Annotated Bibliography 5 sources/paragraphs

173

6 Conclusion

“Covered” and Assertive Muslim Identities

yasmin : Like, either I have to be completely assimilated, com-

pletely into this culture or either I have to become completely like,

Muslim, and be separate instead of a part.

Muslim women felt the tension of binary identities on campus. Did it have to be a zero-sum game? Did you have to be socially divided from hedonistic campus culture or completely assimilated “into this culture”? Yes, actually, it seemed very much like a zero-sum game when Muslim identities were mauled not only by American military and intelligence actions but also in the social spaces of campus cul- ture, when “that outcast . . . that really foreign belief about alcohol” and hijab, modest clothes, and not-dating clashed with the narrowly conceived “normal” American college student.

As my participants constructed Muslim American identities, they deployed as well as “covered” racial, cultural, and religious attributes contextually, and religionized identities were also inscribed on them. Increasingly perceived as outsiders, Muslim women made the camou- fl aging of religious identities an integral element of their response to encompassing cultural and political surveillance. As the boundaries of Americanness contracted, pushing out immigrants and people of color, Roshan and Heather tacitly disavowed the stigma of Muslim identity, protected it from public exposure, and disguised their religiosity under the secular “uniform” of “normal” behavior. In invisibility lies safety. In liminality one may conduct one’s identity work in relative security.

Yet when the individual regards his or her own attributes as “defi ling” (Goffman 1963: 7), how genuine can such safety be?

C o p y r i g h t 2 0 1 4 . T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f N o r t h C a r o l i n a P r e s s .

A l l r i g h t s r e s e r v e d . M a y n o t b e r e p r o d u c e d i n a n y f o r m w i t h o u t p e r m i s s i o n f r o m t h e p u b l i s h e r , e x c e p t f a i r u s e s p e r m i t t e d u n d e r U . S . o r a p p l i c a b l e c o p y r i g h t l a w .

EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT AN: 582981 ; Shabana Mir.; Muslim American Women on Campus : Undergraduate Social Life and Identity Account: s3931335.main.eds

174 Conclusion

Muslim American women treated Muslim modesty, courtship, and teetotalism like dirty secrets, contaminations that reduced their normalcy quotient in campus culture. Yasmin, for instance, toned down the visibility of her religious affi liation by strategically ex- cluding Muslim referees from internship applications: “Can you really change things from outside the system?” she asked. “So I think it’s much more likely you can change the system from the inside.” A political and cultural sea change required long-term, low-key labor. The luxury of being true to oneself—whatever that meant for an individual—was not available until the cultural proj- ect of Muslim American indigenization was complete. So Yasmin disavowed and covered Muslim identity: if accepted by the domi- nant majority, if “inside” the system, she might become part of a cultural undercurrent that would eventually pull Muslims into the mainstream.

Sharmila and Amber rejected the passivity of Yasmin’s silences: the critical political situation demanded “loud” identities, not cov- ered ones.

amber : Yes, now in every single thing I feel like I have to speak up [bitter laugh]. No one else is going to do it for us and we’re just going to be stomped on. And yes, it’s constant pressure, but if I don’t do it then I’m not going to respect myself. . . . There’s a handful [of Muslims on campus] who care. And the rest, . . . they don’t do anything about it. . . . They’ll be like, . . . “They [law enforcement and intelligence] are all going to take us all.” . . . But they’re not going to do anything. . . . It [apathy] is a way to protect themselves too. . . . Personally.

But Sharmila and Amber, as conservative hijabis, along with their friends and families, prominent Washington area religious Muslims, were already at risk in the war on terror. The apathetic Muslims were protecting themselves “personally,” but the visible Muslims were con- structed as primarily Muslim , and not as private persons with secular interests and identities to protect. Her plans for the future in jeop- ardy, Amber became more visibly and vocally Muslim, rather than less visibly like Yasmin. For overtly religious Muslims like Amber, who had never been a vocal person, assertive identities were inescapable, rather than a choice.

