In 2010, Sharif El-Gamal, founder of Soho Properties and a prominent figure of Lower Manhattan’s Muslim American community, launched the Park51 Islamic Community and Cultural Center project. The stated vision was to create a space to foster Park51 is an Islamic community and cultural center to promote dialogue and understanding of the Islamic faith. The initial designs for the 13-story Islamic Center made a bold architectural statement, wrapped in an exoskeleton of abstract webbed pattern. This vision was not to be, however. Located less than two city blocks from the site of the 9/11 attacks, the project faced political backlash. Critics ranged from conservative media, politicians, and some families of 9/11 victims, citing the project as a monument to terrorist aggression. After a year of severe public scrutiny, El-Gamal withdrew the project, and instead proposed to transform Park51 into 45 Park Place, composed of a 43-story luxury condominium skyscraper, and a significantly reduced program for the Islamic Center, now only a three-story Islamic Museum. This paper explores the suppression of Islamic spaces in the transformation of Park51 to 45 Park Place by examining the social and cultural implications of the projects’ design iterations and programmatic changes. In this process, the flexibility of Islamic religious practices and space allowed the continual reduction of religious aspects of the project – such as the prayer hall – in the program. More broadly, the history of the Park51/45 Park Place project illustrates how capitalist economy, coupled with political and cultural tensions between Muslim and non-Muslim American communities, eclipsed non-western cultural production on the site. The paper also uses the Park51/45 Park Place project to examine the potential impact of market-driven logics and political tensions on the future of Muslim-American religious space in the U.S.

As a cinematic genre, horror serves as a reflection and reproduction of a population’s anxieties, offering a site for analyzing particular formulations of terror in a given sociopolitical moment. William Friedkin’s 1973 film The Exorcist is one such object for analysis. Depicting the demonic possession of 12-year old Regan MacNeil in Georgetown, Washington D.C., the U.S. horror film follows her rapid psychological and moral deterioration, the demon’s influence on her home, and the eventual exorcism performed on her body by two Catholic priests. Though the film has been read through the lens of sexual and gender studies (Daniel Humphrey 2014), little scholarly attention has been given to the film’s opening scene: a 10-minute prologue identifying Iraq as the origin of the demonic presence. With such audiovisual components as the adhan and faceless crowds of veiled Arabs used as Orientalist signals, The Exorcist depicts a particular Muslim/Arab territory as the geographical source from which the monstrous emerges. This detail not only contextualizes the subsequent victimization of a white, U.S. gendered body, but simultaneously identifies an ethnoreligious origin for the film’s employment of sexual aberration and blasphemy as its tool of horror -- Regan’s possession marked by such moments as her use of sexually expletive language and desecration of a Virgin Mary statue. Grounded in media, feminist, and critical ethnic studies, my project analyzes the neglected connection between the Iraq prologue, its use in positioning the demon as Arab/Muslim, and its consequential image-production of the Middle East as a site of profane, sexual horror—a horror directed specifically towards the U.S. domestic body. I argue that the film builds upon the Orientalist imagination of the Arab/Muslim as sexually deviant (Arjana 2015), and reflects emergent gendered, sexual notions of Arab violence unique to the late 1960’s and early 1970’s international contexts. In conversation with the methods of cinema scholar Melani McAlister (2005), I read the film as being further influenced by popular U.S. conceptions of the Arab as a terrorist threat to the American domestic sphere, influenced by the televised broadcasts of such events as the 1972 Munich Massacre, dually defining the notion of ‘terror.’ Through the examination of this U.S. cinematic object, then, I examine The Exorcist as a site within which gendered, sexual, and ethnoreligious imaginings of the Middle East are particularly interpreted and reproduced – locating a horror for the 1970’s American voyeur.

This paper explores the agency of two reformist thinkers, namely Abdolkarim Soroush (1945- ) and Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1943-2010), in negotiating their space within the “western” discourse on Islam. The last three decades, indeed, have witnessed a spark in the literature on reformist Muslim scholars in the Anglophone academia. Authors such as Abdolkarim Soroush, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Fatima Mernissi, Amina Wadud have emerged in the English scholarship as authoritative voices in contemporary debates within Islam. While a broad literature has discussed these thinkers as reflective of an emerging phenomenon within the Muslim world, other authors have underlined the political dimension of “Western” attention to them. In her prominent article “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation,” Saba Mahmood untangled the political structure underpinning American discourse on Islam, seeing the support for these figures as linked to foreign policy and security interests. This research sets itself in dialogue with Mahmood’s position: while recognizing the rise in funding on “moderate Islam” often associated with a security dimension, the study investigates the agency of Soroush and Abu Zayd—two figures discussed by Mahmood—in navigating these platforms. The paper explores their discourses and practices in negotiating attention they received by political actors in Europe and North America. The study argues that these scholars were aware of the risks of instrumentalization and adopted a double criticism addressed to both the Muslim world and the “West.” This narrative translated into three modes of engagement: refusal, acceptance with criticism, and collaboration. In this process, Abu Zayd and Soroush wavered between engagement with political actors in an attempt to shape policies and refusing any association as both a matter of principle and legitimacy within the Muslim community. Through the examination of archival material, reports and interviews, this study brings reformist thinkers’ perspective in the analysis of the socio-political mechanisms underpinning the production of knowledge on Islam in the “West.”

Interfaith marriage is common in the US, about half of all married couples in the US. When couples file for divorce, the religion of minor children can become one of the contentious issues that require court intervention. In the US, there is separation of state and church. The Establishment Clause prevents judges from preferring one religion over another. The judges are supposed not to let their personal preferences play a role in their custody determination. As to religion, the focus is supposed to be on the effect of the practice of the religion on the child. The popularity of the religion and whether it is a majority or minority religion is not supposed to play a role in court decisions regarding the upbringing of children. Previous research shows Muslims are victims of negative stereotypes and judges are not immune from biases and prejudices. To determine if Islam is a disfavored religion in religious custody disputes, we focus on Wayne County, Michigan. Wayne County has one of the largest concentrations of Muslim and Arab Americans in the country. To answer this question, we interview Muslim clergy and Family law lawyers with significant Muslim clientele.