Despite being home to the largest Muslim population in Latin America (PewResearchCenter 2015), little research focuses on Islamic identities and Muslim life in Argentina (except Montenegro 2015). This is a surprising lacuna, especially given the attention to presumed terrorist activity on the “Triple Frontier” between Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay (Anzit Guerrero 2006; Caro 2012). Moreover, controversy swirls around former Argentine president Cristina Fernández de Kirschner’s relationship with Iran, especially after the death of public prosecutor Alberto Nisman investigating the matter. Emergent research on Middle Eastern communities in Latin America looks mainly at immigration (Alfaro-Velcamp 2007) and ethnic identity (Civantos 2005; Karam 2007), but less at religion, religious identities, and religious politics so critical to transnational Muslim identities today. Drawing on several years of fieldwork, this paper focuses on how Islamic media and institutions connect Shi’a, Sunni, Druze, Isma’ili, and Alawite communities inside Argentina, across Latin America, and with the larger Muslim Umma. Argentina is the home to Latin America’s first Islamic television station AnnurTV, in addition to Radio TV Almahdi in Tucumán and innumerable websites and organizations (like PrensaIslamica, “an alternative to media hegemony”). Buenos Aires boasts Latin America’s largest mosque El Centro Cultural Islámico Custodio de las Dos Sagradas Mezquitas Rey Fahd that has a Muslim school, built by former president Carlos Menem, of Syrian extraction. The mosque’s location—in the city’s most expensive neighborhood—speaks to the Muslim community’s visibility. The venerable El Centro Islámico de la República Argentina also has its own school Colegio Omar Bin Al Jattab, newspaper Voz de l’Islam (Voice of Islam), and radio program. Moreover, Muslim women like Masuma Assad de Paz play visible roles in public debates in the national press, the blogosphere, and the international media. Assad de Paz, president of the Unión de Mujeres Musulmanas Argentinas (UMMA), maintains an active website with hundreds of articles on Islam and women in Islam. In Europe, debates rage over the role of Muslim minorities, focusing on how Muslim identities threaten secular life and governance (e.g., Bowen 2011; Fernando 2014; Jouili 2015). Yet Latin American negotiates “a third way” (un tercer camino) distinct from U.S. and European secularisms, forged through political identities calling for solidarity across the Global South. As one Chilean journalist observes, Latin America is outside “a new world order in occidental countries living in constant war with Islam” (Lizama 2009).

In July of 1952, the international media rushed to record revolutionary and tragic events that unfolded, respectively, in Egypt and Argentina. Early in the morning of July 23rd, the voice of the young army officer Anwar Sadat rang out across the airwaves as he announced the bloodless coup that was taking place, and that would soon oust Farouk I. Press organs around the world buzzed with the news, but in Argentina, Farouk’s defeat was eclipsed by national tragedy. On the same day that Farouk fled to Italy, First Lady Eva (“Evita”) Perón lay on her deathbed. On the evening of the 26th, rapt listeners across Argentina tuned in as the National Press Secretary interrupted the nightly broadcast to announce that “at 20:25 hours Mrs. Eva Perón, Spiritual Leader of the Nation, died.” With Eva Perón’s death, an outpouring of popular grief mixed with patriotic zeal, reaching a fever pitch with nearly three million people attending her funeral. In the months that followed, populist leader Juan Domingo Perón embarked on his second term in office faced with a national economy plagued by mounting financial problems, and no longer bolstered by Eva, his charismatic partner and ally in the Peronist national project. Across the country, press organs from Argentina’s Middle Eastern community joined the fray of impassioned mourning for Eva Perón, but their anguish was also accompanied by an explosion of jubilant press coverage of the revolutionary process unfolding on Egyptian soil. For Argentine citizens who could trace their roots back to Arabic-speaking immigrants from the Eastern Mediterranean, or who had themselves emigrated from this region, the events of 1952 led to opportunities for advocating for a closer relationship between Argentina and the Arab world. In this paper, I analyze the ways in which Argentines experienced, and reacted to, the Egyptian Revolution of 1952. In the post-World War II era, both Argentina and Egypt looked to strengthen their international alliances within the Global South as they negotiated their position in the early Cold War era. University students, government officials, and citizens of Arab descent living in Argentina looked on enthusiastically as the Revolution and ensuing Suez Canal crisis unfolded. Both Argentine and Egyptian witnesses to these events interpreted them as signs of a common destiny for Latin America and the Arab world. This paper is based on archival research conducted in Argentina’s Biblioteca Nacional, and the Hoover Institute at Stanford University.

Islam has grown by leaps and bounds in Latin America and among Latinos in the United States in the past three decades. Most of this expansion has happened through conversion and can be traced to the transnational institutionalization of Muslim religious practice in the region. In Mexico, where no mosques existed before the 1980’s, an initial handful of converts who embraced Islam as economic migrants in the United States have joined a small historical Lebanese Shia migration and Spanish proselytizing converts in founding spaces of worship. The new mosques, musallas and tariqas make Islam a presence in Mexican public space, attracting new conversions and fuelling the growth of Mexican Muslim communities. As these become more numerous and more aware of the diversity of practice and interpretation in Islam, new spaces of worship and dawa- of invitation to the faith- have been established. In the past two years, two new Sufi orders and a Shia community have been established in Mexico City and its environs and are already developing headquarters in other large and medium sized urban centre in Mexico. This most recent growth has occurred through the presence of young religious leaders with formative links to Argentinian Islam. In the same period, new proselytizing efforts such as the Turkish Fetulla Gullen initiative have also developed a visible and effective presence in Mexico. The institutionalization of diversity has occurred in synergy with the fragmentation of the initial convert communities. As converts acquire religious expertise through contact with fellow Muslims online and in historically Muslim regions where some have received religious education, they increasingly assert a Mexican or a Latino Islam as distinctive and establish institutions with specific theological traditions and socio-demographic profiles. The paper is based on fieldwork among Mexican Muslim communities between 2005-2015; especially the "Ethnographic Census of Muslim Populations in Mexico" ethnographic and archival project.

The Great Syrian Revolt (1925-1927) led to significant and sustained institution building among the sizable Muslim colonies in Argentina. In the process of organizing the communities, several activists and community leaders organized fund drives, battled French and British sympathizers in the robust Arabic-language press, primarily located in the port city of Buenos Aires, connected with like-minded Muslims throughout the Atlantic world, and tried to forge alliances with the various anti-colonial movements in Argentina. These actions provoked the close surveillance by French diplomats and the intervention of the Argentine state at particular moments. The result was a variety of strategies pursued by numerous activists during the interwar period that had two concurrent effects - creating moments of unity among a fractious Muslim colony and driving a wedge through the larger Syrian-Lebanese colonies in Argentina. While the French in Syria and Lebanon produced tension within this immigrant colony, Muslim activists were deeply influenced by Argentine popular political culture, in particular the frames of reference generated by a vibrant anti-imperialist sentiment. This paper asserts that to fully understand this Islamic transnational activism, the study must be grounded in the social realities, popular politics, and political contexts of Argentina. The paper is built upon Arabic- and Spanish-language newspapers as well as Argentine and French diplomatic source materials.