How accountable are we to the societies within which we live? How do we distinguish between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb when we live within nation-states, whether “secular” or “Islamic” that are shaped by often contradictory notions of freedom of religion, political expression, and dissent, as well as global relationships of “colonial racial capitalism?”[1] Building upon the work of Black radical, decolonial, and Indigenous scholars who have undertaken the critical task of naming both the foundations and ongoing structures of the global capitalist system within which we live Muslim lives (ontologies) and continue discursive traditions of Muslim ways of knowing (epistemologies), in this essay, I contend with what it means—what we are implicated in—when we take this system for granted and alternatively what it means when we use Islamic structures of wealth redistribution to be anti-capitalist and anti-racist as Muslims. There are multiple scales of this issue that must be tackled at the communal and individual levels, respectively. I enter this issue as a “legal” citizen of the United States, the carceral capital of the world. My material life both supports and is sustained by the United States as a settler colonial and racial capitalist structure. This is also the context within which I aim to become Muslim, not in terms of conversion, but rather in terms of actualizing what it means to truly submit to Islam as an epistemic, ontologic, and spiritual totality and vision of the world.
“I enter this issue as a “legal” citizen of the United States, the carceral capital of the world. My material life both supports and is sustained by the United States as a settler colonial and racial capitalist structure. This is also the context within which I aim to become Muslim, not in terms of conversion, but rather in terms of actualizing what it means to truly submit to Islam as an epistemic, ontologic, and spiritual totality and vision of the world.”
By thinking multiple traditions, or theories and theologies together, we carry on in an Islamic tradition of “going as far as China” for knowledge.[2] Colonial racial capitalism is an analytic concept drawn from decolonial, Indigenous, and Black radical critique that explores “how colonization and imperialism partitioned the globe into racially differentiated lands and peoples, naturalizing and justifying the expropriation of some bodies and lands for the benefit of others.”[3] There have been numerous studies that discuss how Muslims have responded to capitalism as an economic form and structure.[4] While these studies often discuss colonialism as a historical event that transformed Muslim everyday life and forms of Muslim governance and post-colonial nation-state formation, they neither engage with colonialism and coloniality (especially setter colonialism) as ongoing structures and logics nor do they engage with capitalism’s inherent racialism, in which “racial” is not reduced to a matter of skin color, but rather speaks to how capitalism requires differentiation, often through racial logics “to naturalize capitalist inequalities and their attendant violences.”[5] For example, how do post-colonial elites mobilize racial difference against colonization and neo-colonization at the same time that they participate in forms of (neoliberal) extraction and dispossession against populations who share their skin color, their ethnicity, their tribe, or their religion in the name of developmental, state-building, and state-preserving projects? How do discourses of development themselves reproduce forms of racial or cultural differentiation and hierarchy? Why have we taken capitalism as a given as if its “victory” in the fall of the USSR really was the “end of history”?
Muslim individuals, scholars, institutions, and states have not fully mobilized the potential of Islam as a way of knowing and being in the world, especially when it comes to the profound disparities in wealth at both local and global scales. What emerges from conversations both for and against Islamic approaches to and negotiations with capitalism as a system, is a resigned pragmatism, dare I say complacency, to the inevitability of the extractive, scarcity-motivated capitalist system. One cannot disaggregate race or coloniality (nor contemporary Islam) from capitalism. How we as an umma respond to the ever-increasing carceralities and militarizations of our societies, the prison and military industrial complexes, says a great deal about what role Islam and Muslim communities, as well as Muslim-majority states, will play in our collective survival.
