In an effort to bring into view critically—as actors rather than as spectacle—
Muslim men and especially Muslim women in non-Islamic countries and to examine their
constitutive individual as well as collective religious and social identities—that is their
contextual realities as opposed to just the ideal of Islam—this project seeks via
ethnographic research to investigate gender practices and relations among Muslims at the
Masjid al Muslimeen and Madressa located in Trinidad and Tobago. This small
community’s mundane yet resilient existence amid national, global, historical,
geographical, physical, and sociopolitical ambivalences and contradictions begs revisiting
how we read, interpret, represent, and deploy extant categories, theories, and
methodologies articulating gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, and nation.