Nancy Khalil

"Limited Imams:  Disestablishment and the Establishment of US Islam"

This project is an ethnography about Sunni US Muslim religious clerics (imams), their lives, field of work, and institutions of ministry at a time of intense struggle over the essence of Islam, its sources of authority, and increasing national tensions between preserving liberty while maintaining security. 

This book project asks whether we can adequately locate Muslim authority in the US absent recognizing a profession for the US imam? It posits that the conception of religious freedom and the principle of disestablishment in the US, ironically, is the very foundation for a Muslim authority that is unique to the US. In Limited Imams, I aim to demonstrate a) that ministry is a key to nationalizing a faith and its latent and manifest regulation by state actors as a necessary part of the US bureaucracy, b) the focus by Muslims on the training of individuals who serve as imams at the expense of creating regulatory processes for the profession itself skews towards greater state and interfaith influence, and c) religious freedom, and its well-argued impossibility in the US is, ironically, the very reason why the idea of an "American Islam" is undeniable.

Based on now nearly ten years of ethnographic fieldwork at Islamic seminaries and with imams in over a dozen US metropolises, Limited Imams is an extensive study on imams in the United States and Muslim seminaries, contributing a US narrative to a field rapidly growing in Europe, and well developed in Muslim majority societies. 

Nancy Khalil is an Assistant Professor of American Culture.