Summary
Founder of the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN), whose trajectory in Chapter 5 of Lybarger’s book exemplifies “conversion” — a single movement from an antireligious secular nationalism to a syncretic Islamic cosmopolitanism mediated through Black Nationalism and Black Islam in Chicago (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.163-173).
Details
- Nashashibi was born in Amman in 1972, the son of a Palestinian-Jordanian diplomat; his mother’s family fled Ein Karem during the war of 1948 and settled in Chicago’s Southwest Side Palestinian enclave, and he attended boarding school in Rome (PDF p.164 / printed p.143).
- He recalled a childhood in which religion was entirely absent — “I never once walked into a mosque, I never opened up a Qur’an” — while his mother worked deliberately to sustain his Palestinian identification (PDF p.164-165 / printed p.143-144).
- In Chicago from 1990 for undergraduate studies, experiences of racism during the first Gulf War and mentorship at the Arab Community Center (Chicago) by Thomas (pseudonym), an African American activist with Communist Party and Black Panther links, led him to what he later called “ghetto cosmopolitanism” (Nashashibi 2009) (PDF p.166-167 / printed p.145-146).
- Reading the Qur’an initially to debate Black Muslim interlocutors, he came to take revelation seriously, and as a youth worker at the markaz he introduced organized prayer there, against the leadership’s objections, before founding IMAN just east of the markaz on West 63rd Street (PDF p.167-169 / printed p.146-148).
- He rejected both suburban reformism and markaz secularism for privileging Palestinian or Muslim suffering above other oppression, invoked Edward Said’s universal humanism against his earlier criticism of Said’s “eliticism” (sic), and criticized Palestinian activists at the 2001 Durban conference on racism and the racism of local Palestinian shop owners (PDF p.170-172 / printed p.149-151).
- In a personal communication in March 2019 he said he avoids talking about Islam as “one thing” and avoids “Islamic” as an adjective for IMAN’s work (PDF p.173 / printed p.152).
- In 2016 former US President Barack Obama appointed him to his Advisory Council on Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, and a year later the MacArthur Foundation awarded him a “genius” grant (PDF p.163-164 / printed p.142-143).
Related pages
Inner-City Muslim Action Network · Arab Community Center (Chicago) · Palestinian Chicago · Syncretic secularity