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Conclusion 175

Conservative Muslims like Amber could not benefi t from the “di- versity showcase” of college. When it is a subdued ingredient blended into a medley of fl avors, differentness is “interesting” and “fun,” but when bold and noticeable, differentness is seen as menacing and alien. Muslim women quickly learned that, to belong in campus so- cial and leisure cultures, it was better to “cover” their religious Mus- lim identities, implement (or pretend to implement) the hedonistic hidden curriculum, and transcend religious and ethnic commit- ments. Visible Muslims, however, had no choice but to “speak out.”

Whether in the form of Yasmin’s covered identities or Sharmila’s loud identities, the heart of campus culture—like the heart of Ameri- can culture—remains populated by half-real minority individuals, or rather half-real members of homogeneous essentialized groups. The bodies inhabiting multicultural student clubs and the drama of veils and turbans pictured in glitzy brochures remain framed by the majority gaze.

Social Integration in Campus Culture

Amber’s conspicuously Muslim identity did not mix well with domi- nant majority culture, true, but visible Muslims, because they were not socially well integrated into core campus culture, were not under undue pressure to cover their religious identities. Once you were out, you were out, after all. Muslims whose identities seemed outwardly “ambiguous or unformed” (Yoshino 2007: 44) masked their Muslim identities to earn the privilege (?) of peripheral social participation in campus culture.

Like mainstream campus culture, Muslim enclaves were fraught with diffi culty. Muslims constructed religionized Muslim identities and shaped religionized Muslim spaces, in which Amira and Yas- min felt alienated. Amira objected to the msa enclaves that were Sharmila’s “enfolding rubric” and her safe space for visible religiosity. The muted religious identities that worked for Yasmin did not suit Sharmila. Minority enclaves were unseemly, Haseena said, because “it’s having to do with being in America. You know what I’m saying. Because you can’t close yourself off to like—because you have to deal with everyone. You can’t just be like, I’m going to only deal with people that are like me. Like, that’s not how it works.” Amira agreed, even as she attacked the Patriot Act.

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

176 Conclusion

amira : Become—it’s like becoming a citizen. There’s a lot that’s attached to it. It’s not just, oh I’m going to live in a country and enjoy the prosperity and not really become a part of it, not re- ally contribute to it. And I think that’s the difference between assimilation and—just living separately. . . . Yes, there’s a social disadvantage but also, it can make it easy for you to live in an insulated world, where everyone you know doesn’t drink. You become cushioned, and I think that’s a very bad [thing].

Muslims became excessively “cushioned” in community enclaves, unprepared for the “real world,” Amira contended. Yet the real world already pervaded these college students’ lives, relegating to the mar- gins any signs of difference, however skillfully disguised. Amber and Sharmila sought an “insulated world” because they were marked with the visible stigma of loud Muslim identities. Muslim American undergraduate women were already in the “real world,” making the same costly choices of conformity and resistance.

While it does not seem appropriate that students should spend all their college years in protective enclaves—“like, that’s not how it works,” as Haseena said—it also does not seem fair to ask minor- ity freshmen to plunge themselves into mainstream campus culture without the buffer of minority communities (if desired). White Chris- tian American students can be immersed in a predominantly white Christian social world for the four years of college (and for their lives, if they wish), but minority students’ search for camaraderie and community is typically pathologized as ghettoization or balkaniza- tion. My research fi ndings challenge “the university and its observ- ers to imagine segregated spaces that nobody has to worry about or apologize for, or for that matter to label as self-segregated. Instead, these ethnic spaces can be understood as inevitable features of a country and a university still gripped by the realities of race, even as the university makes its own noteworthy efforts to forge new ties and spaces” (Abelmann 2009: 166).

