More than a supplement: Muslim geographies and rethinking human geography

Introduction

Calls to ‘decolonise geography’ have become increasingly prominent, reflecting recognition that the discipline continues to reproduce Eurocentric frameworks in both its genealogies and its present-day practices (Radcliffe, 2017). This recognition also builds on a longer genealogy of critiques of Eurocentrism across the social sciences – from Samir Amin’s influential analyses of global epistemic hierarchies (Amin, 1989) to Edward Said’s critique of Orientalism (1978, 1997). Yet, as geography’s own history demonstrates, such calls remain only partially realised. As Tuck and Yang (2012) remind us, decolonisation is too often treated metaphorically: a gesture of inclusion without material transformation. This tendency narrows the field of what counts as legitimate theory, keeping non-Western intellectual traditions at the margins as empirical ‘cases’ rather than as sources of conceptual innovation.

Muslim geographies exemplify this paradox. They are deeply entangled with the global history of spatial thought – from al-Masʿudi’s cosmographies and al-Yaʿqubi’s historiographies to Ibn Khaldun’s theories of state and society – yet remain largely absent from geography’s canonical histories (Irwin, 2018; Rosenthal, 1968). While Ibn Khaldun did not identify as a geographer in the modern disciplinary sense, his reflections on environment, settlement, and political organisation have informed later geographical debates.

Earlier historiographic efforts, such as Harley and Woodward’s Cartography in the Traditional Islamic and South Asian Societies (1993), Ahmad’s A History of Arab-Islamic Geography (1995), Karamustafa’s (1987) analyses of Islamic maps, and Tibbetts’s (1979) studies of navigation, recovered rich traditions but still framed them as supplements to Western accounts (see also Gale, 2007). Whilst Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima offers critical insights on state and society, it also contains elements of environmental determinism (Lacoste, 1984; Sidaway, 2025), reminding us that engaging classical thought requires both appreciation and critique. The marginalisation of such contributions is not accidental but symptomatic of what Sidaway (1997) identified as the strategic construction of a ‘geographical tradition’ – a disciplinary narrative that secures identity by minimising non-Western genealogies. More recent interventions underline how such exclusions sustain epistemic colonialism and structural whiteness (Najib, 2024; Nassar, 2023; Sidaway, 2022).

There are, however, important openings. Work on the geographies of religion (Gale, 2007), the everyday lives of Muslims (Dunn and Hopkins, 2016), and racialised exclusion in the academy (Mahtani, 2014) has highlighted the significance of Muslim perspectives. Complementary interventions from Muslim feminist and decolonial scholarship (Noxolo and Hamis, 2023) and reflexive accounts of the uneven geographies of Islamophobia (Najib, 2025) underscore how location and political culture shape whose knowledge is recognised within the field. Aydin’s (2017) intellectual history of the ‘Muslim world’ and Simone’s (2020) theorisation of Muslim urbanism likewise foreground pluralism, relationality, and improvisation. Yet, these advances remain situated within wider critiques of Orientalist and civilisational framings that have positioned Muslim geographies as exceptional or as markers of cultural and civilisational difference (Akhter, 2023; Hopkins, 2009).

Recent exchanges in Dialogues in Human Geography (e.g., Arik, 2024; Culcasi, 2024; Najib, 2024; Nassar, 2023) mark the emergence of ‘Critical Muslim Geographies’. These forum pieces have been crucial in signalling possibilities – from decentring whiteness to engaging Islam as a discursive tradition – but their brevity has also limited the agenda. What remains needed is a sustained synthesis that situates Muslim geographies within the longer history of geographical thought while clarifying their theoretical potential and their lived, everyday manifestations across space.

This article contributes to that effort through three interrelated moves. First, it revisits classical Islamic scholarship – historiography, cosmography, and statecraft – as integral to broader genealogies of geographical thought, challenging Eurocentric disciplinary histories. Second, it develops key Islamic concepts – ummah (community), hijra (migration as ethical adaptation), waqf (redistribution), and khalifa (stewardship) – as conceptual frameworks for rethinking political geography, urban studies, and environmental thought, and traces how these epistemologies are enacted through ordinary and lived geographies in daily life. Third, it examines contemporary debates on theoretical positioning, whiteness, and institutional exclusion within the discipline to clarify the limits of geography’s current decolonial turn.

