Founded in 1963 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Muslim Students Association of the United States and Canada (MSA) expanded to 116 local chapters by 1968, with members representing more than forty countries. During the Cold War, the MSA embraced the project of daʿwa, or renewing and correcting other Muslims’ devotional practice, and improving the public image of Islam. Extant scholarship on the MSA portrays the organization as ambivalent, if not antagonistic, toward U.S. society during the Cold War because it was deeply enmeshed in the political and religious ideologies associated with the global Islamic Revival. This article offers a different view by examining female-authored writings published under the auspices of the MSA Women's Committee between 1963 and 1980. Aspirational in scope and pedagogical in approach, MSA women's literature shifts conceptions of the MSA's political and religious priorities during this period, from one of detachment to one of selective engagement with American culture. This article makes three main interventions. First, it demonstrates that a focus on the publications of MSA female members yields a more robust understanding of how this important group of American Muslims envisioned daʿwa as a local and global project of religious revival during the Cold War. Second, it shows that, to achieve their revivalist aims, female MSA members identified points of affinity with certain religious non-Muslim Americans, namely, upwardly mobile Christians and Jews. For these authors, the ground on which they found affinity with families of other faiths was not theology or Abrahamic lineage but, rather, a shared gendered and classed vision of raising devout children to meet the unique threats posed by modernity. Finally, this article examines how female MSA authors conceived of the patriarchally organized yet maternally driven nuclear family as essential for reinvigorating Muslim practice.

This article uses the case of Kaufmann Kohler (1843–1926), an intellectual and institutional leader of American Reform Judaism, to explore the relationship between Orientalism and the category of religion in nineteenth-century America. Recent scholarship has shown that the lived religion of nineteenth-century American Jews departs significantly from the ideological hopes of Jewish elites. Connecting the emerging portrait of nineteenth-century Jewish laity with elite arguments for American Judaism, I reconsider Kohler's thought as a theological project out of step with his socioreligious milieu. Kohler is renowned for his theorizing of Judaism as a universal, ethical religion. As scholars have demonstrated repeatedly, defining Judaism as a “religion” was an important feature of Reform thought. What these accounts have insufficiently theorized, however, is the political context that ties the categorization of religion to the history of Orientalism that organized so many late nineteenth-century discussions of religion, Jewish and not. Drawing on work by Tracy Fessenden, John Modern, and Tisa Wenger, I show that Kohler's universal, cosmopolitan religion is a Jewish version of the Protestant secular. Like these Protestant modernists, Kohler defines Reform Judaism as a religion that supersedes an atavistic tribalism bound to materiality and ritual law. Being Jewish, for Kohler, means being civilized; reforming the soul of Judaism goes together with civilizing Jewish bodies and creating a Judaism that could civilize the world in an era in which religion and imperialism were overlapping interpretive projects with racial and gendered entanglements.

In 1899, a religious revival in Needles, California, included the first recorded instance of tongues-speech in California. The revival was begun by a white Holiness preacher and included a predominantly Native American, but ethnically mixed, congregation. The Mohave Indians at the heart of the Needles Revival had survived in the Southern California borderlands by crossing boundaries and building new communities in the shadow of the modernizing state. As they participated in the Needles Revival, Mohave believers and others combined this pattern of boundary crossing with the theology and praxis of the Holiness movement to develop a local manifestation of the emerging Pentecostal movement. During the early twentieth century, a series of revivals around the world and a network of Holiness groups and missionaries developed into modern Pentecostalism. The most prominent of these revivals took place on Azusa Street in Los Angeles and emphasized speaking in tongues and multiracial community, not unlike the earlier revival in Needles. Taken together, these two revivals show the influence of Southern California on early Pentecostalism. Speaking in tongues enabled early Pentecostals to cross boundaries imposed by California's racial hierarchy, and the multiethnic communities they formed were a testament to the cultural dynamism of the region. As Mohave converts embraced Pentecostalism and eventually assumed leadership of the Needles congregation, they brought their legacy of survival and adaptation to the movement. In the process, they helped to shape modern Pentecostalism.

This article highlights the U.S. Armed Forces’ appointment of the YMCA to train American soldiers in boxing during World War I and so contributes to scholarly research on religion and war as well as religion and sports. As the YMCA taught the fistic art to white regiments in stateside military camps and to the American Expeditionary Forces on the Western Front, I argue that World War I was a watershed moment for both Muscular Christianity and boxing. Religious, political, and military leaders announced boxing to be ideal for the close-proximity encounters in the trenches, and they championed the YMCA as being best equipped to turn newly enlisted recruits into hardened trench-pugs. To the YMCA-military, the practical benefits of boxing were that soldiers would not just be “good with their hands” but also have a good manly character, a “fighting spirit.” In the establishment of a new world order, boxing thereby became a bellicose technique for unmaking evil others and a Christian method for remaking “overcivilized” white men. Immediately after the war—because of the Y—the sport of boxing, previously believed unscrupulous, was redeemed. Protestant Christians and a larger public recast boxing as less an activity for the morally corrupt and the criminal underworld and more an enlightened pursuit in the realization of an authentic, God-given human nature. Legalized, mainstreamed, and backed by antimodern logic, Christian theology, and white fears of racial devolution, boxing was for “character” more than crime.