Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and Contemporary Shrine Cultures
Produktdetaljer
Biographical note
Merin Shobhana Xavier is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Queen's University, Canada.This highly recommended study would work well at both the undergraduate and graduate levels in courses focusing on Sufism, method and theory in the study of religion, new religious movements, globalized religions, comparative spirituality, religion and immigration, and charismatic spiritual leaders.
Nova Religio
A masterful, ground-breaking study. Combining textual analysis with ethnographic interviews, Xavier traces the remarkable life and enduring legacy of a charismatic, boundary-blurring spiritual teacher. The book reveals the complexity and fluidity of religious identity, sacred space, gender boundaries, and ritual piety within a global Sufi community. A beautifully written and provocative portrait of living Sufism in everyday practice.
Robert Rozehnal, Associate Professor, Department of Religion Studies, Lehigh University, USA
Xavier offers many creative insights for understanding contemporary transnational Islam and Western Sufism as part of new configurations of sacred space that transcend the binary of East and West.
Marcia Hermansen, Director of the Islamic World Studies Program and Professor of Theology, Loyola University Chicago, USA
This is an important book on an important topic. Bawa Muhaiyaddeen and his heritage are key to understanding one really important aspect of Islam in a global world.
Mark Sedgwick, Professor of Arab and Islamic Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark
This book is a fascinating and original study. The book is scholarly, simply and directly written and will be of interest to scholars of Islam, diaspora, Sufism, and transnational studies, as well as religious sociology more generally.
Pnina Werbner, Professor Emerita of Social Anthropology, Keele University, UK
This book sheds light on the Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship (BMF), one of North America's major Sufi movements, and one of the first to establish a Sufi shrine in the region. It provides the first comprehensive overview of the BMF, offering new insight into its historical development and practices, and charting its establishment in both the United States and Sri Lanka.
Through ethnographic research, Sacred Spaces and Transnational Networks in American Sufism shows that the followers of Bawa in the United States and Sri Lanka share far more similarities in the relationships they formed with spaces, Bawa, and Sufism, than differences. This challenges the accepted conceptualization of Sufism in North America as having a distinct “Americanness”, and prompts scholars to re-consider how Sufism is developing in the modern American landscape, as well as globally.
The book focuses on the transnational spaces and ritual activities of Bawa’s communities, mapping parallel shrines and pilgrimages. It examines the roles of culture, religion, and gender and their impact on ritual embodiment, drawing attention to the global range of a Sufi community through engagement with its distinct Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, and Christian followers.
Acknowledgments
List of Images
Introduction
1, Charting Bawa’s Ministries from Jaffna to Pennsylvania
2.From the Ashram to Mankumban: Everyday Practices amongst Bawa’s Sri Lankan Followers
3. From the Masjid to the Mazar: Rituals and Spaces in the American Fellowship
4. Women in Bawa’s Ministries from Jaffna to Pennsylvania
5. Swami to Qutb: Bawa as al-Insan al-Kamil
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Islam of the Global West is a pioneering series that examines Islamic beliefs, practices, discourses, communities, and institutions that have emerged from ‘the Global West.’ The geographical and intellectual framing of the Global West reflects both the role played by the interactions between people from diverse religions and cultures in the development of Western ideals and institutions in the modern era, and the globalization of these very ideals and institutions.
In creating an intellectual space where works of scholarship on European and North American Muslims enter into conversation with one another, the series promotes the publication of theoretically informed and empirically grounded research in these areas. By bringing the rapidly growing research on Muslims in European and North American societies, ranging from the United States and France to Portugal and Albania, into conversation with the conceptual framing of the Global West, this ambitious series aims to reimagine the modern world and develop new analytical categories and historical narratives that highlight the complex relationships and rivalries that have shaped the multicultural, poly-religious character of Europe and North America, as evidenced, by way of example, in such economically and culturally dynamic urban centres as Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Madrid, Toronto, Sarajevo, London, Berlin, and Amsterdam where there is a significant Muslim presence.
Editorial Board
Leila Ahmed, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Divinity, Harvard Divinity School, USA
Schirin Amir-Moazami, Professor, Institute of Islamic Studies, Freie University Berlin, Germany
John Bowen, Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor in Arts and Sciences, Department of Anthropology, Washington University in St. Louis, USA
Xavier Bougarel, Researcher, Centre nationale de la recherche scientifieque (CNRS), France
Ian Coller, Department of History, University of California, Irvine, USA
Edward E. Curtis IV, Millennium Chair of the Liberal Arts and Professor of Religious Studies, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis, USA
Mercedes García-Arenal, Research Professor, Centro de Ciencias Humanas y Sociales CSIC, Madrid, Spain
Sophie Gilliat-Ray, Professor in Religious and Theological Studies, Director of the Centre for the Study of Islam in the United Kingdom, Cardiff University, Wales, UK
Riva Kastoryano, Senior Research Fellow, Centre de Recherches Internationales, SciencesPo, France
Aisha Khan, Associate Professor of Anthropology, New York University, USA
Andrew March, Associate Professor of Political Science, USA
Sean McLoughlin, Professor of the Anthropology of Islam, University of Leeds, UK
Jonas Otterbeck, Professor of Islamic Studies, Aga Khan University, UK
Mark Sedgwick, Professor, School of Culture and Society—Arabic and Islamic Studies, Aarhus University, Denmark