Taken together, these interventions position Muslim geographies not as supplements to the canon but as traditions that invite reconsideration of its contours. Writing from within European and North American institutions marked by uneven geographies of whiteness and Islamophobia (Najib, 2025), we approach these debates reflexively, recognising that our positionality shapes what can be claimed about decolonial transformation. The animating question, then, is not how Muslim thought might be added to geography, but how taking Muslim epistemologies seriously might contribute to rethinking the discipline’s conceptual architecture and its decolonial trajectories. We write as geographers working across human geography and critical Islamic studies, informed both by engagement with Muslim intellectual traditions and by experiences of navigating disciplinary spaces where such traditions are often marginalised. This standpoint shapes our commitment to treating Muslim geographies not as objects of study but as epistemological interlocutors – traditions that contribute to ongoing debates about the discipline’s direction and the scope of its decolonial aspirations.

Reconceptualising the genealogy of geography

The discipline of geography remains deeply entangled with colonial and modern power, shaping both what counts as legitimate knowledge and which spatial imaginaries hold authority. Calls for a decolonial turn therefore require more than diversifying case studies; they demand recognition of intellectual traditions that both preceded and extended beyond European modernity (Radcliffe, 2017; Sidaway, 2022). Among these, the corpus of Muslim geographical thought is historically significant yet persistently marginalised in the discipline’s official genealogy. As Samir Amin (1989) long ago argued, Eurocentrism operates not only through political economy but through epistemic hierarchies that organise whose pasts are remembered as theory and whose are relegated to prehistory. This structural condition continues to shape how geography defines its own intellectual lineage.

Classical Islamic scholarship offers rich foundations for rethinking geography’s past and future. Franz Rosenthal’s History of Muslim Historiography (1968) already showed how Muslim intellectuals treated space and time as mutually constitutive categories. Al-Yaʿqubi integrated travel accounts, oral testimony, and empirical observation to produce spatial histories that preserved peripheral regions such as Nubia. Al-Masʿudi’s Muruj al-dhahab illustrates a cosmographic science that combined empirical observation with philosophical cosmology and the ethical orientation of adab – curiosity, encyclopedic knowledge, cosmopolitanism (Irwin, 2018). Geography here was not cartographic control but relational, interpretive practice. By the fourteenth century, Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima integrated geography into theories of state, society, and environment, anticipating themes later central to debates in political geography, urban theory, and environmental governance (Ibn Khaldun, 2015 F. Rosenthal’s transl.). While Ibn Khaldun did not identify as a geographer in the modern disciplinary sense, his analyses of environment, settlement, and political organisation have informed subsequent geographical debates. Yet, as Sidaway (2025) notes in his reading of Lacoste (1984), Ibn Khaldun’s legacy has often been filtered through environmental determinism, underscoring the need to approach these classical texts both critically and contextually.

The exclusion of these contributions from geography’s canonical history is not a passive omission but a product of epistemic sorting. Modern historiographies have tended to interpret the complexity of Muslim thought through retroactively imposed Euro-American categories. Yves Lacoste’s Cold War formulation of geography as warfare, for instance, exemplifies this process: his ‘geography as strategy’ model projects twentieth-century geopolitical anxieties onto cosmopolitan thinkers such as al-Masʿudi, often positioning them as precursors to Western paradigms rather than engaging them as theorists of relational knowledge and ethical inquiry. The problem is not merely misreading but methodological anachronism – reading Islamic geography through frameworks that deny its own epistemological autonomy.

