Maryam Kashani - "Medina by the Bay" - Alireza Doostdar & Eman Abdulhadi

Maryam Kashani will discuss Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival . She will be joined in conversation by Alireza Doostdar and Eman Abdulhadi. A Q&A and signing will follow the discussion. 

At the Co-op.

RSVP Here (Please note your RSVP is requested but not required).

About the Book

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.

About the Author

Maryam Kashani is a filmmaker and associate professor in Gender and Women’s Studies and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and is an affiliate with Anthropology, Media and Cinema Studies, and the Center for South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies. Her book Medina by the Bay: Scenes of Muslim Study and Survival (Duke University Press, 2023) is an ethnocinematic examination of how multiracial Muslim communities in the San Francisco Bay Area survive within and against racial capitalist, carceral, and imperial logics. Other writing includes “The Audience Is Present: Invocations of El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz by Muslims in the United States” in With Stones in Our Hands: Reflections on Racism, Muslims, and U.S. Empire, edited by Sohail Daulatzai and Junaid Rana (University of Minnesota Press, 2018); and “Serving the People and Serving God: The Everyday Work and Mobilizing Force of Dhameera Ahmad” in An Afterlife of Black Power: The Enduring Significance of the Black Panther Party Eds., Diane C. Fujino and Matef Harmachis (Haymarket Books, 2020). Her films and video installations have been shown at film festivals, universities, and museums internationally, including the Sharjah Biennial, MoMA, Hammer Museum, and the Berkeley Art Museum/Pacific Film Archive. Kashani is also in the leadership collective of Believers Bail Out, a community-led effort to bailout Muslims in pretrial and immigration incarceration towards abolition. Founded in 2018, BBO works with its community partners to raise zakat funds to bail out Muslims and to educate Muslim communities towards understanding the relationship between Islam and abolition.