Guest Editor: Besheer Mohamed, Pew Research Center. bmohamed@pewresearch.org
Aims and scope
The Review of Religious Research invites paper submissions for a special issue on American
Muslims. This special issue will draw upon contemporary research on Muslims in the United
States. In 2003, Karen Leonard’s Muslims in the United States: The State of Research suggested
that scholarship on American Muslims was growing rapidly and starting to shift in two important
ways: One was a move away from purely descriptive analyses, toward theorizing that both drew
on and contributed to broader social scientific understandings. Another shift was from a focus
on Muslim American subgroups in isolation, toward considerations of Muslims complete as
Americans with multiple identities and affiliations.
In the two decades since its publication, there has been a rapid expansion of rigorous empirical
studies that have begun to tell a nuanced story about this evolving and diverse community. This
special issue will collect articles that draw attention to what is known about Muslim American
individuals, communities and institutions; what tools have been developed to study Muslims in
the U.S.; and what questions remain unanswered.
Potential topics include:
1) political organizing and social preferences
2) religious switching and religious change
3) family dynamics (e.g. marriage, divorce, child rearing)
4) Muslim Americans’ institutions (e.g. mosques, non-profits, third spaces, businesses)
5) Transmission of religious knowledge (inter-generationally and transnationally)
Contributions may focus on specific subgroups of Muslim Americans or on broader national
patterns, but all analyses should be attentive to diversity among Muslims in the U.S. across
demographic and religious characteristics. Contributions from a variety of social science
disciplines and methodological approaches are welcome.
Submissions: Please submit complete papers by December 1, 2024, in the RRR manuscript
submission center and indicate the title of the special issue: American Muslims. Inquiries can be
directed to Special Issue Guest Editor Besheer Mohamed at bmohamed@pewresearch.org.
Timeline
- Call for Papers: June 2024
- Submission Deadline: December 2024
- First Round Review: March 2025
- Expected Publication: June 2025
