Islam as liberatory exploration:praying with British inclusive Muslims

This paper explores the process of meaning-making in an Islamic site—The Inclusive Mosque Initiative (IMI)—where the cultivation of a plural religious space is pursued as an Islamic, rather than a secular, virtue. The study highlights the discourse, spatiality, and praxis of the Friday prayers at IMI, revealing a distinctive non-hierarchical symbolic spatiality, plural congregational practices, shared ritual leadership, and interactive sermons cultivating diversity in congregants’ ethical self-formation. Drawing on these ethnographic experiences, the paper advocates for an expansion of Talal Asad’s concept of the discursive tradition of Islam by proposing a greater emphasis on ‘non-established’ practices, such as IMI’s gender-expansive Friday prayers. Additionally, by questioning the primacy given to reason and argumentation referring to the foundational Islamic texts in Asad’s approach, it highlights how embodied, affective, and phenomenological experiences play a defining role in Islamic discursive traditions. Inclusive Muslims offer an expanded purpose of power within the Islamic discursive tradition, moving away from conceptions of Islamic authority linked with ‘orthodoxy’ to ones demonstrating, what Shahab Ahmed calls, the ‘explorative’ mode of authority. Consequently, the study of non-normative, inclusive Muslim communities, exemplified by the IMI, offers insights into alternative Islamic practices and discourses and challenges conventional anthropological definitions of Islam as a discursive tradition.