Susanne M Stadlbauer

Present-day scholarship on religious conversions diverts from classic Protestant paradigms of sudden conversions and instant transformations of the self. Instead, it stresses that converts make active choices that are influenced by specific contexts and historical changes. This becomes evident in an ethnographic study of one controversial aspect of the recent refugee influx in Germany: the so-called mass conversions of Iranian refugees from Shia Islam to Christianity, which have been highly publicized and criticized since the height of immigration in 2015. The analysis draws on interview data with Ira-nian refugee converts and their pastors in Protestant churches in North Rhine-Westphalia between October 2017 and January 2018. The study reveals the need to theorize the sym-biotic connection between religious contacts, forced migration, and conversion to Chris-tianity. It applies Rambo's (1993) stage model of conversion and the analytical concept of secrecy (Jones 2014, Manderson et al. 2015, Simmel 1906) to demonstrate that the Iranian refugees' conversions are shaped by contexts, crises, encounters, quests, interactions, commitments, and consequences (Rambo 1993) as they negotiate the forces of secrecy, risk, transparency, and the benefits of being a Christian. The goal of this paper is to find thematic patterns in their narratives that can be systematized and can build a foundation for further study.

This paper surveys studies on language ideologies in the Arabic diglossic environment of present-day Egypt. Specifically, it discusses linguistic and cultural implications of language ideologies associated with Classical Arabic (CA), Modern Standard Arabic (MSA), Egyptian Arabic (EA), and English in the Cairo area. The language ideologies of these varieties are a product of both the past and the present: they emerged during British colonialism in the late nineteenth century and are maintained in the postcolonial climate through discourses on the purity of Classical Arabic, on the linguistic corruption of the dialects, and on the increasing use of English as a symbol of Western capitalism and modernity. Aligning with Woolard's (1998) definition of language ideology as a mediating link between linguistic features and social processes, this study demonstrates how language ideologies are communicated in structural aspects of the language varieties in the Arabic diglossia and how Egyptians use language varieties strategically to access the symbolic power of these ideologies. It argues that studies of language ideologies, language features, and discursive interaction are inseparable in uncovering how language is used in the Arabic diglossia in Egypt.

This paper focuses on time, space, and identity relations in narratives of Muslim women in an Islamic student group in Colorado, who use autobiographies of how their faith developed for countering stereotypes of Islam and Muslims in post 9/11 America. In these faith development narratives, these women, who were born and raised in Islam, strive to dispel tbe often abstract media claims of Muslim women being oppressed by Muslim men and by Islamic doctrines, as weU as being behind the times, stagnant in the past, or simply anti-modern, anti-secular, or anti-American. In narrating how they have progressed from unknow-ing children socialized into Islam to knowledgeable adults, the women decontex-tualize, and thereby idealize, Islam to stress their agency and individuality. The women resignify Islamic rituals, such as the salat (praying five times a day), sawn (fasting during Ramadan), and hijab (wearing the head scarf), by delinking them from the often criticized materialistic and pure-repetitious nature characteristic of religious rituals of the pre-modern. Instead, they project these rituals as self-disciplining and self-realizing practices very much in line with modern precepts of individuality and female emancipation. In their narratives, they reinforce the media's binary opposition between America and Islam, reducing them to caricatures of a purely secular, somewhat ignorant, state and a perfect and pure religion, respectively.

Local minority religions are often labeled as clashing with the majority culture, but how people make sense of clashes requires systematic empirical investigation. This paper has two goals: First, it examines different discursive environments through which Muslim women at the Muslims Student Association at a University of Colorado establish their religious practice and how the women renegotiate universalizing and harmful media stereotypes of Islam, which are still influential more than a decade after 9/11. Second, how the women construct a personal Islam in those environments. I argue that the women construct Islamic practices, such as wearing the hijab and believing in jihad, as self-disciplining and self-transforming processes to become modest and pious Muslim women and to overcome both spiritual and mundane difficulties in everyday life. The women show a Western-type of individuality, Islamic practice, self-discipline, and da’wah are compatible. The women collectively draw from various discourses and mediated experiences to reflexively organize their lives and form their self-identity.

This book chapter contributes to developing and illustrating the framework of third spaces of digital religion, as elaborated by Hoover & Echchaibi (2014) in their essay entitled " Media Theory and the 'Third Spaces of Digital Religion'. " 1 It analyzes the negotiation of a Salafist identity on the YouTube channel Salafimedia UK. This channel was created in 2009 to conduct daw'ah (call to Islam) and to popularize the members' controversial reorientation to the way of the salaf (first generation of Muslims). Salafimedia, as seen through the lens of third spaces, thrives at the same time outside of the confines of traditional Islam and the recent persecution of Salafists by the British government, yet is shaped by them in complex ways. The members' identities rely on a complex reflexive interactive engagement with technology, practice, and lived experience. Their practices intertwine modernist percepts of self-fulfillment and individual choice, pre-modern Islamic ways of life, visions of a global Salafist ummah, waves of identity politics after the 2011 Arab Spring, and video-platform affordances that allow for visual and textual representations of all these elements. The negotiations between these elements hail the members of Salafimedia into new religious authorities that are at the same time fitted to these practices and emerge from them.

This paper explores the manifestation of a digital Salafist hypermasculinity on social media platforms in Germany, the UK, and Tunisia with special attention paid to the Tunisian blog SLF Magazine. This hypermasculinity is a product of the naturalization of digital platforms as authentic spaces of religious truth claims in the 2011-Arab-Spring social media campaigns and the social media recruitment strategies of the self-proclaimed Islamic State. This paper analyzes the mediation (Morgan, 2013) of technology, religion, and affect that makes this hypermasculinity immediate to a young male audience. Supported by a wider rhetoric of moral superiority in the Salafist interpretation of Islam, SLF Magazine blends selected virile attributes of the salaf (first generations of Muslims) with symbols of mass-mediated popular culture, such as American superheroes, Care Bears, and Pokémon, leading to a narrow jihadist-Salafist interpretation of Islam.

This dissertation examines how women in the Muslim Student Association (MSA) at the University of Colorado at Boulder respond to the negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims that have proliferated since 9/11. The media's positioning of Muslim women as "backwards" and "un-American" compels MSA women to construct an extensive discourse of da'wah (outreach to non-Muslims) that repositions Islamic doctrine within the terms of American modernity. While this discourse shows respect for Islamic ritual practices, such as praying five times daily and wearing the hijab, the women construct their use of these practices as an agentive choice informed by study, self-discipline, and conscious reflection. The seven chapters that constitute this dissertation examine the discursive strategies that facilitate this construction of a contemporary Islamic self across multiple discourse domains, including interviews, personal narratives, rehearsed performance, and everyday conversational interaction
The dissertation is centrally concerned with uncovering the spatial and temporal dimensions that underlie the discursive production of identity. As a sociocultural linguist, I incorporate a range of theoretical perspectives to illuminate the interplay of time, space, and identity, engaging directly with Bakhtin's (1981) understanding of chronotopes, Benjamin's (1986) distinction between historical time and messianic time, and Keane's (2007) exposition of the moral narrative of modernity. I similarly incorporate a range of methods in my analysis of the discourse data that I collected over the course of two and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork. Chapter 2 employs Membership Categorization Analysis to examine how MSA women negotiate a mediatized Muslim-American binary. Chapter 3 focuses on the women's use of spatial and temporal deixis to illuminate how they situate themselves in response to a media that portrays them as both foreign and anti-modern. Chapter 4 incorporates narrative analysis to shed light on the women's faith development narratives, which articulate their journey with Islam as evolving from ritualistic obligation to intellectual choice. This methodology is also the basis of Chapter 5, which analyzes the narratives of American women who converted to Islam after 9/11. In contrast to other kinds of religious conversion narratives discussed in the literature, these narratives, which I identify as "reversion" narratives, do not demonstrate a clear break with the past but rather rewrite the past as Muslim, thus aligning with other faith development narratives in emphasizing learning as instrumental to self-progression. Finally, Chapter 6 incorporates linguistic anthropological work on the subject of language ideology to illuminate the social meaning behind the women's alternating uses of Qur'anic Arabic, contemporary heritage languages, and English. Taken together, these chapters provide on-the-ground examples of how sociocultural linguistics, with its emphasis on interdisciplinary theories and methods, contributes to the larger endeavor of analyzing the place of Islam in contemporary U.S. society