of appropriation among American Muslims
This article discusses the controversies over the desired interaction between “religion” and “culture” within contemporary American Islam, where several interpretive communities (formed at the intersection of theological positionings, class affiliations and racial categorizations) express divergent...
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| Опубликовано в: : | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/alterites, |
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| Главный автор: | |
| Формат: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Язык: | Anglais |
| Опубликовано: |
Appartenances & Altérités
2024
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| Предметы: | |
| Online-ссылка: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Итог: | This article discusses the controversies over the desired interaction between “religion” and “culture” within contemporary American Islam, where several interpretive communities (formed at the intersection of theological positionings, class affiliations and racial categorizations) express divergent conceptions of both Islam and the United States. Relying on interviews and ethnographic observations among Muslim converts in Chicago, the article unpacks these controversies by placing them in the social context in which they arise. It shows that American Muslims often make use of the prism of “authenticity”, whether cultural or religious, to define what is “truly” Islamic or “truly” American, but that these qualifications of authenticity are also haunted by the specter of appropriation and inseparable from an appraisal of the relations of domination that run through the American Muslim minority. After outlining a brief history of borrowings from the Islamic tradition by groups holding different positions in the U.S. social and racial stratification system, the article examines one by one three registers of discourse on the notion of culture in Islamic circles: acculturation, exculturation and inculturation. These three registers are based on different understandings of “authenticity” and give rise to contrasting views of what constitutes appropriation. |
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