Geographies of Muslim Identities

In recent years geographies of identities including those of ethnicity religion 'race' and gender have formed an increasing focus of contemporary human geography. The events of September 11th 2001 particularly illustrated the ways in which identities can be transformed across time and space by both global and local events of a social cultural political and economic nature. Such transformations have also demonstrated the temporal and spatial construction of hate and fear and of increasing incidences of 'Islamophobia' through the construction of Muslims as 'the Other'. As the social scientific study of religion continues to be marginalized within mainstream scholarship there remains an important gap in the literature. This timely book addresses this gap by collecting a range of cutting-edge contributions from the social cultural political historical and economic sub-disciplines of geography together with writings from gender studies cultural studies and leisure studies where research has revealed a strong spatial dimension to the construction representation contestation and reworking of Muslim identities. The contributors illustrate the ways in which such identities are constructed represented negotiated and contested in everyday life in a wide variety of international contexts focusing upon issues connected with diaspora gender and belonging.