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Introduction
Intisar: Muslim Women in the Spotlight
I met Intisar at one of the informal Muslim gatherings on the fourth floor of the student union at the George Washington University campus. Affectionate and dryly witty, Intisar quickly became a good friend despite the fourteen-year age difference between us. She had a ready reserve of self-deprecating immigrant jokes, as did I, but we had arrived in this country under very different circumstances. I traveled from Pakistan to the United States in the early 1990s as a cash-strapped doctoral student. Intisar, along with her large family headed by a widowed mother, had fled war-torn Somalia as a young child.
When she was in elementary school in the United States, Intisar was acutely aware of the multilayered stigma attached to her as a poor black African refugee and Somali Muslim. But there was one thing she enjoyed at school: she loved basketballâand she played well. This gave her immediate entry into the mainly African American basketball youth culture at school. Suddenly, the poor Somali refugee was a cool kid. She successfully performed being an âintegratedâ American youthâexcept that she was acutely aware of her performance.
Intisarâs life changed as she approached puberty. Like the Sikh mother in Bend It Like Beckham, Intisarâs mother disapproved of girls playing contact sports. It exposed sexual attributes to the public eye, and Intisar was, as she said meaningfully, âa big girl.â Intisar and her mother maintained an uneasy compromise for a while. Intisar started wearing hijab and continued to play basketball. This was not easy. From her hijab and her physiognomy, non-Muslim peers at first deduced that she could not play basketball, rolling their eyes as they passed her over during team selection. Then they gawked when she played: She played basketball so well! They hadnât seen that coming! How could a Muslim woman combine hijab and sports?
As for her Muslim girlfriends, some privately gossiped about how immodest it was to play a fast-paced contact sport like basketballâwith boys!âwhile others admired her for being a âcool hijabiâ (see glossary). The woman who blocked and dribbled the ball also labored to shatter stereotypes about weak, timid, secluded, and immobile Muslim women. Intisar wilted under Muslim and non-Muslim peersâ scrutiny and âamazement,â and wearied of shattering the mold set for Muslim women by both groups.
Eventually, Intisarâs mother lost patience and forbade basketball altogether. Long afterwards Intisar continued to play in secret from her family. While other teenagers hid condoms and pot from their parents, Intisar guarded her big secretâsports. Her doubts grew and she questioned herself. Was she absolutely sure it was Islamically permissible to play a contact sport with boys? If it was not, she could be serving as a bad example to other Muslims, legitimating a religiously problematic act and destabilizing the besieged community, during the War on Terror no less. The intensity of surveillance on and by Muslims, especially of Muslim female bodies, magnified the implications of Intisarâs athletic activity. Intisar stopped playing basketball. She missed it. Sometimes, she shot hoops when she was by herself.
This book unpacks the ways that people like Intisar are not free to be. Intisar wanted to play basketball and to be a religious Muslim woman. The questions poured in from all directions: Surely Muslim femaleness and basketball were opposed to each other. Surely the very American qualities we see in the sportswomanâmobility, flexibility, and freedomâare not qualities the immigrant and Muslim woman can or should share. Intisarâs experience shows us that, though identity options on U.S. campuses are becoming almost clichĂ© in their multiplicity and people identify with diverse, multiple, and changing identity backgrounds, these options are not freely available to all. Nor are these âoptionsâ chosen lightly: for Muslims, whose backgrounds and lifestyles span a dizzying range, identity choices can be explosive. For minoritized people in a racist social order, these are not really choices at all (Waters 1990).
This book is an ethnographic study of Muslim American undergraduate women on U.S. college campuses. Most of the women in my research study were members of what is commonly called the first generation of Muslim Americans raised in the United States after the 1964 immigration laws were liberalized. Muslim Americans are, overall, highly educated, with 40 percent holding a college degree or higher, compared to 29 percent among the general American public (Gallup 2009: 22). In this book, I investigate the relationship between the reality of religious pluralism as it occurs on college campuses and the processes by which undergraduate women construct their identities during one of the most formative times in their lives. Contextualizing my study in religious and ethnic minority experiences generally, I find that while the women experience double scrutinyâfrom their own communities and from the dominant onesâthey find and create spaces within both communities to grow and assert themselves as individuals. They encounter numerous conflicting expectations, and the process of becoming individuals for them is a tangled story of resistance, triumph, compromise, and surrender.
What This Book Does
This book is based on a research study of Muslim American women undergraduates at Georgetown and George Washington Universities in Washington, D.C. In it, I examine the following:
» Muslim American womenâs struggles on university campuses to pursue religious authenticity while being ânormalâ Americans/women/youth;
» majority Americansâ Orientalist stereotyping of Muslims;
» how Orientalist images constitute a pervasive presence in Muslim American womenâs own identity constructions;
» campus social and leisure culture via a new window, the perspective of marginal students, demonstrating specifically how campus culture marginalizes some Muslim undergraduates;
» the flawed pluralism in America and American campus culture.
