Medina by the Bay

“Medina by the Bay is a brilliant, moving, gorgeously crafted tour de force! Seamlessly weaving together ethnography, analysis, theory, history, political critique, and methodological interventions, Maryam Kashani shows readers that Islam is of and from the Bay Area. While attending to gender, class, and generational difference, she elucidates the context of racial capitalism, the War on Terror, and settler-colonial white supremacy within which Muslims in the Bay Area live, not as a laundry list of things to oppose or things that restrict, but as the conditions within which her interlocutors live, work, understand, create, teach, and learn. The result is a cutting-edge work that will be a must-read for years to come.” - Lara Deeb, Professor of Anthropology and MENA studies, Scripps College

“Maryam Kashani’s portrait of the rise of a Muslim American community begins intimately with scenes of prayer, a classroom seminar, and a poetry reading, and gathers to the level of the universal. Sounding manifold voices of what she lovingly calls ‘the unruly aggregate,’ she poses sharp questions about spirituality, knowledge, resistance, and survival. Medina by the Bay is ambitious, expansive, and wholly original, and will be celebrated for years to come.” - Jeff Chang, author of We Gon’ Be Alright: Notes on Race and Resegregation

"Medina by the Bay is an extensive ethnocinemtaic study of Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area, tracing Muslim lives at the intersections of immigration, resistance, race, ethnicity, and religion. Presenting a fresh and effective account of the efforts of Muslim survival in the area, it blends techniques of cinema to provide for intimate storytelling, one wherein scenes from everyday life are told in montage-style narrations. . . . This is a deeply personal work in which we see the imprint of the author throughout." - Shaiq Ali, Islamic Studies