Both capitalism and Islam have been able to “establish affinities with aspects of local cultures” as they have been taken up globally (whether by persuasion or by force). While essential features of capitalism like commodities, markets, and exchange have existed since the earliest human societies, capitalism brought a level of abstraction to value (the move from use value to exchange value) that colonizes and commodifies nearly every aspect of our lives, “beginning with labour and ending with the designation of thoughts, ideas and social relations as commodities.”[6] Charles Tripp discusses how capitalism’s “colonizing power has partly been due to its capacity to disembed practices from pre-existing moral and social constraints, isolating them and recombining them in ways more conducive to acceptance of global capitalist enterprise.”[7] Capitalism is a “technology of antirelationality” that separates forms of humanity (racially, religiously, geographically, etc.) “so that they may be connected in terms that feed capital.” [8] Many Islamic responses to capitalism and its anti-relationality have been to suture such relations, towards “reinforcing, rather than undermining, the solidarities and trusts in transactions.”[9] In addition to such Quranic and jurisprudence guidances on fair and transparent transactions and social organization, zakat and sadaqa are technologies of relationality that connect and order kin and community across scales of geography and time. For example, as Abdoulaye Ndiaye recently described, Al-Azhar scholars proposed that zakat al-rikaz (on buried treasure that does not require much labor or expense to recover), one-fifth or twenty percent be applied to oil revenues in 2008. As Saudi Arabia and other oil-rich nations now pursue alternative revenues through sports like soccer/football, golf, and entertainment, how do we contend with forms of conspicuous consumption, corruption, exploitation, and dubious ethics that such wealth, in the face of profound inequality, enables? How do we mobilize Islamic concepts and structures towards imagining and enacting social reproduction and relations anew, that close the growing wealth gaps between rich and poor, that address the failures of our khilafa responsibilities towards God’s creation in an age of climate change and disaster?
Latin American liberation theology was precisely a theology of the poor, a theology of the wretched, in which priests and lay people sought to understand the ravages of colonial racial capitalism as profoundly anti-Christian.
Latin American liberation theology was precisely a theology of the poor, a theology of the wretched, in which priests and lay people sought to understand the ravages of colonial racial capitalism as profoundly anti-Christian. It is essential that we maintain a material base of understanding our faith because it is not the poor that will pay for their sins of struggling to survive, but rather those who had the means and did nothing, turned away, or assumed positions of non-responsibility. As witnesses to injustice, we have a responsibility to respond to it.
While I call upon Muslims to consider our material and spiritual relations more intentionally here and elsewhere, I focus now on zakat’s potential to “change everything,” in the sense that geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore defines abolition; that abolition requires us to change everything.[10] While she grounds this line of thinking and praxis in the movement to end the prison industrial complex, she speaks of it as being much more than that because the infrastructures that shape this complex reach into all other aspects of our local and global lives. By tracing how prisons and policing fix and shape political economies, geographies, and logics, she demonstrates a governing anti-relationality and organized abandonment that orders and is ordered by racism, which Gilmore defines as the “state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct, yet densely interconnected political geographies.” [11]We can apply this definition of racism and how it shapes political economies at multiple scales. An example of the local scale is the $6 million dollars a day that the city of Chicago, where I live spends on its police force. Scaling up, we witness the vulnerability to premature death that migrant workers in the Gulf region face in building the alternative economic future of soccer stadiums and art museums that is densely interconnected with the political economies of their families and communities in their home countries. Scaling back down, we can consider how these two examples impact the geographies of our bodies, how our efforts of distancing or bringing close impact the hardness of our hearts and the afterlife geographies of our souls.
