DescriptionHow do middle-class Muslims make sense of their religion and of their own selves as Muslims, while occupying the position of highly stigmatized religious minorities? How do they live with and attempt to resolve the contradiction of an Islam that is the source of all that is good and worthwhile and an Islam that stands for backwardness, fanaticism, and terror? This dissertation, based on twenty four months of participant observation in India (Delhi) and the United States (New York City), focuses on how middle-class Muslims in these two sites are re-making what it means to be a pious Muslim and a modern person, as they live their everyday lives in ways that demonstrate that it is entirely possible to be both religious and modern in a world which routinely places Islam in an antithetical relation to modernity. I argue that given the insistent dominant representations of Muslims as anti-modern and backward, Muslims cannot help but engage with the discourses that produce them as such. This engagement in turn produces new understandings of what it means to be both Muslim and modern. At the core of this middle-class Muslim modernity, there is an emphasis on critical thinking that must be brought to bear on all aspects of their lives including their religion. At the same time, in this process of re-presenting themselves as modern, middle-class Muslims are not setting aside their religion but presenting Islam as providing a means for a thoroughly modern way of being in the world in ways that enable us to rethink the tradition/modernity dichotomy. Having already been stigmatized as backward and anti-modern through various public discourses, middle-class Muslims often represent themselves as modern through drawing specific contrasts between their own religious beliefs and practices and those of less educated, lower-class Muslims whom they designate in turn as backward. The very religion of Islam, on account of which Muslims are marked off as non-modern, is thus transformed in the discourses and actions of middle-class Muslims into the site for performing and appropriating modernity.