Nermeen Mouftah | University of Illinois at Chicago (original) (raw)
Papers by Nermeen Mouftah
Wabash Center blog series on Embodied Teaching, 2022
Tags: teaching Islam | embodied teaching | listening When asked, "What was Muhammad's moral chara... more Tags: teaching Islam | embodied teaching | listening When asked, "What was Muhammad's moral character like?" Aisha replied: "His moral character was the Quran.
The Muslim World, 2022
How might our understanding of humanitarianism and development be enriched if we centered Muslims... more How might our understanding of humanitarianism and development be enriched if we centered Muslims, not only as the largest recipients of care but also as significant actors and donors? Despite critical histories and analyses of humanitarianism and development that demystify them as universal projects for “good,” logics of the global north persist in dominating the norms of a perceived “global order.” Centering Muslims in humanitarianism and development offers the opportunity to rethink universal and normative projects of improvement, rescue, and care. Centering Muslims calls our attention to the many ways that Muslims think, lead, engage, and practice aid and relief. In such an effort to center, neither Muslims nor the Islamic tradition should be taken exclusively as foils, or limited to the position of “speaking back” to secular or Christian powers. To be sure, Muslim practices may indeed decenter hegemonic norms and, at times, do so intentionally. Critical research on religion and international aid demonstrates how religious actors upend dominant logics. Yet, as contributors to this special issue demonstrate, Muslim undertakings may just as often present translations or adaptations of what they understand to be global or international norms. This special issue explores Muslim projects of aid, charity, and relief, not as idiosyncratic examples of a global project led by the global north but rather as telling illustrations of the variegated ways that people today address human need and suffering. Twenty-first century Muslim projects of humanitarianism and development—sometimes glossed as Islamic humanitarianism or Islamic development—offer a view not only of a type of humanitarianism—one adjusted by the adjective Muslim or Islamic—but
rather new ways to understand human grappling with notions of justice, humanity, compassion, and responsibility.
The Muslim World, 2022
In Pakistan, one of the most significant celebrations on the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Azha (Feast ... more In Pakistan, one of the most significant celebrations on the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Azha (Feast of the Sacrifice), is marked by two major rituals. At the center of the festival is the animal slaughter remembering the prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. The second, dating to Pakistan’s earliest days as a nation, is the collection of animal hides from the sacrifice. NGOs, political parties, and madrasas annually compete to collect and auction the sacrificial skins. This paper examines how Alkhidmat Foundation–the social welfare branch of the Islamist party Jama’at-e-Islami–invests in a risky fundraising ritual that animates the value of sacrifice in their humanitarian work. While historically the auction of animal hides has been lucrative, over the last decade, the income has come under threat due to the rise of synthetic leathers on the global market, inflation, and climate change, which have left Pakistan’s leather commodity in peril and, with it, the fate of a major source of income for the country’s social services. Pakistan’s skins collection offers insight into a fundraising practice that instantiates sacrifice writ large: of time, safety, and resources, and sometimes, of intimate relations. Sacrifice is the motivating value that underpins dedication to the annual hide collection and articulates Alkhidmat’s humanitarianism through the human capability of sacrifice.
The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching, 2020
This essay reflects on a critical incident that occurred during a seminar discussion about the ag... more This essay reflects on a critical incident that occurred during a seminar discussion about the age of Aishah at the time of her marriage to the prophet Muhammed. I take students’ discomfort with the material and their expression of emotions—especially their desire to love Islam—as an opening to think about the opportunities and challenges of working with students’ emotions in the classroom. I begin by problematizing love (or
the want of it) as an Islamophilic response to students’ awareness of the dangers of Islamophobia. I then go on to entertain the possibility of embracing love as a ‘productive’ emotion that offers insights into the study of Islam and Muslims. While I caution against the traps of Islamophilia, I take love as an important and perhaps overlooked dimension of pedagogy.
