Corporeal Poetics of Sacred Space

Abstract

This article presents an ethnography of makeshift worship space for the minority Muslim community of a university campus and neighborhood in a Midwestern city in the United States. It uncovers how Muslim congregational worship is conducted in this provisional site, which bears competing symbols of Christian worship, to explore how the body plays an active role in perceiving space through rearrangement, reorientation, and auditory inscription. It explores how space is zoned to correspond with boundaries of (im)purity toward the symbolic maintenance of the sacred. In addition, it discusses the play of distance in space along the center to the periphery as spatial markers that correspond with positions of authority and membership. Finally, this article discloses how a lack of ownership of space conditions the disposition of a minority religious community within the larger secular and national landscape.