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Islam and Assisted Reproduction

Marcia C. Inhorn

in The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East

This chapter demonstrates how major divergences have occurred in the fatwas being issued by Sunni and Shia religious authorities regarding the permissibility of third-party reproductive assistance. ... More

This chapter demonstrates how major divergences have occurred in the fatwas being issued by Sunni and Shia religious authorities regarding the permissibility of third-party reproductive assistance. In recent years, new fatwas emerging from the Shia world have condoned third-party gamete donation, whereas gamete donation continues to be banned across the Sunni Muslim countries. These divergent Sunni and Shia Islamic approaches toward gamete donation have affected the moral decision making of infertile Muslim couples in ways that are only beginning to be realized. The degree of consensus across the Sunni Muslim countries is quite striking, as are the ways in which these fatwas have guided the clinical practices of the Middle Eastern IVF community.Less

Sperm Donation and Adoption

Marcia C. Inhorn

in The New Arab Man: Emergent Masculinities, Technologies, and Islam in the Middle East

This chapter analyzes how the vast majority of Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, reject both sperm donation and adoption as solutions to male infertility and childlessness. In the Arab countries, sperm ... More

This chapter analyzes how the vast majority of Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, reject both sperm donation and adoption as solutions to male infertility and childlessness. In the Arab countries, sperm donation is practiced only in Lebanon, but there, too, it meets with ardent resistance on the part of most men. The chapter narrates the story of Hasan, a police officer in southern Lebanon, who believes that he cannot regard a child conceived through donor sperm as his legitimate son. Hasan's reaction is not surprising in that assisted reproductive technologies evoke strong feelings about kinship. Of all of the anthropological work that has been written about the assisted reproductive technologies, the most substantial and most foundational is that which explores the effects of these technologies on kinship and family life.Less

“Guide Us to the Straight Way”: A Look at the Makers of “Religiously Literate” Young Muslim Americans

Nadia Inji Khan

in Educating the Muslims of America

Just as loving parents have their children take vaccines, loving Muslim parents instill a healthy regimen of Islam for their children, hoping to safeguard their American offspring from perceived and ... More

Just as loving parents have their children take vaccines, loving Muslim parents instill a healthy regimen of Islam for their children, hoping to safeguard their American offspring from perceived and real societal ills. This chapter investigates the various “vaccines” or burgeoning religious institutions that aim to “inoculate” young Sunni Muslim Americans with the religious background necessary to face the challenges of forming a sustainable hybrid identity. First, it looks at the various motives students may have for pursuing a religious education: whether it is for a Muslim's idea of leisure activity, the solidification of social networks, facilitating identity construction, alleviating the paucity of credible Muslim American religious scholars, or simply to know God and His will. Second, it considers models of religious education, citing specific popular institutions, their history, their organizational structure, and their target audience. It explores the physical setup of the classrooms with an eye on gender, pedagogical style, and curriculum. The chapter features models based on some of the more frequented venues cited. The institutions under consideration are generally part-time seminaries that either specifically target or attract young college-aged Muslims in the 18–24 age bracket.Less

Personal Status Law Reform

Benjamin Thomas White

in The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East: The Politics of Community in French Mandate Syria

This chapter provides an account of the French attempts to reform personal status law in Syria, and also discuses their failure and what the controversy reveals about the much larger issues of state ... More

This chapter provides an account of the French attempts to reform personal status law in Syria, and also discuses their failure and what the controversy reveals about the much larger issues of state transformation. The first part explains the function of personal status law in general terms, showing how it raised questions going far beyond the merely personal. The rest of the chapter looks at the issue from three different perspectives. First, it outlines French attempts to reform personal status law in Syria during the mandate – attempts which failed in the 1920s and the 1930s, in each case leading the High Commission to decide that the question should be left to the legislation of local governments. The chapter also identifies the development of a sense of being a minority among certain populations. Next, it turns to the Syrian communities affected by the reform, and places those effects in the wider context of the development of nation-state. Rather than involving ‘minorities’ from the onset, this is one of the areas where the changing nature of the nation-state made the concept of minority meaningful. Finally, the chapter focuses on the opposition to the reform among Sunni Muslim ‘ulama’, showing how minority's paired concept, majority, fitted into that opposition. This controversy illustrates the process by which both of these categories became meaningful, but at the same time highlights the dangers of taking them as objective categories for analysis.Less

The Place That Didn’t Belong in Brownsville

Robert Dannin

in Black Pilgrimage to Islam

Shuiab Abdur Raheem was a Sunni Muslim who lived and worked as a night clerk at the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York. Although he was active in terms of participating in Muslim practices ... More

Shuiab Abdur Raheem was a Sunni Muslim who lived and worked as a night clerk at the Metropolitan Transit Authority in New York. Although he was active in terms of participating in Muslim practices and he had a relatively good job, he preferred to leave his work as soon as he could because problems arose regarding his identity as an orthodox Muslim. Shuiab was well aware of how to distinguish between the Nation of Islam or the “Black Muslims” and orthodox Islam, which attempts to adopt the scriptures and the teachings attributed to the Holy Quran while also considering the life of Prophet Muhammad ibn Abdullah.Less

