Medina by the Bay

From the Black Power movement and state surveillance to Silicon Valley and gentrification, Medina by the Bay examines how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive and flourish within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Weaving expansive histories, peoples, and geographies together in an ethnographic screenplay of cinematic scenes, Maryam Kashani demonstrates how sociopolitical forces and geopolitical agendas shape Muslim ways of knowing and being. Throughout, Kashani argues that contemporary Islam emerges from the specificities of the Bay Area, from its landscapes and infrastructures to its Muslim liberal arts college, mosques, and prison courtyards. Theorizing the Medina by the Bay as a microcosm of socioeconomic, demographic, and political transformations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Kashani resituates Islam as liberatory and abolitionist theory, theology, and praxis for all those engaged in struggle.

“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.”, “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.”

Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.