Two Strangers in the Eternal City: Border Thinking and Individualized Emerging Rituals as Anti-Patriarchal Epistemology

This paper is a work of autoethnography in which I (the author) observe critical practices that I and my colleague, Aisha, thought, said, and embodied during our tenure as the only Muslim Nostra Aetate Fellows at the St. Catherine Center for Interreligious Dialogue in the Vatican City, Italy. The paper focuses on our survival strategies that took on an interreligious and anti-patriarchal character within our interreligious, Muslim–Christian encounters. The framework of border thinking, as theorized by Maria Lugones and Gloria Anzaldúa, and the concept of emerging rituals proposed by Ronald Grimes, will serve as analytical tools to understand our practices. I argue that our embodied thoughts and practices, as seen from the lenses of emerging rituals and border thinking, represent an anti-patriarchal, interreligious epistemology that questions and deconstructs the hegemonic presence of patriarchal Catholic praxis around us within that specific context.