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More Muslim, Salman Ahad Khan

Capstones

More Muslim is a show that explores the Muslim experience, with all its messiness.

Each episode is a narrative, transhistorical journey into one aspect of the Muslim experience that defined or is being defined by the modern world. This capstone forms the first two episodes of the series. Episode 1, "When Memes Meet Sufis," explores the question of how Rumi, a Muslim scholar from the 13th century, became the best-selling poet in the US. Episode 2, "The Halal Meat Conundrum," is a firsthand journey into the American halal meat industry and attempts to understand how halal became a $20 billion …

The Shari'a Courts Of Mogadishu: Beyond "African Islam" And "Islamic Law", Ahmed Ibrahim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation, based on a year and eight months of fieldwork, is a historical ethnography of a Shari‘a-based movement which appeared in Mogadishu, Somalia within a year after the complete disintegration of the central government in 1991. The movement originated when religious authorities and “traditional” elders established centers in various neighborhoods in Mogadishu to deal with the vacuum of power after the fall of the state. Since Shari‘a structures of authority and discourse were integral to the formation and functioning of the centers, they became known as Shari‘a courts. My work on the Shari‘a courts intervenes in the literature on …

Refractions Through The Secular: Islam, Human Rights And Universality, Zara Khan

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Universal human rights (HR) are often theorized as philosophically neutral. Because they do not espouse any particular theory of the human being, it is argued, they can be reasonably appropriated by all. In this thesis, I explore HR’s universality claim, by focusing on the discourse’s secular foundation. In the universal human right to freedom of religion, I find a distinctly modern grammar of ‘religion,’ one that separates ‘religion’ from politics and power, law from morality, and the public and private realms. The modern concept of religion also espouses a secular theory of the human, insofar as the human is defined …