In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing

John C. Waldmeir, Ph.D. (1991), University of Chicago, is Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. He has published extensively in the area of Art, Religion, and Culture, including The American Trilogy, 1900-1937: Norris, Dreiser, Dos Passos and the History of Mammon (1995), Poetry, Prose, and Art in American Social Gospel Movement (2002), and Cathedrals of Bone: The Role of the Body in Contemporary Catholic Literature (2009). This is his sixth book.

Acknowledgments



Introduction—Words Beneath Words



1 Traveling with an American Qur’an: Sandow Birk and the Thirty Mosques in Thirty Days Project

 1 Plurality Across 30 Mosques

 2 Everyday Bonds: Living Muslim Lives in America

 3 Assembling the Stories of 30 Mosques

 4 Sandow Birk and Scenes for an American Qur’an

 5 Bending Borders in an American Qur’an

 6 Tradition as a Ritual Process of Communication



2 “Learning to Pray All Over”: The Body in Mohja Kahf’s Poetry and Fiction

 1 Marvelous Women

 2 The Language of the Body

 3 (Un)moored

 4 Just Being



3 “Are You A Muslim or Will You Love?” Dropping the Veil in Kazim Ali’s Writing

 1 The Body in Space

 2 Patterns in and of the Body



4 Begun in Mystery: Ayad Akhtar’s Fiction and Drama

 1 Visible Lives, Invisible Hands

 2 The Invisible Hand

 3 Akhtar’s Islam

 4 Faith and the Body

 5 Disgraced



5 “Sometimes I Feel Me”: Between Faith and Resistance in the Poetry of Blackamerican Islam

 1 Amir Sulaiman

 2 Blueprint



6 Where Hope Begins: The Intertextual Worlds of Rabih Alameddine

 1 Intertextual Violence and Identity

 2 Violence, Identity, Hope



Conclusion—“Half In, Half Out”: Willow Wilson and Ms. Marvel to the Rescue



Bibliography

Index