Religious and Socio-Political Studies Journal

The articles in this edition are threaded together by different facets of Muslim community identity through the spaces and places Muslims communally build, inhabit, contest, and share. Community identity within the social sciences and humanities has been understood in a variety of ways. While some authors argue that there are no clear means of measuring a sense of community identity, especially for comparative analysis) and others have proposed foundations for the development of community identity, especially through shared discursive construction, still others prefer to examine how social identities function. They do this with particular attention to the enhancement of individual and group well-being through social support and both collective efficacy and action. These experiences can be largely shared to varying degrees by individuals who perceive themselves to be part of the same groupings or communities, especially when those collectives are subordinate or liminal to dominant cultural groups. The shared meanings that emerge from spaces shared by these groups feed into individual senses of Selfhood as well as the collective.

Within traditional Islamic discourses, there is not necessarily a term for group identity as it would be understood in a Western sense today; rather, Islamic concepts of collective identity can be understood in (but not limited to) the terms of Ummah (or the global community of Muslims connected by belief, law and practice) and fard ul kifayah, or community responsibility and duty. In fact, it could be argued that the normative Islamic worldview and ethos is one of holistic communality and relationships in a way that it is challenging for more individualized ideologies and societies to conceptualize. Ultimately, the social aspect of this requires that we parse community identity and experiences according to the situated places in which they occur and which they give life to/are given life by. The spirit of community in many Muslim locales and globally, however, has been shaken and even fragmented by forces of colonialism, neo-liberalism and others such that a sense of community identity, experience and relationality are, at best, muted and, at worst, absent. This process, of course, is neither consistent, nor linear and can fluctuate while being dependent on a range of factors including time, place, relationships, and so forth.

With these matters in mind, this issue opens with a book review by Amilah and Bibi Baksh of an important 2022 volume about knowledge production about Muslims and Islam in Canada and how this reflects on and impacts Muslim communities here – an excellent window into the diversity of scholarship out there and how this scholarship comes to be. The review is followed by the first article, contributed by Memona Hossain, which looks at relationship-building and space-making between Muslims and Indigenous (First Nation, Metis, Inuit) peoples in the context of ongoing settler colonialism and immigration to understand how both groups make meaning within their relationships and what form their shared spaces take. The second article comes from Nuray Catic and is an exploration of conversion to Islam in Canada, picking up on the themes of identity, community, and place-making through that process. Catic is also careful to center the religious stories of and community spaces built by converts to Islam – an often misunderstood and misrepresented sub-group within wider Muslim communities – to understand the diversity of reasons people become Muslim and what is shared among them. Finally, Fatima Chakroun offers a critical genealogical look at the origins of veil pulling as Orientalist and colonial violence that continues to weaponize symbols of Muslim group identity to exact communal harm through individual hate crimes. Bringing to light this historical legacy that continues to impact Canadian Muslims to this very day and offers an opportunity for reflection on how the past informs and shapes the present.