Without Forgetting the Imam is an ethnographic study of the religious life of the Lebanese Shi'ites of Dearborn, Michigan, the largest Muslim community outside of the Middle East. Based on four years of fieldwork, this book explores how the Lebanese who have emigrated, most in the past three decades, to the United States, have adapted to their new surroundings. Anthropologist Linda Walbridge delves into the ways in which politics and religion have converged as the Lebanese Shi'i community has remade its identity and accommodated itself to a new environment. She captures a broad picture of religious life within the realm of community living and within the mosques which have proliferated in Dearborn. Walbridge explains how Shi'ites, affected in one way or another by Islamic revivalism, have brought different notions of how their religion should be expressed and carried out in America. These differences are reflected in mosque rituals, social functions, sermons, and educational activities. She also explores how contemporary Middle Eastern politics and the religious leadership in Iran and Iraq influence the functioning of the mosques.

This well-rounded introduction takes an expansive view of Islamic ideology, culture, and tradition, sourcing a range of historical, sociological, and literary perspectives.

Provides an overview of America's Shi'i community, tracing its history, describing its composition in the twenty-first century, and explaining how they have created an identity for themselves in the American context.

This useful resource provides basic information about Islamic life in the United States. Coverage includes population statistics and analysis, as well as immigration information that tracks the settlement of Islamic people in the America. The guide contains contact information for mosques, community organizations, schools, women's groups, media, and student groups. Recent Islamic-American events over the past five years are also reviewed. To see the Introduction, the table of contents, a generous selection of sample pages, and more, visit the The North American Muslim Resource Guide website.

Setting the record straight about Arab American culture.

Based on a political sociology of two families of religious scholars, al-Hakim and al-Khu'i, Elvire Corboz explains the internal workings of transnational leadership patterns in Shi'ism for the first time.

In this volume 30 of the field's top scholars examine historical and contemporary aspects of American Islam, and explore the meaning of religious identity in the context of race, ethnicity, gender, and politics.

Across North America, Islam is portrayed as a religion of immigrants, converts, and cultural outsiders. Yet Muslims have been part of American society for much longer than most people realize. This book documents the history of Islam in Detroit, a city that is home to several of the nation's oldest, most diverse Muslim communities. In the early 1900s, there were thousands of Muslims in Detroit. Most came from Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, and British India. In 1921, they built the nation's first mosque in Highland Park. By the 1930s, new Islam-oriented social movements were taking root among African Americans in Detroit. By the 1950s, Albanians, Arabs, African Americans, and South Asians all had mosques and religious associations in the city, and they were confident that Islam could be, and had already become, an American religion. When immigration laws were liberalized in 1965, new immigrants and new African American converts rapidly became the majority of U.S. Muslims. For them, Detroit's old Muslims and their mosques seemed oddly Americanized, even unorthodox. Old Islam in Detroit explores the rise of Detroit's earliest Muslim communities. It documents the culture wars and doctrinal debates that ensued as these populations confronted Muslim newcomers who did not understand their manner of worship or the American identities they had created. Looking closely at this historical encounter, Old Islam in Detroit provides a new interpretation of the possibilities and limits of Muslim incorporation in American life. It shows how Islam has become American in the past and how the anxieties many new Muslim Americans and non-Muslims feel about the place of Islam in American society today are not inevitable, but are part of a dynamic process of political and religious change that is still unfolding.

In light of the recent death of C. Eric Lincoln, the renowned theorist of race and religion, scholars came together and created this compelling collection that represents twenty years of critical intellectual reflection in Lincoln's honor. "How Long this Road" is a social study of African American religious patterns and dynamics. C. Eric Lincoln's principle concern with the racial factor in American social and religious life expands in these pages to include such correlative factors as gender, the African Diaspora, and social class. "How Long this Road" is an impressive work that is bound to become a classic in religion and sociology courses, church studies and African American studies.

This collection of essays explores the nature of political and religious leadership in Shi'ism. Contributors look at a variety of critical historical periods--from medieval to modern--to reveal the social, political, and theological factors that have influenced the development of Shi'ite leadership.