How to think about Muslim Difference: On Mimesis and Alterity in Islam

Abstract: Drawing on his recently published book, The Muslim Difference (Yale 2022), Youshaa Patel explores the vexing Islamic discourse of reprehensible imitation (tashabbuh), a discourse that enjoins ordinary believers to embody and display their religious difference from Christians, Jews and others in public life. Moderating cross-cultural imitation and assimilation was as crucial to the construction of Muslim identity and alterity during Islam's formative period as it is today. This lecture situates the religious discourse within Islamic scholarship and history, drawing attention to the role of embodied and sensorial practice in mediating Muslim difference and casting new light on contemporary debates in the West over visible expressions of Islam, from headscarves and beards to minarets and mosques.

Biography: Youshaa Patel is associate professor of Religious Studies at Lafayette College (Easton, PA USA), and author of The Muslim Difference: Defining the Line between Believers and Unbelievers from Early Islam to the Present (Yale University Press 2022).  His scholarship explores how Islam has shaped—and been shaped—by Muslim interfaith encounters in the Middle East and beyond. His work has been supported by grants from Mellon, Fulbright, and the American Institute of Yemeni Studies, and includes extended research stays in India, Qatar, Yemen, Jordan, and Syria. Most recently, Professor Patel was the Abdul Aziz Al-Mutawa visiting fellow at the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, an independent center of the University of Oxford.