Editorial

Abstract

This issue of the American Journal of Islamic Social Sciences features two important articles: Sarah Marusek’s ethnographic study of a grassroots Islamic movement in Lebanon reconfiguring (even resisting) secularism and neoliberalism, and Madiha Tahseen and Charissa S.L. Cheah’s empirical study of the formation of American Muslim adolescents. Also featured is an extended interview with the renowned anthropologist, Talal Asad. Marusek’s study of the interaction of an Islamic movement within secular, liberal, and neoliberal structures and practices is innovative and thought-provoking. It shows how certain Shi‘ite clerics and leaders are able to adapt but also simultaneously resist neoliberalism while providing services to the poor, in particular the downtrodden Shi‘a population of Lebanon. The intellectual posture of these movements, she highlights, seeks to separate the rationalistic procedures and procedures of modernity from what they insist are still religious values. But straddling “forces of materialism and spirituality,” Marusek argues, “need not inevitably yield a gospel of wealth. Indeed, these forces may even coalesce into a decolonial project.” The Lebanese “Shi‘i movements,” she concludes, “are each critically engaging with secular liberalism and neoliberal capitalism on their own terms, in profoundly interesting, complex, and contradictory ways.” This is an illuminating study which alludes to the contradictions and limits of embedding religious values and rationality in neoliberal and secular structures and practices, which themselves are inevitably instilling their own values and rationality as they must in order to be fully efficient on their own terms. The struggle, the author suggests, is ongoing and worthwhile ...