The 35th ANNUAL CONFERENCE
of the
Association of Muslim Social Scientists (AMSS)

Muslim Identities: Shifting Boundaries and Dialogues

Cosponsored by:
Hartford Seminary
Hartford, Connecticut
October 27 – 29, 2006

• Call for Papers
• Program
• Abstracts
• Final Papers
• Conference Report
  

Call for Papers

In the global postmodern context, identities are complex sites of struggle and negotiation. Muslim identities in particular represent contested epistemological and ontological sites. Islamic identities are being politically and ideologically defined and negotiated in the context of a volatile global political landscape post 9/11 and within and against competing doctrinal debates over what it means to be a Muslim and the true nature of Islam. Muslim subjectivities are also constituted through other social, cultural, legal, and political negotiations as part of individual and collective lived realities. Therefore, the discursive contexts and social and cultural environments through which Muslim identities are constructed, framed and legitimated are multiple, and often warrant renewed examination in light of shifting global and local realities.

This conference seeks to bring a wide range of scholarly voices in the social sciences and humanities to deconstruct the various dimensions through which Muslim social identities are constituted, challenged and lived.

We invite papers that may address but are not limited to the following themes:

• Muslim Identities in Historical, Textual or Empirical Research
• Religious, Social, Cultural and Political Dimensions of Muslim Social Identities
• Constructions of the Muslim Subject In Colonial, Neo-Colonial, and Post-Colonial Encounters
• Good Muslim/Bad Muslim: Identity Politics in the Post-9/11 Era
• Divergent Discourses and the Construction of Muslim Subjectivities: Traditional and/or Modern Perspectives
• Essentialism/Anti-Essentialism in Muslim Identity Construction
• Epistemological and Ontological Perspectives: Textual Narrations of Self/Identity/Community
• The Complex Relationship Between Texts, Contexts, and Human Agency in the Construction of Islamic Norms
• Authoritative Identities: Exegetical Practices and Gendered Interpretations
• Contesting Boundaries: Gendered/Sexual Identities
• Indigenous and Diasporic Articulations of Identity, Community, Nation: Authenticity, Hybridity and Belonging
• Muslim Youth and Identity Politics
• Marginality and the Politics of Resistance
• Transnational Pan-Islamic Identities and Solidarities: Re-Examining the Ummah
• Collective Identities and Political Praxis: Muslim Social and Political Movements
• Boundaries and Social Control: Regulating and Policing Identities
• Identity and Representation: Media Characterizations and Muslim Identities
• Religious Manichaeanism: Persistence of Orientalist and emergence of Neo-Orientalist Constructions of Self/Other and Civilizational Dialogues
• Identities of Faith: Challenges of and Possibilities for Interfaith Dialogue and Collaboration
• Post-Modernism and the Crisis of Identity

Abstracts (250 words) are due May 15, 2006.
Accepted papers must be submitted by September 15, 2006.

Send abstracts and papers to Conference Coordinator Ms. Layla Sein at conferences@amss.net