Recent scholarship insists that this marginalisation is sustained through ongoing epistemic politics rather than simple neglect. Nassar (2023) shows how whiteness continues to function as geography’s tacit foundation, ensuring Muslim contributions are acknowledged only peripherally. Culcasi (2024) warns against tokenistic citation, and Najib (2024) links exclusion directly to institutional Islamophobia. Together, these critiques reveal that genealogical erasures are maintained through structures of publishing, pedagogy, and hiring – mechanisms that police what counts as theoretical authority. As Najib’s (2025) comparative work on French and British academic cultures demonstrates, these dynamics also have their own geographies: the marginalisation of Muslim knowledge is unevenly distributed rather than universal.

At the same time, new directions open possibilities for rethinking genealogy itself. Arik (2024) draws on Talal Asad’s notion of Islam as a discursive tradition, offering a methodological bridge for engaging Muslim epistemologies as evolving frameworks rather than static inheritances. This approach provides precisely the interpretive flexibility needed to revisit figures such as al-Yaʿqubi, al-Masʿudi, and Ibn Khaldun without subsuming them under Western categories. In this sense, Asad’s framework not only informs contemporary theorisation but retroactively opens space for alternative readings of classical scholarship as dynamic, dialogical, and conceptually generative. Sidaway (2023) similarly calls for Muslim geographies to be placed in dialogue with – but not subordinated to – Indigenous, Black, and Latin American traditions. Extending this, Llopart i Olivella and Mostowlansky (2023) urge recognition of Islam’s global reach across geographies often excluded even from Muslim studies itself – West Africa, Iberia, Indigenous Australia, China, and the Americas. By tracing Islam’s imprint in law, cartography, and material culture, they move beyond ‘decolonial correction’ toward a recognition that Islam has long been a constitutive presence in global intellectual life.

Reconceptualising genealogy in this way does more than diversify the canon: it invites reconsideration of geography’s self-understanding. Figures such as al-Yaʿqubi, al-Masʿudi, and Ibn Khaldun are not curiosities to be added to geography’s archive but interlocutors who complicate and extend its epistemological assumptions. Acknowledging Islam’s intellectual and geographical imprint across continents suggests that the task is not additive inclusion but more substantive engagement. A more plural genealogy thus becomes imaginable – one that holds geography accountable to multiple epistemological pasts and opens pathways toward a field constituted through dialogue rather than dominance.

Islamic thought and the politics of epistemological positioning

Building on the previous discussion of genealogy, this section shifts from the historical construction of exclusion to its contemporary operation. If Section II traced how geography’s canon was produced through epistemic sorting, this section examines how those boundaries continue to be policed and how Muslim epistemologies open alternative modes of theorising space.

Sidaway’s (1997) early critique exposed the ‘geographical tradition’ as a strategically constructed lineage rather than a neutral inheritance – an argument that continues to resonate. As the previous section showed, such construction defined which intellectual histories counted as geography; here, its effects are evident in the discipline’s ongoing gatekeeping. Nassar (2023) identifies whiteness as a tacit organising principle that functions to confine Muslim perspectives to illustrative margins; Najib (2024) connects this marginalisation to institutional Islamophobia, showing how academic norms shape what knowledge appears legitimate; and Culcasi (2024) demonstrates how gestures of inclusion become tokenistic, signalling diversity without substantive epistemic change. As Najib (2025) further notes, these dynamics vary across national contexts, demonstrating that epistemic exclusion has its own uneven geographies.

Sayyid’s Recalling the Caliphate (2022) deepens this critique by situating it within the broader architecture of global power. Islam, he argues, has not followed the secularising trajectory of Christianity in the West; rather, Muslim mobilisations continue to contest political, cultural, and intellectual structures of authority. For geographers, recognising this different trajectory calls for methodological and ethical reflection. It invites greater scrutiny of secular analytical categories – such as the public/private divide or the religion/secular binary – that have structured much of social theory. Islam’s continuing vitality thus encourages approaches attentive to epistemic sovereignty: ways of knowing that do not rigidly separate spiritual from political life. Muslim feminist scholarship highlights how such claims are negotiated in everyday practices of faith and power, complicating singular accounts of decoloniality (Noxolo and Hamis, 2023).