An example of the local scale is the $6 million dollars a day that the city of Chicago, where I live spends on its police force. Scaling up, we witness the vulnerability to premature death that migrant workers in the Gulf region face in building the alternative economic future of soccer stadiums and art museums that is densely interconnected with the political economies of their families and communities in their home countries
In Imam al-Ghazali’s Ihya Ulum Al-Din, his book on the mysteries of zakat discusses both the inward and outward requisites of zakat. The second requisite speaks to the haste with which one should pay one’s zakat: “To delay paying zakat on wealth when someone has the means to do so is a sin, and if that wealth were destroyed or lost [while he delayed], the obligation to pay zakat would remain. However, if he delayed because there were no deserving beneficiaries to pay to and if, during that delay, the property were destroyed or lost, then the obligation to pay it would cease” (my emphasis).[12] While al-Ghazali later elucidates what makes a “deserving beneficiary,” and perhaps there were no sufficiently pious individuals who qualified, I am struck that al-Ghazali would write this. Was he saying that it would be possible that an entire local community would not have those in need? Was this to be expected in twelfth-century Muslim-majority societies? I am astounded because as I write this, I am overwhelmed by the needs of the most vulnerable and less vulnerable in my locality, whether I write from California, where I was born and raised or whether I write from Illinois, where I currently make my life. As I write this, Gaza has been facing over 300 days of settler colonial racial capitalist violence after decades of sustained displacement, force, enclosure, dispossession, and death. The ongoing structure of settler colonial violence is made exceedingly plain and the need for attending to all those who qualify for zakat (namely everyone in Gaza) in the face of US participation in the Occupation and genocide is maddening. At the same time, what is happening in Gaza and greater Occupied Palestine is deeply interconnected with the ongoing counterinsurgent war in the name of protecting power and capital that the United States government continues to wage against Indigenous and other colonized and poor people.[13]
In the United States nearly one-third of the working-age population has a criminal record, about the same number of people who have a 4-year college degree![14] By the age of 23, nearly one in three Americans will have been arrested; this particular statistic came out in a medical journal for pediatricians, speaking to the health risks of a carceral society that is oriented around cops, rather than infrastructures of care (hence the protest chant, “Care not Cops”). These statistics amongst many others testify to the ways that our collective human capital, from our labor to our time and social relations, is mobilized in ways that neither serve us as citizens nor serve us as those attempting to become Muslim. How do we live lives of spiritual meaning when living in such a society requires us to not see, to be blind to the realities of contemporary systems? How do we fulfill the fourth and fifth outward requisites, that zakat and sadaqa, which are “collected should not be sent from one town to another,” meaning that one should prioritize giving locally, and that “the one who is paying zakat should divide the payment between the different types of recipients [listed in Qur’an 9:60] who are in [the] area where he lives.”[15] How often are Muslims splitting their zakat across the different eight categories, which includes that of the captive and their liberation?
Believers Bail Out (https://believersbailout.org/ ) began as a community-led project in 2018 to contribute to a larger abolitionist movement through the infrastructures (pillars) of Islam. We specifically collected zakat to free Muslim captives in pretrial incarceration and ICE immigration. Those incarcerated pre-trial are punished for being poor; they await their trials for alleged crimes from jail cells, rather than from their homes because they cannot afford the bail. Because the US arrests far more people than it can actually take to trial, the criminal punishment system, part of the larger colonial racial capitalist system, relies on those arrested to take plea deals (regardless of guilt or innocence), so that they can usually return home after time served pre-trial in the local jail. They now have criminal records, which will follow and stigmatize them as they apply to schools and scholarships, housing, and employment.
“When Believers Bail Out started, we were responding to an unjust system–targeted mass incarceration–with a system meant to eradicate unjust systems–zakat. I must admit, at the time that I had not truly reflected upon zakat and its abolitionist qualities and possibilities. It was only in doing the work of collecting and using zakat to pay the bails of incarcerated Muslims, Muslims that were poor, needy, held in bondage, in debt, wayfarers, whose hearts needed reconciliation…”
When Believers Bail Out started, we were responding to an unjust system–targeted mass incarceration–with a system meant to eradicate unjust systems–zakat. I must admit, at the time that I had not truly reflected upon zakat and its abolitionist qualities and possibilities. It was only in doing the work of collecting and using zakat to pay the bails of incarcerated Muslims, Muslims that were poor, needy, held in bondage, in debt, wayfarers, whose hearts needed reconciliation, that I truly gained a two-fold understanding: 1) that our current criminal punishment system and the larger racial capitalist system through which it is structured are antithetical to an Islamic political-economic-spiritual worldview, and 2) we are woefully under-utilizing the potential of zakat.
