Egalitarian preferences and benevolence are significant elements of Islamic social justice, which is one of the main pillars of Islam's ethico-political system. Surprisingly, empirical investigations about attitudinal implications of Islamic social justice values are rare. This is one of the first studies examining the correlations between Islam, social justice values, and regime preferences. It proposes that benevolence and egalitarian distributive preferences will induce democratic support and mediate the effect of religiosity on democratic orientations. Seemingly unrelated regression estimations using a Muslim-only sample from the sixth wave of the World Values Surveys support these hypotheses. The effects of social justice values are exclusive to support for democracy and not to support for authoritarian systems. Furthermore, religiosity increases support for democracy through intermediate mechanism of social justice values. These results imply that, next to principles of ijtihad, ijma, and shura, Islamic social justice values can induce pluralistic ideas in Muslim majority societies.

We conduct a multilevel examination of the relationship between religiosity and democratic citizenship norms and behaviors using International Social Survey Program data. We analyze how democratic engagement varies according to individual and national average religious involvement in 28 predominantly-Christian democracies. We find that (1) individual-level religious attendance is positively linked to both what people say (norms) and what they do (participation); (2) nations with higher aggregate national attendance participate less politically; and (3) the relationship between individual-level religious engagement and citizenship varies by national religious context. More specifically, individual religious attendance matters more where it is more distinctive (i.e., in more secular countries). Individual-level religious participation is generally conducive to citizenship, but its impact is context-dependent.

Islamic finance has been surprisingly undertheorized in the international relations literature. In this paper, I fill this gap by investigating the dynamics of mainstreaming within the Islamic finance regime in global markets. Using the norm diffusion literature, I argue that the development and diffusion of Islamic economics, and the corresponding expertise, have followed three distinct steps. First, Islamic economics initially was a critique of capitalism and world markets; second, it was “nationalized” by the political leaders of major Muslim-majority countries; and third, it became an integral part of world markets. By tracing the development of Islamic finance as part of global politics, I situate it within a theoretical framework and show the wider implications of this economic framework for global politics.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that Muslim American women who wear the hijab may be particularly vulnerable to the experiences of stigmatization because the hijab represents one of the most obvious and dominant markers of “otherness.” Yet, extant research has surprisingly neglected to systematically examine how such external markers of difference can increase perceptions of discrimination. Drawing from two nationally representative datasets, we examine perceived discrimination among Muslim Americans, and find that veiled women report experiencing both societal and institutional discrimination at much higher rates than their counterparts. In fact, our findings show that the hijab is one of the most important predictors of self-reported discrimination among all Muslim Americans. Interestingly, however, we also find that men are more likely than women to perceive discrimination once we account for the role of the hijab. Our analysis makes an important contribution to existing research by highlighting the unique experiences of a religious minority group and identifies one important and previously underexplored mechanism by which individuals may be targeted for discrimination—the hijab.

Confronted by a number of home-grown Islamic terrorist attacks, many Americans incorrectly assume that Muslim religiosity correlates with anti-American values and that the American mosque is the center of radical socialization efforts. This paper examines the nature of the relationship between mosque involvement and political engagement. It finds that mosque attendance is positively associated with political engagement only when the attendance engages congregants in ways beyond religious ritual. Attending mosque to pray does not significantly impact political identities or engagement like following politics, registering to vote, voting, or party membership, while participation in other social or religious activities at a mosque is associated with an increased probability of engagement. These results suggest that not all mosque involvement is equally beneficial for promoting political engagement and that religious participation must proactively engage with the social lives of the congregants to have a substantive political effect.

This paper examines how Muslim American advocacy organizations have responded to recent spikes in anti-Muslim discrimination, particularly in the context of the 2016 elections. It asks how Muslim American interest groups have helped frame and communicate the policy interests of U.S. Muslims and, consequently, the collective claims of the group on whose behalf they claim to speak. Relying on political ethnography as the main method of inquiry, I conduct in-depth participant observation, qualitative interviews with Muslim American leaders, and an analysis of primary documents and social media communication produced by Muslim American organizations. This data was collected between June 2016 and July 2017, and transcribed and coded using Nvivo. Through this analysis, I find that being targeted as “other” has driven Muslim advocacy organizations to rely on constituent empowerment strategies, mobilize in demand of Muslim American group rights, defend their constitutional rights, and claim their place as an American minority.

American Muslims’ increased societal salience has led to greater scrutiny of their political and social attitudes. Yet, systematic analyses of this population remain rare and tend to aggregate findings at a level that masks the community's diverse backgrounds and experiences. As a partial corrective, our paper provides a comprehensive demographic analysis of American Muslim political participation. Our conclusions, first, complement previous efforts to elaborate the influence of minority status on the core determinants of political participation. Second, they highlight the differential impact of these determinants within key American Muslim demographic subgroups, revealing the moderating effects of denomination, racial or ethnic background, and gender. As scholars and practitioners seek to better understand Muslims in America, our research suggests that there are myriad circumstances when this community's presumed cohesion gives way to meaningfully diverse perspectives and behaviors.