Michael Kaplan

My doctoral project takes the concept of the "ummah" (global Muslim community) as its ethnographic subject. Drawing on anthropological methods of participant observation and interviews, my research explores the discursive, spatial, and linguistic modes through which individuals of diverse ethnonational backgrounds develop attachments with one another, to the city itself, and to a broader Muslim world. Through attention to quotidian, everyday practices of migrants involved in Islamic communities in Istanbul, I seek to understand how particular sites are constituted as central nodal points within a broader religious geography, and how shared ummah belongings are cultivated and realized amidst difference.