Contemporary Islam, 2020
While the care of orphans is a much lauded form of giving, precisely what care should look like i... more While the care of orphans is a much lauded form of giving, precisely what care should look like is highly contested. This is due, in large part, to a consensus among the Islamic legal schools that adoption (tabanni) is prohibited. This article explores contemporary Muslim Americans' negotiations of Islamic law to find ethical ways to care for non-biological children within their household. Through Muslim American collaborations and contentions over the regulation of orphan care, including the interventions of Islamic scholars and scholar-activists, as well as the intimate reflections of adoptive and foster parents, I demonstrate how Islamic law is not the exclusive domain of jurists, but of Muslim American communities forging new notions of care, kinship, and family as they draw together distinct legal bodies, traditions, and values.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2019
For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and for... more For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and foremost, or whether one must prioritize understanding the meaning of its complex language. What is the best way to encounter God's Word? To explore this question, a women's Qurʾan lesson in a slum of Old Cairo illustrates modern Muslim anxieties over the place of discursive meaning in encounters with the Qurʾan. This article elaborates the concept of affirmation as an analytic to grasp how the women relate to the truth of revelation. Affirmation is a performative and discursive her-meneutic practice that deploys Qurʾanic citation, situates Qurʾanic concepts in daily life, and sutures the efficacy of Qurʾan education with correct language and with right action. Their lessons are indicative of reformist trends in Qurʾan education that open onto questions of meaning and understanding in relation to human interactions with divine speech.
This paper explores anxieties about ignorance and how Egypt’s January 25th uprising brought new u... more This paper explores anxieties about ignorance and how Egypt’s January 25th uprising brought new urgency to calls for managing it. In post-Mubarak Egypt, literacy activism became a major platform to “continue the revolution.” Drawing on ethnographic research that observes a national literacy campaign among shipyard workers, I demonstrate how a particular strand of Islamic reformism makes modern education an indicator of morality, ultimately constraining the revolutionary potential of the literacy movement. Literacy activism offers a crucial lens to observe a major challenge for revolutionary action—the negotiation of recognition between social classes. Through attention to teacher-student interactions, I depict how workers negotiated the power of the written word to gain respect in their early experiments with writing. This paper contributes towards an anthropology of ignorance by revealing the political predicaments that arise out of an Islamic literacy activism that I argue is ultimately counter-revolutionary in its effects.
Life Makers, a major grassroots social development organization established by the prominent Musl... more Life Makers, a major grassroots social development organization established by the prominent Muslim preacher Amr Khaled, has had a tumultuous history with Egyptian authorities for over a decade. The main source of the conflict is how the organization mobilizes faith in their activities in a country currently wary of political Islam. Life Makers' particular vision of faith development offers a view of a distinct ethics and politics of Islamic development in the light of the Middle East uprising, one that not only seeks to redefine traditional alms practices, but that also provides an implicit critique of the entanglements of politics and religion. This paper inquires into the organization's reinterpretation of the Islamic conception of “good works” (khayr) by investigating how they marshal “faith,” rather than and in contrast to “religion.” By focusing on the ethic of voluntarism that animates the organization, I examine how Life Makers volunteers understand faith development as not only an alternative to the machinations of Islam for political power, but as an authentic version of Islam. The voices of youth volunteers demonstrate how they reformulate traditional forms of obligatory charity that call on the distribution of goods, to instead make action through voluntarism the most valuable form of giving. Volunteers foreground issues of belief in orienting their actions as they contemplate and experiment with the best way to please God, work for others, and manage their own lives at a moment of possibility and upheaval. By bringing together NGO studies with an anthropology of religion, this paper crystallizes the NGO as not only a site that draws on religion to motivate and mold social development projects, but significantly as a locus for defining, delimiting, and disciplining religion in public and political life.
For me, scriptural reasoning is like Islam, it is about 'wholeness-making.'" This is the final me... more For me, scriptural reasoning is like Islam, it is about 'wholeness-making.'" This is the final meeting of the year. It is a Tuesday evening, a few minutes past six, and we are seated around the white cloth dining table, our dinner plates in front of us. The members of Reading Abrahamic Scriptures Together are answering the last warm-up introductory question they will get to answer: What did you get out of RAST? Tonight, like all of the bi-weekly meetings of the last three years, we begin with an ice-breaker question as members break bread in the Burwash Private Dining Hall of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. This evening the group reads Matthew 1.18-25 and 27.15-23 to examine how dreams function in the Gospel as a confirmation of truth. It is an evening of scriptural reasoning that brings together faculty as well as graduate and undergraduate students belonging to Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, and others who do not belong to any. The group chose the final topic, dreams, and already read Daniel and Yusuf before coming to tonight's text. The selection is printed as a handout and passed along. Some people reach for pens and start to mark their pages. Then we begin to read aloud, taking turns; each person reads a verse until we have come to the end of the passage. Some moments of silence pass as readers reflect. One student has a question about Matthew's audience, and there is another who asks about the occasion of the festival in the passage. These are the beginnings of the litany of questions that lead to reasoning.
