The center for global muslim life

Building for our collective future. 

The Center for Global Muslim Life is a research center and cultural incubator for cutting edge conversations across diverse Muslim communities working to create a more just, diverse, and sustainable future for all of humanity. The Center for Global Muslim Life brings together a diverse set of researchers, cultural strategists, artists, technologists, community organizers, and policy makers from throughout the United States and from around the world working on key issues in global Muslim communities. Our research and public engagement is focused on the unique set of issues facing one of the largest and most diverse religious communities on this planet, while asking key questions about the role Muslims are playing in creating global social impact, diverse narratives, and unique contributions to the fabric of our rapidly changing world. 

The worlds most diverse faith has been grossly, understudied

Today global Muslim communities are known primarily through the singular narrative produced through media and cultural production, of terrorism, war, Islamophobia, and the global refugee crisis with media and academic institutions focusing on Arab Muslims who make up only 15-20% of global Muslim populations. Nearly 70% of the worlds Muslims live in Asia and Africa yet in terms of popular representation the uniquely diverse Muslim populations across the world have very little representation. Muslims are unique as a multi-civilizational community with large diasporas of peoples all around the world. With large populations in Southeast Asia, South Asia, throughout north, east, and west Africa, with large populations across the middle east and eastern Europe, and with large minority populations in Europe, the Americas, and East Asia. Over the next 50 years, our world will see unprecedented change with more than 70% of humanity is expected to live in urban areas, as global power will continue to shift to Asia.

Technology will play an ever increasing role in our daily lives and climate change will impact our world in ways that we cannot fully predict. The landscape of religious communities will also change rapidly over the coming half-century as global Muslim populations will grow from an expected population of 2 billion in 2020 to over 3 billion people by 2070, making Islam the largest religion in the world for the first time. Muslims have created unique global networks that despite great differences across communities, have historically shown strong solidarities most explicitly represented in the life and legacy of Malcolm X’s global vision of Islam, what Sohail Daulatzai calls the “Muslim International.” This international collective of global Muslim life is a call to global solidarity amongst Muslims and with peoples throughout the world who face similar forms of oppression. As Daulatzai so clearly states,

Today Muslim communities face oppression and are building resistances both within Muslim majority countries, as well as within western countries where Muslims make up large minority populations

This reality of overlapping diasporas and global spaces of social impact, political, and artistic resistance is an emerging reality, that has been grossly understudied within the Muslim community or academic studies at large. Islamic studies departments in Western academia have never fully distanced themselves from their colonial roots within area studies and have primarily focused on lands that US and European military power were interested in. This is why we are building the center for global Muslim life rooted in the emerging field of Muslim studies tied with the theoretical, and research directions emerging from Ethnic Studies. We are launching the center with a unique set of research focused on emerging narrative infrastructure within Muslim communities, the unique set of issues emerging within global Muslim cities and how diversity and Diaspora live within these cities, and the emerging field of Muslim social impact work. We are building relationships with leading cultural institutions and universities to create homes for each of our projects.

The Center for Global Muslim Life is tasked with conducting key research on these issues as well as create convening's for academics, community leaders and the media. We must take our narratives into our own hands to more fully understand these issues beyond the current scope of Muslims seen only in the light of terrorism and Islamophobia. Below is an outline of the core issues we will focus on in the coming years as we build out the Center for Global Muslim Life.