Building on this critique, other scholars have advanced generative approaches to Muslim geographies. Aydin’s The Idea of the Muslim World (2017) demonstrates that Islam cannot be reduced to a fixed civilisation: the ummah is plural, heterogeneous, and supra-territorial, forming translocal networks of solidarity that unsettle state-centric models of community. Arik (2024), drawing on Talal Asad, develops this view by treating Islam as a discursive tradition – an evolving field of interpretation and authority – whilst Anshary (2023, 2024) calls for a ‘more-than-critical’ geography that moves beyond reactive decolonisation toward creative world-making. Together, these perspectives mark a shift from viewing Muslim thought as an object of study to recognising it as a living source of theoretical insight within geography.

This theoretical reorientation is borne out in studies of urban and everyday practice. Simone (2020) reinterprets hijra – the migration from Mecca to Medina – as a metaphor for collective, ethical adaptation, foregrounding Muslim urban life as improvised, mobile, and ethically negotiated under conditions of precarity. Earlier critiques of the ‘Islamic city’ concept (e.g., Abu-Lughod, 1987) caution against treating Muslim urbanism as a fixed civilisational form derived from selective North African cases. Rather than reviving such essentialist models, this article approaches Muslim geographies as dynamic epistemological traditions that inform urban life in historically and geographically differentiated ways.

Rather than depicting Muslim spaces as securitised or deficient, this reading highlights relational practices of care, hospitality, and mutual support as constitutive of urban order. Dunn and Hopkins (2016) similarly demonstrate that the ‘ordinary geographies’ of Muslim life – education, prayer, mobility, work – form the everyday grounds of belonging and civic life. Such analyses suggest that Muslim urbanism can serve as a site of conceptual engagement within human geography, offering perspectives on mobility, relationality, and community that complicate and extend Eurocentric frameworks.

Foregrounding key Islamic categories further strengthens this turn. Ummah challenges territorial logics of political geography by positing belonging as plural and translocal. Hijra reframes migration as collective, intentional, and ethical adaptation rather than crisis or displacement. Waqf (endowment) introduces redistributive principles that unsettle dominant paradigms of urban governance and political economy. Khalifa (stewardship) and related ecological traditions such as al-Mizān (balance) articulate non-anthropocentric ethics for political ecology, with khalifa serving as an important conceptual anchor linking human responsibility to divine accountability. Taken together, these ideas offer not cultural ornamentation but a repertoire for engaging key debates in politics, economy, urbanism, and ecology through dialogue with Muslim epistemologies.

Finally, epistemological positioning is not confined to theory; it is enacted through pedagogy and methodology. Sammar (2024) shows how teaching through Islamic frameworks – such as al-Mizān – can destabilise the assumption that knowledge flows only from Euro-American traditions. Yet, as Culcasi (2024) cautions, citing Muslim concepts is insufficient without theoretical integration. Classrooms, reading lists, and citation practices thus become key sites where epistemic hierarchies are either reproduced or re-made – a point echoed by Noxolo and Hamis (2023) in their emphasis on positionality and power in knowledge production.

In sum, the politics of epistemological positioning reveals both the structures that marginalise Muslim geographies and the conceptual resources they offer for contributing to debates within the field. Engaging these epistemologies seriously calls for a shift from diversity rhetoric toward a more plural decolonial ethics – one that recognises Muslim thought as an important interlocutor in ongoing discussions about geography’s renewal (e.g., see also Marston et al., 2008; Whatmore, 2008).

Institutional structures, whiteness, and the constraints of inclusion

Having established the epistemological stakes of engaging Muslim geographies, this section turns to the institutional architectures that often constrain such engagement. Moving beyond tokenistic diversity requires recognising Muslim geographies not as peripheral supplements but as epistemological sites that prompt reconsideration of geography’s ethical and theoretical foundations. Yet, as Sidaway (2022, 2023) observes, the discipline’s uptake of Muslim intellectual traditions has been minimal: they are acknowledged rhetorically but rarely embedded into curricula, research agendas, or the material structures of publishing and hiring.

