Finding Mecca in America: How Islam is Becoming an American Religion.

• Author: Leonard, Karen
• Position: Book review

Finding Mecca in America: How Islam is Becoming an American Religion

By Mucahit Bilici

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012, 272 pages, ISBN 9780226049571.

NEAR the end of this interesting book, the author characterizes his final chapter as "a series of interpretive judgments about the venture of Islam in its American habitat (p. 205)," and I find this true of the book as a whole. It began as a doctoral dissertation, and Bilici defines himself a cultural sociologist who takes an agonistic (combative, contesting) approach, an approach that "pays attention to the margins more than the mainstreams, to lived experience more than to floating abstractions (p. 21)." Yet, lengthy discussions of philosophy and social theory punctuate the chapters, enabling readers to debate the stated balance. Bilici also characterizes his work as ethnography, and while he draws on his work in Detroit, Michigan, as part of a team project and his internship with the Council of American-Islamic Relations, CAIR, in Washington, DC, the ethnographic material is limited, providing illustrations for various points Bilici wants to make rather than systematic evidence for them. He argues that his topics have escaped attention (or been taken for granted) or are postdiasporic, meaning they have not yet fully appeared above the horizon (p. 19), such as Abrahamic discourse and Muslim comedy. He writes that "what should be prized is not the sea of data but the wisdom of elucidation (p. 23)," and this personal interpretation is certainly worth reading.

Focusing on immigrant Muslims in the United States, Bilici mentions African American and other indigenous Muslims occasionally and also utilizes material from Canada in his chapter on Muslim comedy (The Little Mosque on the Prairie TV show). He takes an optimistic stance, one that sees Muslims becoming part of the whole, developing "an American asabiyya (p. 10)." He defines asabiyya as "a solidarity that is not only a work of consciousness among individuals who choose to come together but a deeper sense of oneness within a collective individuality (p. 219, note 3; also 203 and 212)." Other writers on Muslims in America often define asabiyya in contrast to the umma, as a particular collective identity rather than that of the universal Islamic umma, for example, when discussing African American Muslims and their particular history and needs. However, Bilici tends to avoid issues causing conflict and disunity within the American...