From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and geopolitical agendas shape Muslim ways of knowing and being. Throughout, Kashani argues that contemporary Islam emerges from the specificities of the Bay Area, from its landscapes and infrastructures to its Muslim liberal arts college, mosques, and prison courtyards. Theorizing the Medina by the Bay as a microcosm of socioeconomic, demographic, and political transformations in the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries, Kashani resituates Islam as liberatory and abolitionist theory, theology, and praxis for all those engaged in struggle.
Reviews
“There was a resounding response from my students… and the resounding response was, this book is beautiful and healing…. I think why they found it healing was because the book is both rigorous intellectually, but also written in a creative way. Instead of giving you answers, it asks questions to make you want to find your own answers, which I think for my students was really particularly important. For Muslim students, it was important because there's ways in which being Muslim and Islam and what Kashani calls, Islamic ways of knowing and being, are threaded throughout how she even writes the book. It makes them think about what does that mean for me and how can I have that and do that as an intellectual, as a scholar. And for the non-Muslim student, it was the range of her sources. It wasn't just Islamic sources, religious sources, but throughout ethnic studies, Asian American studies and decolonial studies and the creativity of it, again, made people feel like, wow, intellectual work can be dynamic in a really important way. So that's why I plug from Medina by the Bay, check it out.“ Dr. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, associate professor of American Culture and Arab and Muslim American Studies at the University of Michigan.
“Medina by the Bay is a brilliant, moving, gorgeously crafted tour de force! Seamlessly weaving together ethnography, analysis, theory, history, political critique, and methodological interventions, Maryam Kashani shows readers that Islam is of and from the Bay Area. While attending to gender, class, and generational difference, she elucidates the context of racial capitalism, the War on Terror, and settler-colonial white supremacy within which Muslims in the Bay Area live, not as a laundry list of things to oppose or things that restrict, but as the conditions within which her interlocutors live, work, understand, create, teach, and learn. The result is a cutting-edge work that will be a must-read for years to come.” — Lara Deeb, Professor of Anthropology and MENA studies, Scripps College
“Maryam Kashani’s portrait of the rise of a Muslim American community begins intimately with scenes of prayer, a classroom seminar, and a poetry reading, and gathers to the level of the universal. Sounding manifold voices of what she lovingly calls ‘the unruly aggregate,’ she poses sharp questions about spirituality, knowledge, resistance, and survival. Medina by the Bay is ambitious, expansive, and wholly original, and will be celebrated for years to come.” — Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation