5 Books to Read During Ramadan

Muslims on the Margins: Creating Queer Religious Community in North America by Katrina Daly Thompson

In Muslims on the Margins, Thompson shares vivid stories of nonconformist Muslims and the communities they form. The book draws from personal interviews and narratives to illustrate how religion is radically reinvented to make space for queerness and new traditions.

Broken: The Failed Promise of Muslim Inclusion by Evelyn Alsultany

Broken explores how diversity initiatives in the United States ultimately fail to include Muslims. Through analysis of popular culture, institutional policies, and law, Alsultany makes a distinction between consistent, genuine inclusion, and “crisis diversity,” a phenomenon where Muslim communities are only centered in times of Islamophobic crisis.

The Women’s Mosque of America: Authority & Community in US Islam by Tazeen M. Ali

Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title in 2023, this book centers a multiracial, women-only mosque in Los Angeles, the first of its kind in the United States. By investigating this innovative community, Ali uncovers how American Muslim women create and authorize new conceptions of Islamic authority.

Muslims of the Heartland: How Syrian Immigrants Made a Home in the American Midwest by Edward E. Curtis IV

Winner of the 2023 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Book Award from the Arab American National Museum, Muslims of the Heartland uncovers an important history of the Syrian Muslim Midwest, revealing deep-rooted multiculturalism in a region often thought of as uniformly white.

Muslim Cool: Race, Religion, and Hip Hop in the United States by Su’ad Abdul Khabeer

Muslim Cool illuminates the intersection of hip hop and American Islam as a way of asserting social identity. Su’ad Abdul Khabeer draws on ethnographic research to examine connections between Blackness and American Islam and intersections between the two communities.