In chapter 5, I alluded to “unspoiled” or “healthy” Muslim Ameri- can identities constructed in relative freedom from the constraining effect of stereotypes. By highlighting the symbolic violence Muslims experience in mainstream campus culture, I do not mean to sug- gest that they should be forever divided from their majority peers to construct religionized identities in Muslim enclaves. In this book,

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Conclusion 177

I follow the trail of essentialized, religionized stereotypes inscribed on and adopted for public consumption by Muslims. The individual’s authenticity is threatened by the imperative to perform stereotypi- cally minority identities (such as Islamicized conduct) as it is by the imperative to “pass” as majority persons (such as non-Muslims) (Yo- shino 2007: 23). In a “healthy” campus culture hospitable to Muslim students’ religious and American identities, Muslim women would possess the freedom, fl exibility, and vocabulary to construct their American, Muslim, ethnic, gendered, and youthful identities, to “em- phasize [their] multiple subject positions,” and to decide how Mus- lim, mainstream American, or ethnic to be, how much to “mute or fl aunt [their] identities” (Yoshino 2007: 79). This means that I must recognize myself (and be recognized) as a woman, a double immi- grant from Pakistani as well as the United Kingdom and culturally both Western and Pakistani, a heterosexual, a Muslim feminist, a cancer survivor, an anthropologist, an academic, and a resident of the United States for much of my life now—rather than merely as “Muslim” or “Pakistani.” To treat our identities as complex, simulta- neous, and seamless not only opens up multiple possibilities of iden- tity for us but also “rupture[s] the boundaries between groups” and connects us to multiple communities of interest (Carlson 1994: 6, 22).

Campus Culture and Policy

Despite the efforts of higher education leaders, the vacuum of ef- fective, authorized campus policy on religious minority students enhances the unauthorized power of mainstream leisure culture. Mainstream campus leisure culture is engaged in policy formation by appropriation (Levinson and Sutton 2001: 3) in the student union, the dorm, the local bar, and the nightclub, where diverse identities are most vulnerable to homogenization. Even moderately deter- mined students can break the constraints of a “dry” campus, and campus housing habitually bends the rules on overnight opposite sex guests. Students who refuse to join in such culturally authorized bending of policies are uncool, marginal sticklers who must learn to disavow their identities in order to belong.

Campus policies related to leisure matters that affect religious Muslims are weak, shallow, inconsistent, and selectively applied. Campus policy in many such areas (e.g., drinking and overnight

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

178 Conclusion

dorm visitors) also fails to refl ect meaningful acknowledgment of campus demographics. “Limp endorsement and bland acceptance of principles such as ‘nondiscrimination,’ ‘diversity,’ and ‘openness’ in the abstract” not only enable “the Right’s ruthless appropriation of the vision and language of multiculturalism” but also protects the hegemony of the dominant group (S. Giroux 2005: 315). More- over, “religion-blind” policy is incomplete in its religion-blindness, as even accommodations for minority students (such as Georgetown’s Muslim housing) are majority-referenced and uphold dominant group hegemony. Policy accommodations for minorities often fail to achieve their goals because majority students, accommodated across the length and breadth of campus culture, must be equally accommodated within such special minority provisions such as Muslim housing.

Campus Culture, Assimilation, and Pluralism

Students have a “seismographic” quality (Dahrendorf 1974). They sense, record, and make manifest the tremors and fi ssures underly- ing the cultural day-to-day. College students do not by themselves invent Islamophobic anxieties, Orientalist essentialism, and Muslim women’s hypervisibility on campus: they co-construct campus cul- ture and make these problems visible in ways that we can scrutinize and address. Rich in the possibilities of cultural interrogation and creative chaos, campus leisure culture brings out in sharp relief the problems that plague American pluralism. In campus social spaces, where symbolic violence occurred on an excruciatingly intimate scale, the potential for symbolic violence was garbed not in force and incivility but in “good times,” sociability, and romance (Holland and Eisenhart 1990). In the leisure rituals of drinking, clubbing, fash- ion, and dating—“integral to social life, . . . unspectacular, repetitive, and predictive” (Magolda 2000: 34)—“the real work of creating com- munity (or of resisting it) occurs” (Quantz and Magolda 1997: 222). At the heart of campus social culture, despite diversity policy, minority youth are most vulnerable.

