MARA A. LEICHTMAN joined the anthropology faculty in 2005 and helped to build the Muslim Studies Program. Her research highlights the interconnections among religion, migration, politics, and economic development, through examining Muslim institutions and the communities they serve.

Shi‘i Islam has been expanding in West Africa through Lebanese migration, African conversion, and the spread of the Iranian Revolution in unexpected ways. Dr. Leichtman’s book, “Shi‘i Cosmopolitanisms in Africa: Lebanese Migration and Religious Conversion in Senegal,” investigates the location of Shi‘i Islam in national and international religious networks, the tension between Lebanese and Iranian religious authorities in West Africa, and the making of a vernacular Shi‘i Islam in Senegal. The book provides an account of the everyday lives of the predominantly Shi‘i Lebanese community in Senegal, focusing on changing religious, ethnic, and national identities. These identities are placed in the context of the politics of globalization, post-colonialism in Africa, and conflict in the Middle East. Additionally, over the past few decades, Senegalese have been “converting” from Sunni to Shi‘i Islam. Their Shi‘i identity is linked to an intellectual and textual tradition of reformist Islam. The book illustrates how Lebanese migrants and Senegalese converts strategically mold their cosmopolitanism in ways that uniquely enable each minority community to assert political autochthony.

Dr. Leichtman’s second research project examines Islamic humanitarianism in the Gulf directed to global economic development, in particular in Africa. A key provider of foreign assistance, Kuwait is one of the affluent non-Western nations whose role is understudied. With the lines between “charity” and “development” organizations increasingly blurred, this project explores Islamic ethical frameworks as motivation for giving and how Islamic movements mediate global and regional changes. Dr. Leichtman was a Fulbright Scholar at American University of Kuwait in 2016-2017. Case studies in Senegal and Tanzania were funded by a Council of American Overseas Research Centers Multi-Country Research Fellowship, a West Africa Research Association Post-Doctoral Fellowship, and a Humanities and Arts Research Program Development Grant through MSU. She was a 2020-2021 Luce/ACLS Fellow in Religion, Journalism and International Affairs.

Mara Leichtman is the co-editor (with Rola El-Husseini) of a special journal issue of Die Welt des Islams entitled "The Shi‘a of Lebanon: New Approaches to Modern History, Contemporary Politics, and Religion." This interdisciplinary issue assembles the latest research within history, religious studies, and the social sciences and aims to broaden knowledge about Lebanon. The introduction makes a case for the concept of “Arab Shiʿism,” and, more specifically, “Lebanese Shiʿism.” The special issue is a call for a more inclusive Shiʿi Studies that encompasses a wider range of disciplinary fields, historical periods, and contemporary lived experiences of Shiʿa outside of Iran—and in particular the unique situations of minority religious communities.

She also co-edited (with Dorothea Schulz) a special journal issue of City and Society entitled “Muslim Cosmopolitanism: Movement, Identity, and Contemporary Reconfigurations.” This volume investigates the diversity of forms of cosmopolitanism as they are envisaged and practiced by Muslims in Muslim-majority countries, Muslim-minority countries, as well as in diasporic contexts. Current notions and practices of cosmopolitanism are deeply shaped by reconfigurations in the relationship between state and society in the era of neoliberal reforms, along with processes such as the intensification of migration and exchange, the proliferation of multiple forms of decentralized media and the concurrent transformation of national and transnational Muslim publics.

Dr. Leichtman was a visiting fellow at the Ali Vural Ak Center for Global Islamic Studies at George Mason University, Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin, Germany, and the International Institute for the Study of Islam in the Modern World in Leiden, the Netherlands. She is a member of the International Editorial Advisory Committee for the journal Islamic Africa and served as Book Review Editor for Contemporary Islam. She was a member of the Middle East Studies Association Conference Program Committee (2022), a board member of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion (2016-2020), and also served as Secretary of the Middle East Section (2008-2011) of the American Anthropological Association. She participated in a multi-year and multi-country research project entitled “Religion and the Private Sphere: Religious Dynamics, Everyday Experiences and the Individual in West Africa,” funded by the French Agence Nationale de la Recherche. She also collaborated with colleagues on an oral history project on Muslims in the Midwest and on launching a Trans-Regional Studies initiative at MSU.