Jerusalem is the third holiest city in Islam and home to some 300,000 Muslims, but due to Israel’s occupation, Muslims in the city live difficult and disrupted lives. What might it mean for them to practice their faith—on the ground, day by day—in such a conflicted place? One way religion becomes a meaningful category is through ritual. Scholars of Muslim religious practices have been attuned to this insight and observed it in various communities and places. But their analyses have often been predicated on an implicit and unquestioned assumption—that those who desire to perform rituals have the means to act on their intention in regular and routine ways. Scholars have also shown that when societies are in rapid transition—be they weakened or threatened—their rituals often evolve with them. This project, therefore, asks: what happens in Jerusalem when Muslims’ ability to routinely perform religious rituals cannot be assumed? The study argues that when rituals are disrupted, Muslims are forced to improvise. Religious rituals—like the performances of skilled jazz musicians—are spontaneous and dynamic but also practiced and deliberate. They are spontaneous in that they respond to the occupation’s disruptions, making physical and discursive adjustments. They are practiced in that Muslims in Jerusalem draw from a repertoire of themes that includes Islam and sacred space, history and eschatology, nationalism and resistance, local culture and geography. This practiced yet spontaneous dynamic becomes, what I call, the “improvisation thesis.” This paper explores the comparative utility of the improvisation thesis for theorizing processes of meaning-making through ritual performances within other religious traditions. That is to say, how might the notions of disruption, improvisation, and resonance give analytical purchase to the ways Judaism, Christianity, or Hinduism transform on the communal level in other contexts experiencing rapid transition and change.

This paper explores the dynamic between secularism and sectarianism by analyzing the dismantlement of a Christian worship collective based in the town of Jeita, Lebanon. In the early 2000, several residents of the Keserwan District started meeting to pray together and discuss the “letters” that one of them (a woman) claimed to receive from Virgin Mary. Throughout the decade, the group built a place of worship, published books, and gathered media attention. Meanwhile, clergy members of the Maronite and Greek Catholic sects grew worried about the practice and representation of Christianity entertained by the Jeita-based collective. Local priests tried to protect their flock against the influence of the charismatic woman communicating with Virgin Mary. Bishops built an archive documenting the collective’s meetings and the life of its members. In 2009, Maronite and Greek Catholic authorities mobilized the legal apparatuses of the state to dismantle the worship collective, claiming that its activities threaten Jeita’s peaceful life. They convinced the Ministry of Interior to seal off the collective’s worship site and ban its meetings. Members of the collective soon complained to Lebanon’s State Council that the Ministry’s involvement violated the principle of religious freedom (enshrined in the country’s constitution). The highest administrative court of the country, however, supported the Ministry’s decision to dismantle the Jeita-based collective, stating that a “group or assembly cannot practice religious acts of worship unless it is legally recognized [by the state].” “Religious freedom,” the State Council concluded, “is linked to the sectarian system, which requires each Lebanese to belong to one of the official sects.” Drawing on fieldwork conducted among members of the Jeita-based collective, clergy members, and state judges involved in adjudicating the case, I argue that the secular principle of religious freedom, in Lebanon, both presupposes and strengthens the country’s sectarian architecture. I also show how states and churches sometimes collaborate to administer the devotional life of ordinary people and maintain religion within the boundaries of governmental reason.

Contemporary research on Islam in the U.S. tends to discuss intra-Muslim relations in terms of an “‘indigenous-immigrant’ divide” (Khabeer 2016, 12), with the terms “indigenous/native” and “immigrant” and denoting the two primary demographic groups that make up the Muslim population in the U.S.: Black American native Muslims and first and second-generation immigrant Muslims (Pew 2011, 2007). These terms are also used by scholars to describe the major schism among Muslim Americans and (pejoratively) by immigrant Muslims to distinguish between native (inauthentic) and immigrant (authoritative) “versions” of Islam (Grewal 2013; Khabeer 2016, 2009; McCloud 1995; Curtis 2008; Rouse 2004). Scholars explain that these strained relationships are caused both by cultural and religious differences and what Fanon describes as “racial superiority/inferiority complexes” (Khabeer 2016; Grewal 2009; Fanon 2008). This paper brings these questions of intra-Muslim relations and perceptions to the city of Philadelphia, where I have conducted two years of ethnographic fieldwork with Black and Arab American Sunni Muslims to understand how these groups relate in the city and how these relationships play out at one specific mosque. More specifically, I am interested in racial subjectivity and identity formation: How do U.S. racial ideologies fuse with Islamic ideals (e.g. of the ummah), imported ideas about race and difference from the Middle East, and everyday experiences to inform how my interlocutors—Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi, and Black Americans —view themselves and others and narrate these differences? What role does race play in informing physical, cultural, and ideological divisions that exist between and among these communities? What work is being undertaken to break down these barriers across the city? How do the imams of the mosque I attend address—or not—these divisions? The goal of the paper is to emphasize some of the barriers to and problematics of solidarity—specifically, racism as manifest in anti-blackness and white, Arab, and immigrant supremacy—as well as some examples of coalition-building and solidarity work being undertaken in the city.

This project analyzes the new social, economical and technological configurations for creating the desire for a “natural” childbirth among families in Turkey. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research conducted in Istanbul, I trace how the transnational global birth conferences along with the popular “pregnancy- schools” are becoming platforms to criticize existing biomedical hegemonies while building an alternative system of care. The scholarship on reproduction typically focuses on the biopolitics of the state, whereby state intervention in reproductive healthcare is meant to make modern citizen-subjects (Boddy 2007, van Hollen 2003, Kanaaneh 2002) and demedicalization processes are considered as a form of feminist resistance to undo these state interventions (Davis Floyd 2006, Adler and Adler 2007, Conrad 1992). However, my interlocutors are drawing on multiple sources that are including but not limited to the feminist discourses such as islamic, spiritual and somatic narratives. Thus, this paper aims to move beyond the feminist vs. anti-feminist dichotomies in examining the practices of natural birthers in Turkey.