Books by Nermeen Mouftah
Read in the Name of Your Lord: Islamic Literacy Development in Revolutionary Egypt , 2024
Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands—including th... more Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands—including the call to address Egypt's education crisis and adult literacy rates.
Read in the Name of Your Lord traces the push for universal literacy as a project caught between revolutionary activism and Islamic reformism in post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite their many disagreements, religious reformers, revolutionaries, and state actors converged on literacy as the first step toward realizing aspirations of the revolution. They invoked the verse Muslims believe was the first to be revealed, "Read in the name of your Lord," to teach literacy as a religious duty and the foundation for the country's future. Nermeen Mouftah unravels how this religiously inspired push for universal literacy was born of twenty-first-century scripturalism and simultaneously went beyond the Quran, to make reading and writing virtuous acts of the liberal state. While revolutionary literacy campaigns soon vanished and adult literacy rates remained stubbornly low, their efforts revealed the importance of recognizing alternative modes of text processing and the personhood and knowledge of nonliterate people.
Read in the Name of Your Lord demonstrates how the rise in modern
scripturalism underpinned literacy activism, blurring the binary between secular and religious knowledge.
Book Reviews by Nermeen Mouftah
In the last couple of decades or so, among the central arguments that have occupied the problem s... more In the last couple of decades or so, among the central arguments that have occupied the problem space of the study of religion is that the religious and the secular cannot be approached as opposites. Rather than the inverse of religion, the secular represents a form of discursive and institutional power that constantly manages and regulates what does and does not count as religion. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood is among the pioneering scholars of critical secularism studies whose work has shaped the contours of this argument in singularly novel and complex ways. Her most recent book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report is the subject of this book forum. It brings together three scholars of varied disciplinary persuasions and regions of specialization, Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, Nermeen Mouftah, and John Modern, who explore and wrestle with different aspects of Mahmood's interventions. This introductory essay presents a brief overview of the central themes and arguments at the heart of Religious Difference in a Secular Age as a way to prepare the ground for the more specific questions engaged and analyses conducted in the individual commentaries that follow.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Media by Nermeen Mouftah
Documentary Films by Nermeen Mouftah
Wabash Center blog series on Embodied Teaching, 2022
Tags: teaching Islam | embodied teaching | listening When asked, "What was Muhammad's moral chara... more Tags: teaching Islam | embodied teaching | listening When asked, "What was Muhammad's moral character like?" Aisha replied: "His moral character was the Quran.
The Muslim World, 2022
How might our understanding of humanitarianism and development be enriched if we centered Muslims... more How might our understanding of humanitarianism and development be enriched if we centered Muslims, not only as the largest recipients of care but also as significant actors and donors? Despite critical histories and analyses of humanitarianism and development that demystify them as universal projects for “good,” logics of the global north persist in dominating the norms of a perceived “global order.” Centering Muslims in humanitarianism and development offers the opportunity to rethink universal and normative projects of improvement, rescue, and care. Centering Muslims calls our attention to the many ways that Muslims think, lead, engage, and practice aid and relief. In such an effort to center, neither Muslims nor the Islamic tradition should be taken exclusively as foils, or limited to the position of “speaking back” to secular or Christian powers. To be sure, Muslim practices may indeed decenter hegemonic norms and, at times, do so intentionally. Critical research on religion and international aid demonstrates how religious actors upend dominant logics. Yet, as contributors to this special issue demonstrate, Muslim undertakings may just as often present translations or adaptations of what they understand to be global or international norms. This special issue explores Muslim projects of aid, charity, and relief, not as idiosyncratic examples of a global project led by the global north but rather as telling illustrations of the variegated ways that people today address human need and suffering. Twenty-first century Muslim projects of humanitarianism and development—sometimes glossed as Islamic humanitarianism or Islamic development—offer a view not only of a type of humanitarianism—one adjusted by the adjective Muslim or Islamic—but
rather new ways to understand human grappling with notions of justice, humanity, compassion, and responsibility.
