Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2023
Analyzes how American Muslim women assert themselves as religious actors in the US and beyond, using the Qur'an as a tool for social justice and community building
The Women's Mosque of America (WMA), a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, is the first of its kind in the United States. Since 2015, the WMA has provided a space for Muslim women to build inclusive communities committed to gender and social justice, challenging the dominant mosque culture that has historically marginalized them through inadequate prayer spaces, exclusion from leadership, and limited access to religious learning.
Tazeen M. Ali explores this congregation, focusing on how members contest established patriarchal norms while simultaneously contending with domestic and global Islamophobia that renders their communities vulnerable to violence. Drawing on textual analysis of WMA sermons and ethnographic interviews with community members, and utilizing Black feminist and womanist frameworks, Ali investigates how American Muslim women create and authorize new conceptions of Islamic authority. Whereas the established model of Islamic authority is rooted in formal religious training and Arabic language expertise, the WMA is predicated on women's embodied experiences, commitments to social and racial justice, English interpretations of the Qur'an, and community building across Islamic sects and in an interfaith context.
Situating the US at the center rather than at the margins of debates over Islamic authority and showing how American Muslim women assert themselves as meaningful religious actors in the US and beyond, Ali's work offers new insights on Islamic authority as it relates to the intersections of gender, religious space, and national belonging.

About the Author
Tazeen M. Ali is Assistant Professor in the John C. Danforth Center on Religion and Politics at Washington University in St. Louis.

Reviews
"Offers a sophisticated and complex perspective on how religious authority is constructed in North American Muslim communities. At once timely and compelling." -- Ayesha S. Chaudhry, Canada Research Chair in Religion, Law and Social Justice, University of British Columbia
"Superb. A layered, nuanced study showing how American Muslim women reimagine religious authority and leadership as well as traditions of scriptural interpretation in ways that are consequential far beyond their mosque." -- Zareena Grewal, author of Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority
"A crucial contribution to the scholarship on women and religion in the US as well as to the literatures on American Islam and Islamophobia. Ali's deeply researched and finely nuanced analysis of the Women's Mosque of America paints a vivid picture of a robust and distinctive form of women's authority sustained in that space. Scholars and students alike will learn much here about the diversity of Muslim life and women's experiences in our contemporary world." -- R. Marie Griffith, author of Making the World Over: Confronting Racism, Misogyny, and Xenophobia in U.S. History



Book Information
ISBN 9781479811304
Author Tazeen M. Ali
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint New York University Press
Publisher New York University Press
Weight(grams) 449g