The wisdom of zakat and its eight recipient categories says a great deal about the political-economic-cosmological revolution that Islam was and can be (if only we recognize the signs!), and what tools we were given through Islam towards recognizing and eradicating injustice in the world. Of the eight categories of zakat – the poor (al-fuqara’), needy (al-masakin), those in debt (al-gharimin), those in bondage (fi’l-riqab), travelers/wayfarers (ibn al-sabil), in the way of God (fi sabilillah), those who distribute zakat (al-‘amilina ‘alayha), and for the reconciliation or softening of hearts (al-mu’allafah qulubuhum) – most of the people that we have bailed out belong to five to six of these categories, and we’ve distributed zakat to all eight of these categories. We have worked with the Tayba Foundation in California on developing our zakat policy, especially in terms of respecting the agency (wakala) of the zakat recipients and their ownership of zakat (tamlik), that they must give us permission by making us the wakil or agent, to use zakat to bail them out.
Putting people in cages is not natural, nor is it Islamic. Carcerality is an essential component of the colonial racial capitalist system that governs “American” society that is exported elsewhere; the US incarcerated population continues to be the largest in the world with roughly 1.9 million people currently incarcerated, 803,000 people on parole, and 2.9 million people on probation; 79 million people have a criminal record. Crime has been steadily decreasing over the last quarter century, yet the perception of crime has increased. Research critically shows that more police funding or “tough on crime” policies do little to reduce the breaking of laws or interpersonal violence, rather they only serve as illusions that make people feel like something is being done and that it is for their safety. This illusory aspect of the criminal punishment system is what needs to denaturalized. We continue to put money into and expand this version of a criminal punishment system that is profoundly unsuccessful and unsustainable, regardless of its rates of failure or success. For many, this fact is mostly hidden from view; for others this carcerality is experienced through absence, of loved ones, relations, care, and resources.
Most aspects of our everyday lives in modern racial capitalism are touched by financial and legal dealings. Our students are demonstrating this every day in their popular universities for Gaza…
Zakat has both an inward and outward dimension in its purifying qualities: “it has the evident effect of purifying us of elements of our greed, avarice, and indifference to others…Zakat connects us to all other human beings, to whom we are tied through our financial and legal dealings… So important is economic justice to the Qur’an’s vision of society that this social pillar of the religion is not about family, or neighbour, or Jihad; but relates to how money is stored, taxed, and exchanged.”[16] Most aspects of our everyday lives in modern racial capitalism are touched by financial and legal dealings. Our students are demonstrating this every day in their popular universities for Gaza. They demand that their universities disclose their investments in corporations and governments that undergird and facilitate ongoing disregard for international humanitarian laws and protocols. In the United States, both private and public universities, like non-profits or non-governmental associations and foundations hoard incredible amounts of wealth to “secure” the futures of their institutions. But increasingly, it is becoming profoundly clear that rather than undergird the tertiary higher education system, they also invest in the increasing militarization of our societies and the increasing expansion of extreme poverty and extreme wealth. For example, my university has investments in the State of Israel through government bonds and has multiple partnerships and investments with companies like Caterpillar, Raytheon, and Boeing. Our students’ families have been murdered by missiles and bombs produced by Raytheon and have had their families’ homes destroyed by Caterpillar bulldozers. At the same time, the criminal punishment system is being mobilized against these students through the targeted criminalization of their protests. Over 3200 students (and many more community members) are facing criminal charges ranging from misdemeanors to felonies that aim to scare, stigmatize, isolate, and discourage these students and others from speaking up for Palestinian life and challenging the logics of our colonial racial capitalist system.[17]
The Material of the Spiritual
If one truly understands the logics and mechanisms of capital, and takes Islam and the Qur’an seriously, it is hard to believe that such a thing as Islamic banking and finance can exist in ways that do not parcel off a few legal rulings here and there from the ethical imperative of Islam. So much has been abstracted and mystified, that it is hard to remain material as one attempts to buy a home, gain an education, prepare for retirement, untimely accidents, etcetera. The social safety net is so slim, that insurance becomes that net, debt becomes the means, enabling inflation of everything from the price of rent to a dozen eggs. In my book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival, I discuss how predominantly Black and Black-led Muslim communities in East Oakland flourished from the 1970s-1990s, purchasing multiple properties, creating New Medinas, and running multiple independent K-8 schools and informal scholarly communities. These communities had different genealogies, often within the same institution, from the Nation of Islam, Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the Dar ul-Islam movement, and the Ahmadiyya movements to the forms of Islam which emerged from incarcerated populations and