The Rule of the Infidel

Peter Jackson

in The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion

This chapter examines the experience of Muslims of all social ranks under infidel Mongol rule, focusing in particularly on the contexts of taxation, law and religious freedom. It also considers the ... More

This chapter examines the experience of Muslims of all social ranks under infidel Mongol rule, focusing in particularly on the contexts of taxation, law and religious freedom. It also considers the repressive measures enacted by the Mongols, notably those enshrined in Mongol law and custom, and what Muslims viewed as a starkly unwelcome departure from the practice of their pre-Mongol rulers: the establishment of parity between themselves and other confessional groups. Finally, it discusses the clash between Islamic norms and steppe customary law during the advent of infidel rule, the competition for office and influence among Sunnī Muslims, Shīʻīs and dhimmis; and the importation of unfamiliar religious traditions that Muslims perceived as a threat to Islam under the new dispensation.Less

The Crown of Dreams: Sufis and Princes in Sixteenth-Century Iran

A. Azfar Moin

in The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam

This chapter traces the intersecting careers of Sufi king Shah Ismaʿil and Prince Babur, the heir of Timur, to describe the kingship in the eastern Islamic world a hundred years after Timur. Even ... More

This chapter traces the intersecting careers of Sufi king Shah Ismaʿil and Prince Babur, the heir of Timur, to describe the kingship in the eastern Islamic world a hundred years after Timur. Even though the lives of Babur and Shah Ismaʿil intersected at several key moments, the historical image of these two men had been rendered in two very different historiographical veins. Babur was a Sunni Muslim of the temperate and orthodox kind. He was a tolerant ruler who kept his religion to himself and did not impose it upon his subjects in India. In contrast, Shah Ismaʿil was a Shiʿi Muslim of a particularly extreme heterodox kind. He became an ecstatic demagogue who whipped his followers into revolutionary frenzy with apocalyptic verse and messianic propaganda, and imposed his religious creed on the conquered population of Iran on pain of torture and death.Less

Maronite Catholics, Orthodox Christians, and Sunni Muslims from the Arab Region: Between Empire, Racialization, and Assimilation

Nadine Naber

in MisReading America: Scriptures and Difference

Nadine Naber, Matthew Stiffler, and their research team focus on Sunni Muslims in California and Maronite Catholics and Antiochian Orthodox Christians in Michigan, specifically those belonging to ... More

Nadine Naber, Matthew Stiffler, and their research team focus on Sunni Muslims in California and Maronite Catholics and Antiochian Orthodox Christians in Michigan, specifically those belonging to diaspora communities from the Arab region. Their research illustrates the way in which religious and scriptural concepts and practices are entangled in historical and material realities that are transnational in scope. Naber and Stiffler found that these diasporic individuals conceptualize their relationship to religion and scriptures with and through varied relationships to the concept of “Arab cultural identity” in ways that are very much entangled in the historical realities of anti-Arab racism, particularly in the aftermath of 9/11. Some Christians overemphasize their Christian identity and de-emphasize their relationship to Arab histories and cultures. While some Muslims tend to disaggregate the categories “Arab” from “Muslims,” arguing that cultural norms taint true Islam.Less

Muslim America: Divergent Origins and Converging Histories

Muna Ali

in Young Muslim America: Faith, Community, and Belonging

This chapter gives a brief historical tour of Muslim America to provide a context for situating the younger generations of Muslims— the second and third generations of immigrants and of convert ... More

This chapter gives a brief historical tour of Muslim America to provide a context for situating the younger generations of Muslims— the second and third generations of immigrants and of convert Muslims— in both intra-community and societal dynamics. It shows the ethno-racial and class diversity of this group, then provides a detailed profile of the participants in this ethnographic study. The two study areas—Chicagoland and Phoenix-valley—are also described in regard to their Muslim residents. This chapter argues that though immigrant and convert Muslim Americas are often presented as having parallel histories, theirs is a shared history in which they have coauthored each chapter, in spite of their divergent origins and internal tensions.Less

Iraq

in Cutting the Fuse: The Explosion of Global Suicide Terrorism and How to Stop It

This chapter analyzes suicide terrorism in Iraq. It explains the composition, goals, objectives, cohesion, popular support, trajectory, and state sponsorship status of the five key groups that have ... More

This chapter analyzes suicide terrorism in Iraq. It explains the composition, goals, objectives, cohesion, popular support, trajectory, and state sponsorship status of the five key groups that have engaged in suicide terrorist tactics in Iraq. Suicide terrorists in Iraq are predominantly Sunni Muslims. The analysis of the goals of several campaigns reveals that the common strategic objectives are to remove the coalition presence in Iraq and undermine the new Iraqi government in its current form. But these groups disagree substantially with respect to the role that religion should play in the future of Iraqi governance.Less