American Qu’ran Makes a Sacred Text Familiar

The artist Sandow Birk has created a illuminated manuscript of Islam’s holy book that juxtaposes its writings with pictures of American life.

Katharine Schwab for The Atlantic:

As the Yale professor Zareena Grewal writes in an essay that opens American Qur’an, Birk is driven in part by the question, “Why can’t Islam be an American religion?” In one illustration, two Muslim men kneel on prayer rugs on the street in New York next to a vendor selling “I Love NY” t-shirts. Their faces are hidden, their ethnicities ambiguous. With this scene, Birk asks his audience to disentangle stereotypes of racial and religious identity. As Grewal notes, “Birk insists that we cannot know who is or is not Muslim just by looking at the people who populate the American Qur’an; the same holds true for the people who populate America.”

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