Introduction

Abstract

The introduction describes the conceptualization of “Medina by the Bay” as a social geography, infrastructure, and analytic frame, drawing on the significance of Medina as a site of refuge and an emergent new society in Islamic history. In the San Francisco Bay Area and throughout Islamic history, formal and informal knowledge practices have been mobilized toward the survival of Islam as a tradition and toward the material and spiritual survival of Muslims themselves. The introduction outlines the specificity of the geographic, historical, and sociocultural infrastructures of the Bay Area that contribute to the forms of Islamic belief and practice that emerge from this metropolitan region. Throughout the text ethnocinematic scenes—multiple ethnographic vignettes, oral history accounts, and archival documents—are juxtaposed to narrate a radical relationality and metaphysics of ethnographic space and time to engender new ways of thinking and being.