Charles P. Brauer Faculty Fellow
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About
"Recognizing Community Imams: The Limits of Bureaucracy in American Islam"
This project is an ethnography about Sunni US Muslim religious clerics (imams), their lives, field of work, and institutions of ministry. Based on nearly ten years of ethnographic fieldwork at Muslim seminaries and with imams in over a dozen US metropolises, Recognizing Community Imams is an extensive study that identifies and names a field forming for US imams. Religious leadership in the US is a fairly bureaucratic establishment. Leaders cannot be leaders if they are not recognized as such. Recognition comes from both governmental and religious bureaucracies, but what are the limits of this structure in the case of decentralized religions like that of the Sunni US Muslims whose religious bureaucracies remain immature? This ethnography demonstrates how US religious leaders, in this case imams, and by extension, religion, gets recognized in the US, and who emerges as recognizing powers. Recognizing Community Imams argues that bureaucracy is a primary force in the shaping of religious leader professions, and thus broadly of US religion, both in imagination and in implementation, and also depicts the limits of bureaucracy in both how it bounds and enables recognition of US community imams.
Nancy Khalil is an Assistant Professor of American Culture.