spiritual genealogies of West and East African Islam. The Warith Deen Muhammad community was established in the late 1950s in the San Francisco Bay Area as a Nation of Islam temple and in 1975 transitioned to Sunni Islam. With the assistance of Warith Deen Muhammad, the community eventually purchased a number of buildings in a town across the San Francisco Bay called Oakland. They established an elementary and secondary Muslim school, which in the 1990s was sending its children to ivy league universities and other 4-year colleges. The community lost its school building in the aftermath of the 2008 sub-prime mortgage crisis. With increasing gentrification and the dispersal of Muslim congregants and their financial and infrastructural support, organized abandonment, violence, counterinsurgent infiltration and surveillance, predatory banking, especially in the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the expansion of other Muslim institutions, and bad and impossible choices, these communities are increasingly aging, losing properties and population, or have members who were exiled or incarcerated, while mosques in Silicon Valley and Zaytuna College in Berkeley continue to purchase additional properties, expand their geographic and cultural footprints, and shape which forms of Islam as a way of being and knowing become normative and survive.
In my book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival, I discuss how predominantly Black and Black-led Muslim communities in East Oakland flourished from the 1970s-1990s, purchasing multiple properties, creating New Medinas, and running multiple independent K-8 schools and informal scholarly communities
Zaytuna Institute’s first property in Hayward was purchased with the proceeds of Google stock. As it transitioned to a College in the last two decades, it has purchased over twenty million dollars’ worth of property in the Berkeley hills, while masajid throughout the Bay, specifically in and adjacent to Silicon Valley continue to expand their mosques and Islamic centers. Such accumulations and dispossessions are not exclusive to the extremely-gentrified San Francisco Bay Area; as a recent study showed, while the overall numbers and locations of US-based mosques are increasing nationally, African American mosques and congregants across the country are decreasing.[18] I speak of this to draw attention to the political economy of Islam and Muslim everyday life and how forms of Islamic ways of knowing and being flourish or decline due to matters far beyond doctrine. I argue for attending to the infrastructures and contingencies of Islamic belief and practice, how geography, cultural and socioeconomic forces, and geopolitical agendas impact which Muslim ways of knowing and being become normative and dominant or marginalized and diminished. In particular, I attend to how the race-concept, liberal humanism, and the global transformation wrought by racial capitalism all introduced modalities of thought, belief, and power that reorganized how social and spiritual life were governed and what role Islam and Muslim actors played in that governance.
In our historical and contemporary studies of and practices within Islam and Muslim communities, we must account for how the race-concept, the emergence of race and racial thinking, brings about a new era of human definition and differentiation that constructs some as sub-human and non-human and that then shapes a material, socioeconomic, and political order undergirded by these logics. The San Francisco Bay Area, like much of the United States, is resegregating towards carceral geographies not limited to prisons and law enforcement, but that enable the inequality that “capitalism requires” and “racism enshrines”. Hard-fought achievements in schooling, housing, employment, and antiracism are being eradicated by state-sanctioned and extralegal efforts to expand inequality and segregation as a form of counterinsurgent warfare. By demonstrating how a dynamic discourse of Muslim heterogeneity coexists with and often reinforces resegregation within the Muslim community, I work to make legible for all of us here more broadly the need to reorient our knowledge production and transmission toward the needs and knowledge of the most vulnerable in ways that foreground, rather than suspend, the grounded relationality of mosques, schools, and other Muslims institutions and their local communities.[19]
To Fulfill Our Trusts
Zakat and other redistributive structures offer both ethical and practical means of addressing the hoarding of great wealth. Zakat has the potential to change everything because it binds us to each other and foundationally asserts the human dignity and agency of the poor, rather than the ways that racial capitalist systems tend to punish the poor for being poor. Most research on poverty in the United States and globally focuses on the poor and how to engage them in making better life choices and take advantage of charitable opportunities, but as sociologist Matthew Desmond points out, we need to look at those with wealth to understand why poverty continues to exist. The Qur’an does the same. The Qur’an does not ask the poor to be more frugal, work harder, and consume better or less, nor does it ask for them to be punished for their conditions. Rather, the Qur’an focuses on those with wealth and means, that they not be misers nor hoarders and that they spend their wealth according to scales of proximity and abundance. It further articulates the role of sadaqa as a way of affirming one’s obligatory acts with a supererogatory act that “aims at conformity with the truth in his deed.”[20]
As I have stated elsewhere, we should stop referring to sadaqa as charity, because its roots have much more to do with truth and veracity, friendship, and the alignment of the heart and the deed or utterance than benevolence, relief, or generosity.
