Hijra and Homegrown Agriculture

Résumé du livre

ABSTRACT: In general, my research examines how groups of Muslims interpret and embody religious and environmental beliefs and practices, create religious identities, craft communities, and negotiate the boundaries and points of connection between their communities and larger Muslim, cultural, and ecological communities. My study of three American Muslim Sufi groups with farms as part of their religious communities demonstrates the many roles that farms and farming can play within communal life. I argue that members of these communities draw upon their Islamic beliefs, their identities as American converts, American history, and their ideas about the role of religion and nature in a meaningful life, in order to create distinct Muslim communities. These communities, in turn enable them to live out their beliefs, develop new awareness about the environment, and negotiate their places in the American religious landscape and the Islamic tradition. Their communities demonstrate continuity with and diversity in the Islamic tradition and in American religious history. These groups demonstrate distinctly Muslim ways of engaging and valuing the natural world - a topic that has received very little attention in either Islamic or environmental studies.