In-Between Identities: Signs of Islam in Contemporary American Writing

John C. Waldmeir, Ph.D. (1991), University of Chicago, is Professor of Religious Studies and Theology at Loras College in Dubuque, Iowa. He has published extensively in the area of Art, Religion, and Culture, including The American Trilogy, 1900-1937: Norris, Dreiser, Dos Passos and the History of Mammon (1995), Poetry, Prose, and Art in American Social Gospel Movement (2002), and Cathedrals of Bone: The Role of the Body in Contemporary Catholic Literature (2009). This is his sixth book.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction—Words Beneath Words1 Traveling with an American Qur’an: Sandow Birk and the Thirty Mosques in Thirty Days Project1 Plurality Across 30 Mosques2 Everyday Bonds: Living Muslim Lives in America3 Assembling the Stories of 30 Mosques4 Sandow Birk and Scenes for an American Qur’an5 Bending Borders in an American Qur’an6 Tradition as a Ritual Process of Communication2 “Learning to Pray All Over”: The Body in Mohja Kahf’s Poetry and Fiction1 Marvelous Women2 The Language of the Body3 (Un)moored4 Just Being3 “Are You A Muslim or Will You Love?” Dropping the Veil in Kazim Ali’s Writing1 The Body in Space2 Patterns in and of the Body4 Begun in Mystery: Ayad Akhtar’s Fiction and Drama1 Visible Lives, Invisible Hands2 The Invisible Hand3 Akhtar’s Islam4 Faith and the Body5 Disgraced5 “Sometimes I Feel Me”: Between Faith and Resistance in the Poetry of Blackamerican Islam1 Amir Sulaiman2 Blueprint6 Where Hope Begins: The Intertextual Worlds of Rabih Alameddine1 Intertextual Violence and Identity2 Violence, Identity, HopeConclusion—“Half In, Half Out”: Willow Wilson and Ms. Marvel to the RescueBibliographyIndex