Sarah Merchant is a PhD candidate in Sociology at UC Berkeley. Her work bridges the fields of religious studies and political economy by exploring the entanglements between racial capitalism, the formation of the secular, and the Islamic world. Prior to Berkeley, she was a Pre-Doctoral Fellow in the Harvard Economics Department and a research assistant at the Harvard Kennedy School studying the racial and spatial determinants of economic inequality. She received her BA in Ethics, Politics, and Economics with honors from Yale University.
Dissertation Title: The Muslim Left in the Metropole: Islamic Theology and Progressive Politics in New York City
On the heels of the election of New York City’s first Muslim socialist mayor, my dissertation documents the formation of a Muslim Left in contemporary American politics. How was this political victory made possible by the mobilization of Muslim communities and organizations in the weeks, months, and years prior to the election? My dissertation aims to answer this question by tracing the nascent formation that has coalesced across spaces and issues, tethered by shared networks and a commitment to integrating Islamic ethics, theology, and practice into political organizing. I suggest that this new political movement is made up of overlapping networks across religious, cultural, non-profit, and political institutions in New York addressing issues that affect Muslims locally and internationally. Seeking to escape the secular left’s suspicion of religion and the Islamic orthodoxy’s emphasis on individual piety, the participants of this movement are fashioning their own understandings of a political Islam to resist both corporate and state interests. To do this, participants are critiquing state violence at Friday prayers, discussing Islamic theology in political education reading groups, and convening performance spaces to trace a political Islam in poetic verse. My dissertation explicitly asks how Islamic practice informs the political organizing approach of this movement.
Anchored by an ethnographic investigation of this New Muslim Left, my dissertation situates this political formation within a longer historical entanglement between racial capitalism and Islam dating back to the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the emergence of Renaissance humanism. It argues that because the formation of the Muslim “Other” has been critical to the project of racialization and European imperialism, the Muslim Left engages in a crucial reclamation of Islam as a political resource to resist the dual forces of contemporary capitalism and imperialism. My dissertation also situates its ethnographic exploration of the contemporary Muslim Left within a broader lineage of twentieth century Muslim political actors who mobilized Islamic theology for progressive political projects in the Global South.
In addition to documenting the Muslim Left today through an engagement with Muslim political organizations, I explore how performance spaces facilitate the merger of the theological and political. In these spaces, the body is read as a vessel through which divine energy and political action are realized. I document how Muslim musicians integrate Quranic verses into political songwriting, invoking an Islamic cosmology of unity that troubles the analytical separations between self, other, and divine. Through this process, they challenge commonly accepted conceptions of liberal selfhood that help rationalize the political domination of the “Other." I also trace how Muslim artists read this cosmology of unity in conversation with Black feminist scholarship on the erotic to theorize the body as a vehicle for cultivating an awareness of both divine and self-knowledge that can mobilize Muslims to resist forms of political subordination. In doing so, I clarify how theology becomes embodied and then politically mobilized. Through my study of the contemporary Muslim Left, I contribute to the ongoing conversation on the role of religion in American politics today.