As I have stated elsewhere, we should stop referring to sadaqa as charity, because its roots have much more to do with truth and veracity, friendship, and the alignment of the heart and the deed or utterance than benevolence, relief, or generosity. While we often refer to it as a gift or favor to someone in need, it is actually a seeking of favor from God, which I believe is why many grammarians said that calling a beggar “mutasadiq” was vulgar and incorrect, that it should only be applied to the one who gives sadaqa. In verses 103-4 of Surat Al-Tawbah , Allah is the recipient of sadaqa, the One who accepts these acts to purify and sanctify wealth, especially when one has mixed “an act that was good with another that was evil” 9:102. To call something charity, centers the giver as the moral agent of benevolence, whereas the Qur’an asserts that the giver is actually engaged in tawba, asking for mercy and purification, the poor become a means to do so, while attending to their own salvation as well. Thus, the relational aspect of zakat and sadaqa are especially significant.
As so many Islamic scholars have articulated, the Qur’an addresses believers as people who have duties who are also expected to fulfill these duties – to Allah, ourselves, and others. The Qur’an is not a declaration of our human rights, though it does consistently articulate the rights of the vulnerable vis a vis those with more means and capacity. This is perhaps why the Qur’an so appeals to those who are oppressed, and why so many people convert to Islam in jails and prisons. While the other pillars of Islam, of course, have communal implications and are best done and often need to be done with others, they are primarily individual obligations and responsibilities. While zakat is also an individual obligation, it specifically addresses and organizes our relations and along with Quranic guidance on contracts, inheritance, property, usury, and the rights of the vulnerable and our obligations to them tells us much about how Islam reordered and can reorder the world. That one of the categories of zakat is also the administrator of zakat points to the need for communal responses whether formal or informal.
Muslims have largely abdicated our responsibilities toward building just political-economic relations to forms of business, banking, speculation, debt, and finance that were developed in the fifteenth-twentieth centuries. These forms of wealth and resource accumulation were enabled by violence, theft, genocide, and enslavement across the Atlantic in the Americas. To compete within such an economy as nations, communities, and individuals requires us to harden ourselves in anti-relational ways, to rationalize inequality through differentiation and racialization. The Islamic tradition asks us to think about money and time in particular anti-capitalist ways. That zakat should be distributed and spent in a timely manner is another way to keep wealth in circulation for the betterment of society at large. So, for instance, Believers Bail Out always makes sure that we spend what we have received as zakat within a year. Because the need is quite great, this year we spent what we raised this past Ramadan in a few months, and we recently conducted our first non-Ramadan fundraiser for additional funds, centering the Mauritanian migrants currently being incarcerated in US detention centers as they apply for asylum.
Capitalist money, time, and anti-relationality consistently challenge our Islamic imperatives to configure our money, time, and relations differently. What we keep coming up against is the intensity of organized abandonment that many of our communities face and the degree to which those communities qualify for zakat across multiple categories.
