UC Riverside

This dissertation is the result of four years of ethnographic research with the Muslim Leadership Initiative (MLI). MLI is a network of North American Muslim leaders who engage with North American and Israeli Jews to learn about Judaism, Jewish peoplehood and the centrality of Israel to Jewish peoplehood. This engagement violates the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) call to action to end the occupation of Palestine. MLI seeks to find an alternative pathway to advocate for Muslim minorities living in Western contexts as well as continue support and allyship of the Palestinian fight for self-determination. MLI and its participants have adopted and internalized certain aspects of their Jewish education that they hope to implement within their own local, national, and transnational Muslim communities. Additionally, MLIers and the Shalom Hartman Institute (SHI) that hosts this Jewish learning program, both engage racialized parallel logics that betray an oppressed oppressor mindset that reinforces white supremacist ideologies. MLIers, through their advocacy efforts to fight Islamophobia are problematizing racial structures by claiming a whiteness sought through intra-Muslim Arab supremacy. This white adjacency is a rejection of the racialization of religion imposed by Islamophobia. MLI’s racialized maneuverings take different gendered forms as women MLIers navigate intra-Muslim patriarchy and Western patriarchal structures. The ways women MLIers are pushing back against these dual patriarchies sheds light on how gendered, racialized religious minorities are trying to obtain full social citizenship within the North American contexts they have chosen to call home.