U.S. Muslim Philanthropy after 9/11

Since 9/11, U.S. Muslim philanthropy has generally been framed in terms of national security and civil liberties. In practice, however, U.S. Muslims’ charitable giving has posed no threat to national security, nor has the government’s closing of some of the largest Muslim relief organizations after 9/11 had the chilling effect that many predicted it would have on U.S. Muslims’ giving. This article argues that American Muslim philanthropy post-9/11 belies enduring presuppositions about the alleged ‘rigidity” of Islamic norms and the alleged “insularity” of the U.S. Muslim community. Each of these presuppositions has yielded widespread misapprehensions about the nature of Muslim philanthropy in the U.S. since 9/11. Contrary to these misapprehensions, the actual philanthropic practice of the U.S. Muslim community in the post-9/11 moment highlights the polyvalence and fluidity of the public practice of Islam. In the fluid space of practice, American Muslims have brought together Islamic vocabularies of charity and American legal and sociopolitical norms regarding philanthropy to forge new relations across groups of varying social, religious, political, cultural, and economic backgrounds

A History of islam in America : from the new world to the new world order/ Ghaneabassiri

x, 446 hal.; 23 cm

Qurʾanic Anosmia

This chapter examines the Qurʾan’s attitude towards smell. Against the backdrop of the richly scented setting of pagan Arabia, the chapter argues, the Qurʾan is strikingly disinterested in olfaction. There are only two places in the Qurʾan where olfaction occurs: Jacob smelling the shirt of his beloved Joseph (12:94) and the blessed in paradise enjoying the scent of musk-topped wine, camphor, and fragrant herbs (5:12, 56:89, 76:5, 83:26). However, as this chapter argues, both instances have a transhistorical gist, diverting attention from the here and now by cutting through time in two directions: Joseph “smells back,” recalling an ideal past and aromatically enacting his beloved son’s presence; the paradise passages “smell forward,” gesturing towards eschatological bliss in the perfumed garden of paradise. Neither of these two instances of olfaction, therefore, can cast doubt on the fundamentally anosmic character of the Qurʾan. Rather than suggesting, as others have done, that the importance of smell is uninterrupted from Zoroastrian to Late Antique Christian literature and all the way to the Qurʾan, this chapter suggests that the Qurʾan attempts—albeit unsuccessfully, as many hadiths of the formative period of Islam demonstrate—to disrupt smell and introduce a new olfactory regime

Qurʾanic Anosmia

This chapter examines the Qurʾan’s attitude towards smell. Against the backdrop of the richly scented setting of pagan Arabia, the chapter argues, the Qurʾan is strikingly disinterested in olfaction. There are only two places in the Qurʾan where olfaction occurs: Jacob smelling the shirt of his beloved Joseph (12:94) and the blessed in paradise enjoying the scent of musk-topped wine, camphor, and fragrant herbs (5:12, 56:89, 76:5, 83:26). However, as this chapter argues, both instances have a transhistorical gist, diverting attention from the here and now by cutting through time in two directions: Joseph “smells back,” recalling an ideal past and aromatically enacting his beloved son’s presence; the paradise passages “smell forward,” gesturing towards eschatological bliss in the perfumed garden of paradise. Neither of these two instances of olfaction, therefore, can cast doubt on the fundamentally anosmic character of the Qurʾan. Rather than suggesting, as others have done, that the importance of smell is uninterrupted from Zoroastrian to Late Antique Christian literature and all the way to the Qurʾan, this chapter suggests that the Qurʾan attempts—albeit unsuccessfully, as many hadiths of the formative period of Islam demonstrate—to disrupt smell and introduce a new olfactory regime