As Castree et al. (2008) argue, geography’s pedagogical and professional practices are never neutral: they shape how the discipline reproduces itself and how it relates to broader social and political orders. This institutional embeddedness continues to delimit geography’s capacity for meaningful change. This dynamic exemplifies what Tuck and Yang (2012) term ‘metaphorical decolonisation’ – gestures of inclusion without structural transformation. As Noxolo and Hamis (2023) note, these dynamics also shape the politics of inclusion, revealing how marginalise racialised and Muslim feminist and situated approaches to scholarly practice.

Whiteness functions as a powerful organising condition of this exclusion. Nassar (2023) identifies it as an institutional grammar of gatekeeping, in which Muslim scholarship is acknowledged only as illustrative rather than theoretical, reproducing hierarchies through citation and peer review. Najib (2024) connects this process to institutional Islamophobia: Muslim scholars are frequently treated with suspicion, their work subject to epistemic policing that constrains what can be said about faith, politics, or belonging. Culcasi (2024) demonstrates how even apparently inclusive gestures – special issues, panels, or themed symposia – often serve as tokenistic performances of diversity that leave disciplinary structures intact.

Mahtani’s (2014) concept of ‘toxic geographies’ captures how whiteness organises authority through presence and absence: Euro-American frameworks are naturalised as neutral, while Muslim contributions appear exceptional or parochial. Ahmed’s (2012) study of universities deepens this insight, showing how ‘diversity’ becomes an institutional performance rather than a mechanism of change. As she writes, diversity workers repeatedly ‘come up against a brick wall’, revealing how whiteness is maintained through the prioritisation of institutional comfort. Najib (2025) extends this to a geographical scale, demonstrating how these dynamics manifest differently across national contexts – for example, through state secularisation in France or multicultural policy in the UK – producing distinct spatial formations of institutional whiteness.

These critiques underscore that institutional exclusion is not abstract but infrastructural. Pulido’s (2002) analysis of geography’s racial composition revealed how demography shapes epistemic legitimacy. Bruno and Faiver-Serna (2021) expand this argument, showing that representational inclusion alone cannot unsettle the cultural logic of whiteness. Pulido et al. (2020) trace how environmental racism intersects with deregulation, a dynamic that resonates with Muslim ecological traditions of khalifa (stewardship) and al-Mizān (balance). These frameworks, if taken seriously, could contribute to rethinking the ethics of institutional practice – from curriculum design to departmental governance – by embedding relational accountability rather than extractive expertise. For instance, khalifa’s ethic of stewardship could inform university sustainability initiatives or fieldwork ethics, positioning care and responsibility as central to institutional practice rather than peripheral concerns. In this sense, Muslim concepts are not abstract ideals but living ethical repertoires with direct institutional relevance.

These dynamics materialise through specific mechanisms. In publishing, Muslim thinkers are frequently cited as historical curiosities – such as Ibn Khaldun as a precursor to sociology – rather than engaged as theorists. Recent interventions have begun to challenge this pattern by re-situating Ibn Khaldun’s thought within debates on urbanism and spatial theory (Ahn et al., 2025; Ahn and Juraev, 2025). Peer review, however, often applies Eurocentric benchmarks of what counts as ‘theory’, narrowing space for conceptual innovation. Curricula frequently relegate Muslim contributions to electives, ‘area studies’, or religious modules, whilst European thinkers remain foundational in disciplinary training. Hiring practices can replicate these hierarchies: Muslim scholars are often coded as partial or ‘political’, whilst whiteness retains the guise of neutrality. Linguistic hierarchies within global academia further shape the uneven circulation of knowledge, limiting the visibility of scholarship produced outside dominant Anglophone networks. These mechanisms regulate not only who speaks but what counts as geographical knowledge.

