Event
“A Tale of Two Mosques: Indian Religious Entrepreneurs in America and Japan”
Department of History
University of California, Los Angeles
Abstract: “This lecture focuses on the first two purpose-built mosques founded the United States and Japan in the early 1920s and 30s respectively. While positioned on far sides of the planet and in the distinctive urban environments of inland Detroit and coastal Kobe, the players and forces behind these pioneering mosques bore much in common. Pointing to the influence of South Asian Muslim organizations operating on what was by the 1920s a truly global level, both mosques were established by Indian Muslim religious entrepreneurs. In tracing further commonalities behind the founding of the mosques, the lecture identifies processes of religious competition, adaptation and exchange and the reasons why Indian Muslims fared so successfully amidst them.”