The Muslim World, 2022
In Pakistan, one of the most significant celebrations on the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Azha (Feast ... more In Pakistan, one of the most significant celebrations on the Muslim calendar, Eid al-Azha (Feast of the Sacrifice), is marked by two major rituals. At the center of the festival is the animal slaughter remembering the prophet Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. The second, dating to Pakistan’s earliest days as a nation, is the collection of animal hides from the sacrifice. NGOs, political parties, and madrasas annually compete to collect and auction the sacrificial skins. This paper examines how Alkhidmat Foundation–the social welfare branch of the Islamist party Jama’at-e-Islami–invests in a risky fundraising ritual that animates the value of sacrifice in their humanitarian work. While historically the auction of animal hides has been lucrative, over the last decade, the income has come under threat due to the rise of synthetic leathers on the global market, inflation, and climate change, which have left Pakistan’s leather commodity in peril and, with it, the fate of a major source of income for the country’s social services. Pakistan’s skins collection offers insight into a fundraising practice that instantiates sacrifice writ large: of time, safety, and resources, and sometimes, of intimate relations. Sacrifice is the motivating value that underpins dedication to the annual hide collection and articulates Alkhidmat’s humanitarianism through the human capability of sacrifice.
The Wabash Center Journal on Teaching, 2020
This essay reflects on a critical incident that occurred during a seminar discussion about the ag... more This essay reflects on a critical incident that occurred during a seminar discussion about the age of Aishah at the time of her marriage to the prophet Muhammed. I take students’ discomfort with the material and their expression of emotions—especially their desire to love Islam—as an opening to think about the opportunities and challenges of working with students’ emotions in the classroom. I begin by problematizing love (or
the want of it) as an Islamophilic response to students’ awareness of the dangers of Islamophobia. I then go on to entertain the possibility of embracing love as a ‘productive’ emotion that offers insights into the study of Islam and Muslims. While I caution against the traps of Islamophilia, I take love as an important and perhaps overlooked dimension of pedagogy.
Contemporary Islam, 2020
While the care of orphans is a much lauded form of giving, precisely what care should look like i... more While the care of orphans is a much lauded form of giving, precisely what care should look like is highly contested. This is due, in large part, to a consensus among the Islamic legal schools that adoption (tabanni) is prohibited. This article explores contemporary Muslim Americans' negotiations of Islamic law to find ethical ways to care for non-biological children within their household. Through Muslim American collaborations and contentions over the regulation of orphan care, including the interventions of Islamic scholars and scholar-activists, as well as the intimate reflections of adoptive and foster parents, I demonstrate how Islamic law is not the exclusive domain of jurists, but of Muslim American communities forging new notions of care, kinship, and family as they draw together distinct legal bodies, traditions, and values.
International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2019
For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and for... more For centuries Muslims have asked whether the Qurʾan should be recited and memorized first and foremost, or whether one must prioritize understanding the meaning of its complex language. What is the best way to encounter God's Word? To explore this question, a women's Qurʾan lesson in a slum of Old Cairo illustrates modern Muslim anxieties over the place of discursive meaning in encounters with the Qurʾan. This article elaborates the concept of affirmation as an analytic to grasp how the women relate to the truth of revelation. Affirmation is a performative and discursive her-meneutic practice that deploys Qurʾanic citation, situates Qurʾanic concepts in daily life, and sutures the efficacy of Qurʾan education with correct language and with right action. Their lessons are indicative of reformist trends in Qurʾan education that open onto questions of meaning and understanding in relation to human interactions with divine speech.
This paper explores anxieties about ignorance and how Egypt’s January 25th uprising brought new u... more This paper explores anxieties about ignorance and how Egypt’s January 25th uprising brought new urgency to calls for managing it. In post-Mubarak Egypt, literacy activism became a major platform to “continue the revolution.” Drawing on ethnographic research that observes a national literacy campaign among shipyard workers, I demonstrate how a particular strand of Islamic reformism makes modern education an indicator of morality, ultimately constraining the revolutionary potential of the literacy movement. Literacy activism offers a crucial lens to observe a major challenge for revolutionary action—the negotiation of recognition between social classes. Through attention to teacher-student interactions, I depict how workers negotiated the power of the written word to gain respect in their early experiments with writing. This paper contributes towards an anthropology of ignorance by revealing the political predicaments that arise out of an Islamic literacy activism that I argue is ultimately counter-revolutionary in its effects.