Compounding these internal mechanisms is the stratified nature of geography’s own decolonial turn. Indigenous and Latin American epistemologies have received more sustained engagement (Radcliffe, 2017), while Muslim traditions remain under-integrated. This produces a hierarchy even within decolonial discourse (Culcasi, 2024). Sidaway (2023) calls for a comparative framing that situates Muslim geographies alongside Indigenous, Black, and Latin American thought – not to subsume them but to foreground their distinct contributions. Like Indigenous epistemologies, Muslim traditions question Eurocentric notions of sovereignty and space; like Black geographies, they confront whiteness as a structuring condition of academic life. Yet, they also offer distinct frameworks – ummah, hijra, waqf, khalifa, and al-Mizān – that articulate ethical, social, and ecological orders that are distinct yet not fully reducible to other traditions. As Anshary (2024) argues, embracing these epistemologies requires moving beyond reactive decolonisation toward ‘more-than-critical’ forms of engagement that construct relational futures within the academy.

Recognising Muslim geographies as epistemological resources, therefore, requires sustained attention across the discipline’s institutional sites. Journals can create space for Muslim geographies as theory, not merely regional case studies (Ahmed, 2012). Curricula might embed Islamic epistemologies within core courses – as Sammar (2024) urges – rather than isolating them within electives. Hiring practices must confront the structural barriers that Mahtani (2014) describes as whiteness’s ‘toxic geography’. Citation practices can evolve so that Muslim scholars are recognised as theorists and interlocutors rather than as objects of study (Nassar, 2023). These shifts are necessarily uneven and context-specific, but collectively they signal a redistribution of epistemic authority – one that reconsiders what counts as theory, evidence, and critique.

Institutions, then, are not neutral backdrops but active terrains where the epistemological politics outlined in Section III are negotiated. The challenge is not to add Muslim perspectives symbolically but to rethink the very architectures of legitimacy that determine geography’s canon. Addressing these institutional mechanisms is necessary if the discipline is to move toward a more plural intellectual landscape – one in which Muslim epistemologies are not peripheral additions but significant theoretical participants whose concepts invite reconsideration of geography’s questions, methods, and ethical commitments.

Ordinary geographies and canonical tensions

Building on the previous discussion of institutional architectures, this section turns to how the politics of exclusion are lived, embodied, and contested through everyday practice. If institutions are the infrastructures where knowledge hierarchies are maintained, the ordinary is where those hierarchies are negotiated and re-imagined. Framing ‘the ordinary’ as a theoretical lens rather than a descriptive category reveals how Muslim life itself theorises spatial belonging, ethics, and community, opening a distinctive perspective in debates over geography’s canon.

Structural exclusions of Muslim geographies are reinforced by representational practices that cast Muslim spaces as exceptional or deficient. As Akhter (2023) argues in his intervention on world regional geography, dominant world regional and core–periphery frameworks have often marginalised Muslim geographies, positioning them as objects of scrutiny rather than as constitutive of wider historical and political-economic processes. Christian-centric approaches to the geography of religion (Gale, 2007) reinforce this framing, while Hopkins (2009) demonstrates how the binary of ‘Islam versus the West’ legitimises securitised discourses – a dynamic that Najib (2024) shows is reproduced within academia through institutional Islamophobia. Such representational regimes are also geographically differentiated: Najib’s (2025) comparison of France and the UK demonstrates how distinct secular regimes produce uneven cultural geographies of visibility and invisibility.

Against this background, the scholarly turn to ‘ordinary’ geographies offers more than a descriptive corrective; it provides a conceptual counterpoint and a distinct methodological lens. Dunn and Hopkins (2016), for instance, shift analytical focus from crisis to agency by examining how education, work, prayer, and mobility situate Muslims as integral to urban contexts. Hopkins et al. (2007) introduce Muslim identities as relationally formed through intersections of gender, race, and religion, while Allouache (2023) extends this by showing that everyday practices are not simply empirical details but epistemological resources. In these accounts, ordinariness emerges as a theoretical site for rethinking belonging and mobility rather than as a marker of deficiency. Ordinariness here can also be read as a relational expression of ummah – an everyday ethic of community and mutual care that unsettles civilisational and territorial divides by creating re-territorial, translocal forms of belonging beyond the nation-state.

