Morality at the Margins: Youth, Language, and Islam in Coastal Kenya

This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on Kenya’s island of Lamu, who live simultaneously on the edge and in the center. At the margins of the national and international economy and of Western notions of modernity, Lamu’s inhabitants nevertheless find themselves the focus of campaigns against Islamic radicalization and of Western touristic imaginations of the untouched and secluded.

What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim here? How are these denominators imagine...