A few years ago, Katrina Daly Thompson was living in Los Angeles and teaching at UCLA. As a recently converted Muslim, she began attending services held by both traditional and progressive local Muslim groups—and found herself struck by the sharp and subtle differences in the ways they worshipped and the language and word choices they used.
Her interest in the linguistic ethnography of these groups turned into a research project once she joined the faculty at UW-Madison, and now, into a summer stipend from the National Endowment for the Humanities. The NEH awarded Thompson $6,000 that will allow her to compile and write up the research she’s conducted over the last four years. The working title of her in-progress book is “Misfits, Freaks, Rebels, and Queers: An Ethnography of Muslims on the Margins.”
“The question I’m trying to examine is, how does language contribute to the sense of community and identity in these groups?” says Thompson, chair of the African Cultural Studies department in L&S.
Thompson’s work is based on both participant observation in and extensive interviews with members of progressive Muslim groups in North America, Canada, and international online groups—and by “progressive,” Thompson means committed to reform and inclusion. According to a survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), 60 percent of U.S. Muslims support civil liberties for LGBTQI members, yet those individuals often report feeling isolated and excluded in mainstream mosques. In those settings, for example, men and women pray separately, with men at the front of the room and women at the back. In the progressive communities Thompson is studying, they’re intermingled, and women are encouraged to take leadership roles and give sermons.
“That means they’re allowed to use their voices,” she explains. “The traditional divisions between Sunni and Shi’a Muslims are crumbling in many of these progressive groups. It’s a question of who gets to speak in these spaces.”
The progressive groups are also much more inclusive of LGBTQI members. The gender pronouns they use to refer to the Muslim concept of God are often feminine or nonbinary rather than masculine, and LGBTQI members are fully included in ritual practice and leadership.
Thompson’s project won NEH backing in an extremely competitive environment. According to the organization, only eleven percent of this year’s proposals were funded. Thompson’s research has appeared in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, and, more recently, for the Islamic Studies blog site The Maydan. Her monograph will be the first book to take account of LGBTQI Muslims and their allies as a multi-sited community.
Through detailed description of Muslims’ discursive practices, Thompson hopes to dispel widespread stereotypes about Islam, as well as open new ways to understand how religious discourse, identifications, and futures are transformed through social interaction both in real life and online.