Life Makers, a major grassroots social development organization established by the prominent Musl... more Life Makers, a major grassroots social development organization established by the prominent Muslim preacher Amr Khaled, has had a tumultuous history with Egyptian authorities for over a decade. The main source of the conflict is how the organization mobilizes faith in their activities in a country currently wary of political Islam. Life Makers' particular vision of faith development offers a view of a distinct ethics and politics of Islamic development in the light of the Middle East uprising, one that not only seeks to redefine traditional alms practices, but that also provides an implicit critique of the entanglements of politics and religion. This paper inquires into the organization's reinterpretation of the Islamic conception of “good works” (khayr) by investigating how they marshal “faith,” rather than and in contrast to “religion.” By focusing on the ethic of voluntarism that animates the organization, I examine how Life Makers volunteers understand faith development as not only an alternative to the machinations of Islam for political power, but as an authentic version of Islam. The voices of youth volunteers demonstrate how they reformulate traditional forms of obligatory charity that call on the distribution of goods, to instead make action through voluntarism the most valuable form of giving. Volunteers foreground issues of belief in orienting their actions as they contemplate and experiment with the best way to please God, work for others, and manage their own lives at a moment of possibility and upheaval. By bringing together NGO studies with an anthropology of religion, this paper crystallizes the NGO as not only a site that draws on religion to motivate and mold social development projects, but significantly as a locus for defining, delimiting, and disciplining religion in public and political life.
For me, scriptural reasoning is like Islam, it is about 'wholeness-making.'" This is the final me... more For me, scriptural reasoning is like Islam, it is about 'wholeness-making.'" This is the final meeting of the year. It is a Tuesday evening, a few minutes past six, and we are seated around the white cloth dining table, our dinner plates in front of us. The members of Reading Abrahamic Scriptures Together are answering the last warm-up introductory question they will get to answer: What did you get out of RAST? Tonight, like all of the bi-weekly meetings of the last three years, we begin with an ice-breaker question as members break bread in the Burwash Private Dining Hall of Victoria College at the University of Toronto. This evening the group reads Matthew 1.18-25 and 27.15-23 to examine how dreams function in the Gospel as a confirmation of truth. It is an evening of scriptural reasoning that brings together faculty as well as graduate and undergraduate students belonging to Jewish, Christian and Muslim traditions, and others who do not belong to any. The group chose the final topic, dreams, and already read Daniel and Yusuf before coming to tonight's text. The selection is printed as a handout and passed along. Some people reach for pens and start to mark their pages. Then we begin to read aloud, taking turns; each person reads a verse until we have come to the end of the passage. Some moments of silence pass as readers reflect. One student has a question about Matthew's audience, and there is another who asks about the occasion of the festival in the passage. These are the beginnings of the litany of questions that lead to reasoning.
Read in the Name of Your Lord: Islamic Literacy Development in Revolutionary Egypt , 2024
Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands—including th... more Egypt's January 2011 uprising spurred millions to action with a cacophony of demands—including the call to address Egypt's education crisis and adult literacy rates.
Read in the Name of Your Lord traces the push for universal literacy as a project caught between revolutionary activism and Islamic reformism in post-Mubarak Egypt. Despite their many disagreements, religious reformers, revolutionaries, and state actors converged on literacy as the first step toward realizing aspirations of the revolution. They invoked the verse Muslims believe was the first to be revealed, "Read in the name of your Lord," to teach literacy as a religious duty and the foundation for the country's future. Nermeen Mouftah unravels how this religiously inspired push for universal literacy was born of twenty-first-century scripturalism and simultaneously went beyond the Quran, to make reading and writing virtuous acts of the liberal state. While revolutionary literacy campaigns soon vanished and adult literacy rates remained stubbornly low, their efforts revealed the importance of recognizing alternative modes of text processing and the personhood and knowledge of nonliterate people.
Read in the Name of Your Lord demonstrates how the rise in modern
scripturalism underpinned literacy activism, blurring the binary between secular and religious knowledge.
In the last couple of decades or so, among the central arguments that have occupied the problem s... more In the last couple of decades or so, among the central arguments that have occupied the problem space of the study of religion is that the religious and the secular cannot be approached as opposites. Rather than the inverse of religion, the secular represents a form of discursive and institutional power that constantly manages and regulates what does and does not count as religion. The anthropologist Saba Mahmood is among the pioneering scholars of critical secularism studies whose work has shaped the contours of this argument in singularly novel and complex ways. Her most recent book Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report is the subject of this book forum. It brings together three scholars of varied disciplinary persuasions and regions of specialization, Arvind-Pal S. Mandair, Nermeen Mouftah, and John Modern, who explore and wrestle with different aspects of Mahmood's interventions. This introductory essay presents a brief overview of the central themes and arguments at the heart of Religious Difference in a Secular Age as a way to prepare the ground for the more specific questions engaged and analyses conducted in the individual commentaries that follow.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, a... more JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.