| In an effort to bring into view critically---as actors rather than as spectacle---Muslim men and especially Muslim women in non-Islamic countries and to examine their constitutive individual as well as collective religious and social identities---that is their contextual realities as opposed to just the ideal of Islam---this project seeks via ethnographic research to investigate gender practices and relations among Muslims at the Masjid al Muslimeen and Madressa located in Trinidad and Tobago. This small community's mundane yet resilient existence amid national, global, historical, geographical, physical, and sociopolitical ambivalences and contradictions begs revisiting how we read, interpret, represent, and deploy extant categories, theories, and methodologies articulating gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and nation. |