Feminist geopolitics pushes this turn further by foregrounding embodiment and everyday negotiation. Schenk et al. (2022) show how Muslim women, often targeted as symbols of security threats, are in fact political subjects who reconfigure boundaries of nation and territory through mundane negotiations of dress, legality, and mobility. Their focus on violence in its mundane, discursive, and spectacular forms demonstrates that Muslim women’s lives are not peripheral but significant for theorising security, sovereignty, and belonging. This generates tension with canonical geopolitical accounts that privilege state-centric analyses and view such subjects as passive or threatening. Similarly, Najib (2025) shows how Muslim bodies in Paris and London negotiate Islamophobia through strategies of invisibility, normalcy, and intimacy. These embodied practices are not only responses to exclusion but also theoretical interventions that reframe the relationship between public and private space. Noxolo and Hamis (2023) further foreground the lived and positional dimensions of scholarly practice within decolonial engagements.

Everyday spaces of Muslim life also reveal counter-geopolitical agency. Öcal and Gökarıksel (2022) demonstrate how Turkish mosque communities in Germany resist being cast as passive outposts of foreign influence, instead producing mosques as autonomous sites of belonging and critique. Such work underscores that Muslim geographies are theorised not only in texts but through collective practices that contest the securitisation of space. McGinty’s (2022) analysis deepens this argument by showing how embodied Islam is shaped through everyday practices, where experiences of harassment, visibility, and negotiation become inscribed in the body and entangled with multiple identities across secular and non-religious spaces. In these contexts, the practice of khalifa – understood as ethical stewardship of self, body, and community – offers a framework for reading agency as both spiritual and political practice, connecting micro-ethics of care to broader geographies of accountability.

Ordinariness also gains theoretical force when read through improvisation. Simone (2020) deploys hijra as a metaphor for adaptive belonging, situating Muslim urban life as precarious, mobile, and ethically negotiated. Rather than static or securitised, Muslim urban spaces emerge as dynamic infrastructures of hospitality, prayer, and collective care – practices that generate solidarities complicating the binaries of ‘Islam’ and ‘the West’. These emphases highlight the specific conceptual tensions Muslim geographies introduce to urban theory, challenging its secular, capitalist, and individualist assumptions. They resonate with feminist and Black geographies that treat the everyday as a site of conceptual innovation, yet Muslim contributions add inflections: hijra as collective ethical adaptation, waqf as redistributive urban infrastructure, and prayer as spatial practice. As Anshary (2023, 2024) suggests, these practices exemplify a ‘more-than-critical’ engagement with the world – not only resisting exclusion but actively reconfiguring social and spiritual relations in urban space.

Taken together, these interventions expose persistent canonical tensions. Muslim geographies are often cast as objects of exceptionality or deficiency rather than as sources of theory. Addressing this involves treating ordinariness, embodiment, and improvisation not as descriptive correctives but as epistemologies in their own right – ones that unsettle the canon’s boundaries by reframing the ordinary as a site of conceptual innovation. The tensions illuminated here also clarify how the institutional exclusions traced earlier manifest in lived experience: the ordinary becomes both a method of survival and a medium of theory. In this light, Muslim geographies are not peripheral alternatives but significant interlocutors whose concepts contribute to rethinking the discipline’s questions, methods, and ethical commitments – an argument that leads directly into the next section’s consideration of geography’s future trajectories.

Muslim geographies and the future of human geography

Advancing Muslim geographies requires more than supplementing Western canons with ‘cases’. It involves foregrounding Islamic intellectual traditions as conceptual resources that contribute to debates about the discipline’s theoretical terrain. Concepts such as ummah (re-territorial community), hijra (mobility as ethical adaptation), and waqf (redistributive endowment) intervene in debates on belonging, migration, and political economy (Aydin, 2017; Sammar, 2024; Simone, 2020). Ecological traditions like khalifa (stewardship) and al-Mizān (balance) advance relational ethics that challenge the anthropocentrism of political ecology (Barnawi and R’boul, 2025; Faruque, 2024). Rather than cultural markers, these concepts form a theoretical repertoire that expands geography’s categories of community, economy, mobility, and environment. Together, they provide the conceptual scaffolding for the developments outlined throughout this paper: epistemological, institutional, and now methodological.