Conference Chair: Dr. Jane Smith
Hartford Seminary, Hartford, Connecticut

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Program

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Abstracts

• Ali Altaf Mian: “Poets/Poetics of Self-Identity: Iqbal and Heidegger in the Cosmotolitanist ‘Originological’ Approach”
• Almas Zakiuddin: “The Case of Muslim Women in Bangladesh”
• Amina Jamal: “Engendering an Islamic Public Sphere: Women in the Jamaat-e-Islami of Pakistan”
• Ashraf El Sherif: “Democratic Islamic Yuppies: Post-Islamism or another Islamism?”
• Carrie Newton Lyons “Afghanistan and the Apostate: Legal Implications from the Case of Abdul Rahman”
• Dragos Stoica: “From the World as Text to the World as Image: a Possible Paradigm Shift”
• Ermin Sinanovic and Khuran Hussain: “Constructing Identities through Islamic Education: A Comparative Approach”
• Fahd Ahmed: “Separation, Walls and the Role of the Muslim Intellectual”
• Fareeha Khan: “Being Muslim in Pre-Partition India: Maulana Ashraf’s ‘Ali Thanawi’s Negotiation of Identity and Politics”
• Fatimah Fanusie: “Fard Muhammad in Historical Context: An Islamic Thread”
• Foad Izadi and Hakimeh Saghaye-Biria: “Constructing the Other: Orientalism, U.S. Foreign Policy and the Press”
• Imad ad-Dean Ahmad: “Text, Context and Human Agency in Interpreting Jihad: Struggles of Political Domination, Faith and Identity”
• Ismail bin Matt: “Toward an Islamic Constitutional Government in Sudan”
• Itrath Syed: “Muslims in Canada: Dispensable Citizenship”
• Jose Abraham: “A Discussion on the Possibility of a Subaltern Reading of Indian Muslim History”
• Judd Daniel King: “The Battle for the Ottoman Legacy: the Construction of a Postmodern, Neo-Ottoman Identity in Turkey”
• Judith Rahima Jensen: “A Report on Educational Solutions’ 2006 University: Dialogue Project on the Israel/Palestine Conflict”
• Junaid Ahmad: “The Empire's Desperate Search for the Moderate Muslims”
• Khaled Troudi: “A Study of Tunisia’s Educational Reform Efforts”
• Louis J. Cantori: “Republican Islam in the Islamic Republic of Iran”
• Mahdi Tourage: “Negotiating Shi’i Identities in the Messianic Age”
• Mahgol Sarebanha: “Muslim-American Political Participation”
• Maliha Chisti: “Toward Critical Motivocality in International Aid: Resisting the Rescue”
• Mazen Hashem: “Rekindling Souls: Friday Khutba in Southern California”
• Michelle D. Byng: “Oppositional Frames and the Representation of Muslim Americans in Newspaper Articles: The Impact of 9/11”
• Mucahit Bilici: “Formation of an American Muslim Public Sphere”
• Norbani Binti Ismail:“Scholarship: The British Orientalists and the Translation of the Qur’an”
• Omar H. Altalib: “The Use of Islam in Insurgent Propaganda”
• Roja Fazaeli:“Contemporary Iranian Feminism: Identity, Rights and Interpretations”
• Sadek Hamid: “Convergence and Divergence in British Youth Organizations”
• Saeed A. Khan: “The Primacy of Privacy in the Assessment of Justice System for an Islamic Democratic Model”
• Sarah Swick: “Identity Construction of Euro-American Converts to Islam”
• Scott Morrison: “An Egyptian Muslim in America: Sayyid Qutb’s Travel Writings”
• Suaidi Asyari: “Indonesia’s Perilous Democratization: The Limit of Religious-based Social Capital in Democratic Transition”
• Turgut Kerem Tuncel and Mehmet Demiray: “Different Actors, Intersecting Interests and the “Islamic Revival: A Sociological Inquiry of the Islamic Movement in the post-1980 Turkey”
• Younis Mirza: “The Appropriation of Ibn Taymiyya in the Modern Wahhabi Polemics of Sufism”
• Zainab T. Alwani: “Islamic and Arabic Studies in American Universities: Present & Future”
• Zareena Grewal:“Native Orientalist: The Ethics of the Production of Knowledge in Anthropology”

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Final Papers

• Ashraf El Sherif: “Democratic Islamic Yuppies: Post-Islamism or Another Islamism?”
• Gulsum Gurbuz and Mustafa Gurbuz: “Wearing Headscarf in a Secular Society: American Muslim Women’s Voices”
• Imad ad-Dean Ahmad: “Text, Context and Human Agency in Interpreting Jihad: Struggles of Political Domination, Faith and Identity”
• Ismail bin Matt: “Toward an Islamic Constitutional Government in Sudan”
• Jose Abraham: “A Discussion on the Possibility of a Subaltern Reading of Indian Muslim History”
• Judith Rahima Jensen: “A Report on Educational Solutions’ 2006 University: Dialogue Project on the Israel/Palestine Conflict”
• Mahgol Sarebanha: “Muslim-American Political Participation”
• Suaidi Asyari: “Indonesia’s Perilous Democratization: The Limit of Religious-based Social Capital in Democratic Transition”
• Turgut Kerem Tuncel and Mehmet Demiray: “Different Actors, Intersecting Interests and the “Islamic Revival: A Sociological Inquiry of the Islamic Movement in the post-1980 Turkey”

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Conference Report

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