Capitalist money, time, and anti-relationality consistently challenge our Islamic imperatives to configure our money, time, and relations differently. What we keep coming up against is the intensity of organized abandonment that many of our communities face and the degree to which those communities qualify for zakat across multiple categories. With this qualification, those who live above its thresholds must be in relation to them through zakat and sadaqa. So, we find that we provide an important service by releasing our Muslim kin from bondage, but they enter another form of bondage due to circumstances of housing, employment, and the often-unrequited need for medical services, especially in regards to mental health. Increasingly, especially in Illinois, electronic monitoring has expanded, meaning that individuals are restricted in their movement, placing them in difficult positions within their families, because they are unable to contribute to household needs, whether monetary or care-related. These are compounding effects of poverty–environmental, educational, health, employment, recreational disparities–that lead to premature death.
What does it mean that the Qur’an identified the captive, as well as those with debts, the poor and needy, and the traveler, as eligible for zakat, and that scholars argued that one should dispense with zakat across all its categories? That a connection was being forged through the distribution of zakat and sadaqa? Zakat, sadaqa, and their redistributive functions have powerful roles to play in becoming Muslim and rehearsing abolition – they help us think through short-term conflicts within the community and the long-term ramifications of organized abandonment. They require a return to relationality, with mercy and compassion as our primary models and modes.
Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory. Her book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023) is an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Kashani is also in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition.
[1] Susan Koshy et al., Colonial Racial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022).
[2] I use the second-person “we” as a form of invitation to my reader as one who sits at the crossroads of multiple discursive traditions and genealogies of knowledge and is humbly asking for others to join in constructing a critical path forward towards a more just world.
[3] Koshy et al., Colonial Racial Capitalism, 6.
[4] Maxime Rodinson, Islam and Capitalism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1978); Charles Tripp, Islam and the Moral Economy: The Challenge of Capitalism (Cambridge ; Cambridge University Press, 2006); Rajeswary Ampalavanar Brown, Islam and Capitalism in the Making of Modern Bahrain (Oxford, United Kingdom ; Oxford University Press, 2023); Abdal Hakim Murad, “‘Zakat in a Post-Modern Economy,’” NZF, October 27, 2016,; Taqī al-Dīn Nabhānī, The Economic System in Islam, Living Islam Series 3 (New Delhi: Milli Publications, 2002).
[5] Koshy et al., Colonial Racial Capitalism, 2. See also Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, N.C: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Exceptions to this include Muriam Haleh Davis, Markets of Civilization: Islam and Racial Capitalism in Algeria, Theory in Forms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2022); Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims : Race and Labor in the South Asian Diaspora (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011).
[6] Tripp, Islam and the Moral Economy, 4.
[7] Tripp, 4.
[8] Jodi Melamed, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 78–79. This antirelationality likewise breaks human relations with other signs of creation, our stewardship and consciousness of flora, fauna, and beyond.
[9] Tripp, Islam and the Moral Economy, 4.
[10] Maryam Kashani, Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslims Study and Survival (Durham: Duke University Press, 2023).
[11] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, ed. R. J. Johnston et al. (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2002), 261; Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geography: Essays Towards Liberation (London: Verso, 2022), 107.
[12] Abu-Hamid Muhammad Al-Ghazali, The Mysteries of Charity and the Mysteries of Fasting, trans. M. Abdurrahman Fitzgerald (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2018), 16.
[13] Dylan Rodriguez, White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide, First edition. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2021); Orisanmi Burton, Tip of the Spear: Black Radicalism, Prison Repression, and the Long Attica Revolt (Oakland, California: University of California Press, 2023).
[14] “Just Facts: As Many Americans Have Criminal Records as College Diplomas | Brennan Center for Justice,” accessed June 10, 2024.
[15] Al-Ghazali, The Mysteries of Charity and the Mysteries of Fasting, 19.
[16] Murad, “‘Zakat in a Post-Modern Economy.’”
[17] Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg, Ethan Corey, Jerry Iannelli, Meg O’Connor “We tracked 3,200 Pro-Palestinian Campus Arrests. Here’s How Prosecutors are Responding,” The Appeal, July 1, 2024. Accessed on August 1, 2024.
[18] Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU), “The American Mosque 2020: Growing and Evolving”
[19] Shange, Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Anthropology, and Race in the New San Francisco.
[20] Edward William Lane, An Arabic English Lexicon (Wood Dale, IL: Forgotten Books, 2018)