Realising this intellectual horizon invites methodological rethinking. Arik’s (2024) insistence on Islam as a ‘discursive tradition’ highlights how Muslim epistemologies can be engaged without essentialism, positioning jurisprudential archives, textual traditions, and everyday practices as legitimate sources of geographical theory. This methodological reorientation links directly to the concepts above: ummah invites relational methodologies attentive to community ethics; hijra encourages approaches grounded in mobility and adaptation; waqf suggests redistributive ethics for research collaborations; and khalifa calls for methodological stewardship – care in knowledge creation, citation, and pedagogy. Such approaches resonate with Indigenous, Black, and Latin American geographies that have long theorised from non-Western archives, yet Muslim contributions remain comparatively under-integrated. Recognising them would not only diversify the canon but expand how geography conceives evidence, archive, and method. Language politics and uneven knowledge circulation continue to shape which intellectual traditions travel, are translated, and are recognised as theory within global academic exchange.

The ordinary dimensions discussed above provide important grounding for this argument. Practices of prayer, hospitality, and collective care – emphasised by Dunn and Hopkins (2016), Allouache (2023), and Simone (2020) – are not mere ethnographic details but theoretical acts that model solidarity, improvisation, and ethical coexistence. They reframe urbanism as affective and collaborative rather than deficient, offering templates for more just and relational geographies. These practices bring Muslim thought into dialogue with feminist and Black geographies of the everyday while adding distinct emphases: hijra as adaptive mobility, waqf as redistributive infrastructure, and khalifa as a principle of ethical stewardship. As Anshary (2023) suggests, and as Noxolo and Hamis (2023) emphasise, decolonial work is constituted through lived, gendered, and positional forms of intellectual practice. Therefore, attending to these ordinary geographies is not a separate task but an important ground from which more dialogical approaches may emerge.

Recent interventions collectively outline a forward-looking research agenda. Bulbulia (2021) calls for a futures-oriented approach that treats decolonisation as an ‘anticipatory intervention’, designing intellectual trajectories rather than merely reacting to erasure. Hosseini and Gills (2025) situate this within the dilemmas of pluriversal politics, warning against compartmentalisation of epistemologies and urging dialogical engagements that preserve difference while enabling collective transformation. Culcasi (2024) articulates concrete tasks for advancing critical Muslim geographies – drawing directly on Islamic thought, forging links with Black geographies, and confronting critical geography’s own blind spots – while Anshary (2023) questions whether Islam can ever be fully housed within secular critical frameworks. Llopart i Olivella and Mostowlansky (2023) add a global historical perspective, showing that Islam’s intellectual reach extends from West Africa and Iberia to China and the Americas. Together, these scholars envision Muslim geographies as both historically influential and contemporarily generative. However, as Sidaway (2023) and Najib (2025) remind us, such futures will unfold unevenly across institutional and national contexts, shaped by distinct geographies of whiteness, secularism, and linguistic hierarchy.

The stakes of these interventions extend well beyond representation. This article has argued that Muslim geographies make three interconnected contributions: they reframe disciplinary genealogy by situating Islamic scholarship as integral rather than peripheral; they expose the structural limits of geography’s current decolonial turn by tracing how whiteness and Islamophobia shape disciplinary authority and intellectual legitimacy; and they advance conceptual and methodological resources – from ummah and waqf to khalifa and everyday solidarities – that expand debates in urbanism, political economy, and ecology. These contributions are not endpoints but invitations – pathways for ongoing collaboration across linguistic, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries.

Human geography would be strengthened by engaging Muslim geographies not as supplements but as significant conceptual contributors in the discipline’s ongoing debates about its direction. Engaging these traditions opens possibilities for imagining geography as more anticipatory, pluriversal, and open to epistemic dialogue. The animating question with which this paper began thus returns in revised form: not how Muslim thought might be added to geography, but how taking Muslim epistemologies seriously can contribute to reshaping ongoing debates about what geography is, what it asks, and what it might become.