My work is interdisciplinary, but grounded in the discipline of anthropology. Anthropological studies of immigrants within first world contexts explore a variety of minority identity strategies, such as assimilation into majority behavior patterns, selective âaccommodationâ of such majority norms as are perceived as positive or beneficial by minority persons, and rejection of majority practices (Gibson 1998). I examine all these types of cultural strategies among Muslim American women. This study, situated in the field of critical ethnography, uses the case of Muslim American women as a vehicle by which to examine the cultural strategies of minority and religious undergraduates.
My most important finding is that Muslim women have multidimensional identitiesâwith religious, ethnic, racial, and gendered aspectsâthat fly in the face of the identities expected of them both by many within Muslim communities (such as fellow Muslim students and families) and by those outside their communities (non-Muslim peers, college administrators, etc.). Second, in exploring how they manage to âbecome themselvesâ within and against this context, I find that Muslim women undergraduates face a great deal of scrutiny and pressure during years crucial to the construction of self-identity. Third, as we see how liberal pluralism in U.S. higher education both falters and succeeds, my book contributes to understanding how dominant discourses are inscribed on marginalized people. In doing so, I also celebrate the agency and strategies of the marginalized.
American Muslim Women
I still wince at the memory of the above conversation I had with Amber, a Pakistani American senior and an officer in the Muslim campus organization. Beneath a taciturn surface, as she battled her way through words, I sensed that anxious tears threatened to silence Amber just a heartbeat away. This was a common occurrence in my research interviews. I struggled to record and convey the âimperial feelingâ of post-9/11 America (Maira 2009: 24) as I encountered it in my youthful research participantsâ stress, fear, and inner struggles, but as I did so, I was often faced with a wry, set, unhappy smile and diffident, fragmentary remarks. I struggled to draw Amber out, but with every utterance, she seemed to shut down in despondent fatigue. Still, while Amber despaired of campus community membersâ inability to see particular Muslim Americans, instead of the undifferentiated monolithic world of Islam, she also hinted at the Muslim imagined homogeneous community (âI guess ideally it would be like that to some peopleâ) of good, devout Muslims united on religious doctrine and practice.
Amber and I both reject monolithic notions of Muslim identity. Yet I am also interested in the social processes that make some identities hypervisible while others become invisible. Among Muslim American womenâs various legacies, which ones âcrowd outâ others? Why do we even speak of âMuslim American womenâ when we do not usually speak of, say, âwhite American Christian women?â While I recognize the religious affiliation of Muslim American women, I also wish to subvert the notion that this descriptor is enough, or even that it conveys anything beyond the kaleidoscopic term âMuslimâ itself. Although âMuslim womenâ implies a primarily religious identityâand I certainly focus on their religious identities to the extent that my research subjects didâthese Muslim women are also women, and the construction of gendered selves is extremely significant to this book, to their religiosityâhowever they construct itâand to their ethnic-cultural identities.
And then they are Americans. How brash and radical it seems to make that claim about Muslim women! How sensational it still is for many Americans to see a brown-skinned woman in a silk headscarf and blue jeans open her mouth and speak âperfectâ American English. Why are Muslims and especially Muslim women so palpably foreign, so deeply other? I suggest that a significant portion of the explanation lies in the peculiar relationship between Islam and the West, in the Orientalist lenses many (Muslims and non-Muslims) wear to examine Islam and Muslims. This book wrestles with that troubled Islam-West relationship, but unlike other scholarship, not as it is manifested in âbigâ cultural spaces of national policy, military action, and popular cultural products. I investigate that Islam-West relationship as it is situated in the âsmallâ moments of Muslim womenâs campus experiences. My research participants are also racially and ethnically defined, but all, even indigenous white and black Americans, become racialized, de-Americanized, and âreligionizedâ by their association with Islam.
The many varied Muslim women in the pages of this book may furnish some readers with an unsettling confusion about which one is a typical Muslim womanâbecause none of them is. Neither Intisar (devout hijabi and part-time sportswoman) nor Yasmin (avid clubber and introspective interrogator of religious absolutes) was a ânormâ for all Muslim American female undergraduates. The super-identity of Islam often drowned their voices and overpowered their narratives, yet these womenâs identities shattered the theologocentrism (Rodinson 2006: 104) that equates all Muslims with Islam. These womenâs identities remind us that they are young, female, American, ethnically distinct (for the most part), and in college, all at the same time, and that they, in a variety of ways, create third spaces of identity. These women are sometimes emphatically different and sometimes indistinguishable from their majority American peers, as they do what Intisar called âjust lifeâ and they âjust go through itââall of it.
