Prisms of Palestine: Palestinian Muslim Narratives beyond Reductive Caricatures and Conflict Dichotomies

Narrative simplification of Islam has accompanied the on-going Nakba, or “Catastrophe,” of Palestinian occupation and dispossession. Narrative comprises a closed coherent structure that internally refracts external events thereby illuminating the world and creating a shared identity that motivates action. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork examples, this article challenges the narrative reduction of Islam by showing how Islamic liturgical practices and conceptions of identity generate diverse Palestinian self-understandings amidst a fragmented geography. In so doing, it provides insight into how Islamic practices can generate diverse narratives that may or may not track with dominant discourses about Palestinians. It also shows how these practices (and narratives) can sustain cohesion across political, religious/secular, geographic, and even ethnic/national differences within and beyond conditions of dispersion, occupation, and dispossession.