The Research Moment
From 1996 to the present day (2013), I have keenly observed Muslim American youth and gender identities. I collected data at my research sites, George Washington University and Georgetown University, between August 2002 and May 2003. I continued to follow up with my participants long after that date. In 2009, I interviewed Muslim undergraduates at the University of Texas at Austin for the triangulation of findings. In 2010, I visited Georgetown and George Washington Universities, logged observation time, and collected fresh interview data on Muslim American studentsâ identity construction. This updated data, while not the primary focus of this book, corroborates the conclusions of my earlier fieldwork, albeit in a climate somewhat less charged than that of a year after the events of September 11, 2001. My findings throughout this decade confirm my conviction that racist Orientalist stereotyping and the consequently âspoiledâ Muslim American identities are an enduring feature of American culture and higher education, not primarily a consequence of the September 2001 attacks.
It was painfully awkward to be a researcher examining my Muslim community in the post-9/11 climate. Muslim Americans experienced the War on Terror directly, through intelligence agencies, law enforcement, physical and psychological attacks, and indirectly, through military campaigns replete with human rights violations of Muslim populations abroad (Maira 2009). Hundreds were secretly arrested, incarcerated, and held without the presumption of innocence in the investigation. Muslims in the United States often had little recourse to fundamental legal rights. Political authorities, law enforcement, and security agencies have targeted Muslim Americans on a large scale since 9/11, and civil rights cases of harassment, violence, and discrimination, as well as incidents of anti-Muslim hate crimes have increased since 2001 (CAIR 2005). Anti-Muslim hate crimes shot up by 1600 percent in 2001, with a 10 percent increase between 2005 and 2006 (Read 2008: 40).
I have often agonized over the nature of my research in the political climate after September 11, 2001, and the War on Terror. Many have observed that my topic was timely, even professionally expedient, but scrutinizing fellow Muslims in the post-9/11 atmosphere was unspeakably uncomfortable, both ethically and emotionally. I did not wish to become an unwitting pawn for the use of Islamophobic pundits trawling my articles for evidence of Muslim sexism and extremism (this fear was not unfounded; see Dowd-Galley 2004). An ethnographer can try to present a community âas it is,â warts and all. But over a decade after 9/11, the Muslim community is not allowed the luxury of warts. I feared that my data collection could endanger vulnerable youth and terrified immigrant families, who witnessed the fruit of their labors rot and stink before them.
And Muslim women were in the spotlight again. Hijab (the Muslim headscarf) being the second-highest âtriggerâ of discrimination (CAIR 2005, Ghumman and Jackson 2010), hijabis were the first to be recognized as Muslim and treated accordingly. Muslim women have historically been objects of both pity and fear because they are associated with Islam and because are hyperfeminized as victims of the stereotypically brutal Muslim man. More likely than men to be recognized as Muslim because of their distinctive clothing, but less likely to be deported than their male counterparts, Muslim women were at the forefront of efforts to represent and defend their coreligionists. âWe are not terrorists,â they said ad nauseam. âWe are not oppressed. Donât pity us, but donât fear us either. We are good people. We are just like you. Islam means peace. Muslims are also Americansââbut the unsaid part was: âWe are very tired right now.â
This was the community I was investigatingâtense, tired, and under several layers of surveillance.
By the summer of 2002, I had been a fixture in the D.C. Muslim community for a year, having moved from Bloomington, Indiana. I had also, for some years, been a public speaker and writer on Western Muslimsâ identity and religiosity, Muslim women, progressive Islam, and Sufism.
I was an âinsiderâ anthropologist in many ways, but in many ways, my age, my immigrant status, my discipline (anthropology), and my undertaking (scholarly research) distanced me from my participants. Born in the United Kingdom, I grew up mostly in Lahore, Pakistan, where I graduated from college, obtained a graduate degree, and did a stint teaching English. Then I moved to Britain to do a graduate degree at Cambridge University. My religious journey had taken me through conservative, neo-fundamentalist, orthodox, and progressive Islam, and for some years I had been, spiritually and intellectually, an orthodox Sufi as well as a progressive Muslim. By 2002, I was a kind of moderate Muslim par excellence, almost as if I were crafted to suit a diverse Muslim research sample. During fieldwork, I tried to drown many of my other roles in the researcherâs persona, muting my voice so as to be a good interviewer for a variety of people.
Muslims in America
From an anthropological perspective, who we are is possible because of where we are and when we are. While I am not of the opinion that we are purely creatures of circumstance devoid of agency, I believe that the specific possibilities of our agencyâas well as the potential to stretch our agencyâare structured by our given circumstances.
For my second-generation Muslim American youth, these circumstances include the growing physical presence of immigrant populations in the United States. Their very presence (we hope) brings about a cultural sea change that shifts the balance of the broader population against xenophobia and toward acceptance. When the composition of âusâ is transformed, surely our perceptions of âthemâ will shift too?
Unfortunately, sometimes perceptions change for the worse.
I like to illustrate this by telling an immigrant story set in the 1950s, before the Islamic revolution in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. My uncle, then in his late teens, arrived amid farms in the Deep South, the only foreigner in the area. Wherever he went, he was recognized and greeted as âMoâ (for Mohammad) since his face was splashed all over the newspapers as the exotic foreigner, the attractive and debonair Pakistani student with a sports scholarsh...