Campus culture at Georgetown University and George Washington University offered students the liberty to select from a variety of so- cial options. But these options ranged between the (normal) majority cultural core and the (not normal, weird, stigmatized) periphery, so

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Conclusion 179

in reality, the “closed openness” (Asher 2007: 69) of campus pluralism accepted but a limited range of difference. Muslim religiosity was decidedly located at the periphery of campus culture, and if anything could make religious Muslims normal, it was concealed religiosity. Like gays, blacks, and women in the United States, Muslim Ameri- cans feel “increasing pressure to pledge an allegiance—to fade grate- fully into the mainstream or to resist in the name of persisting dif- ference” (Yoshino 2007: 78). Those who refuse to cover marginalized identities are perceived as having “somehow forfeited social protec- tion against all kinds of micro- and macro-aggressions. They are, ef- fectively, ‘asking for it’” (Galman 2013: 125). Assimilation is proffered as an escape route from discrimination: if a Muslim woman can hide her Muslim identity, she can be normal. But when young Muslim American women drink, dress “like everyone else,” and start dating simply to fi t in, this is an occasion not to celebrate the possibilities of American pluralism but to examine its infl exibility.

Today, university communities make public commitments to in- clusion, integration, and diversity. Yet a right-wing backlash against liberal multiculturalism has been turning campuses into ideological battlegrounds that frame diversity as particularism. Conservatives and neoliberals complain vociferously about diversity, about the “si- lencing” of conservative politics in classrooms, about the demands for “political correctness,” and about the alleged lack of immigrant acculturation. Though cultural assimilation has had a face-lift, the expectation that “newcomers” and Others should bury their angular differences in an Anglo facade is not just alive and well: we have experienced a “renaissance of assimilation” (Yoshino 2007: 3).

Intensely mindful of the scrutiny that read them as static texts and half persons, Muslim women spoke to the gaze in its language. They varied their social roles, masterfully playing them out in differ- ent situations, now stretching the possibilities of identity and now adapting to its constraints, and simultaneously negotiating multiple expectations emanating from the non-Muslim majority, from con- servative and liberal Muslims, and from the self.

Will the Real Muslim People Please Stand Up?

I was as nervous as a freshman that Friday evening in August when I arrived at the Copley Hall musalla for the Georgetown msa open

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

180 Conclusion

meeting for all members. I had been “screened” by msa offi cers and was to deliver my research recruitment spiel as the meeting con- cluded. It had taken me a good few weeks to make it this far. I was diligently trying to fi t in, wearing a studiously friendly manner and a conservative fi tted hijab I never wore otherwise. At thirty-four, I felt staid and old as I glanced around the musalla. The room was fi lled to capacity with fresh-faced Georgetown students, a few of whom I now knew, a large group of young, attractive, stylish men and women stealing chaste glances at each other as they brainstormed msa events for the year. They all sat on the carpet—men on the left side, women on the right—in a rather cramped basement room, where muffl ed laughter from the Copley dorm residents trickled in, as Heather and Nikhat talked about religion and community. Mean- while, on that mild fall evening much of the campus community was already whiling away the hours at trendy Georgetown nightclubs. Some of the demure attendees at the msa meeting would probably join their non-Muslim friends after the meeting. Some would drink, some would not, some would dance, some would not. And on Mon- day morning, they would go to class and listen to white people talk about Islam and terrorism, and Islam and women.

Yasmin did not sign up for research participation that evening. A few weeks later, after a few interviews, she revealed that her reluc- tance had stemmed from a sentiment that she “shouldn’t really be the one representing Islam.” She had thought that I, as a researcher of “ Muslim American college students” was “looking for real Muslim people who like, live the real Muslim lifestyle ” (emphasis added).

No one could singularly represent Muslims. But by participating in the discursive representation of Muslim Americans via my research, Yasmin came to consider the possibility that her voice counted. In the rugged and varied terrain of Muslim American identity, her navi- gation of identity borderlands (Anzaldúa 1987) made sense. Argu- ably, those borderlands made more sense than imaginary “real Mus- lim people” did.

yasmin : I think it’s really made me understand, and made me think about the fact that—you know what—I am a Muslim and I have the right to represent Islam as much as anyone else does. . . . [I used to think], “it’s not me; I’m trying to be Mus- lim; some of the time, I’m not really doing it.” But I think it’s

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Conclusion 181

really made me—you kind of gave me—. . . I was like there’s so many other Muslims out there like me, who are just like, “if I’m not always the one who’s always organizing the protests, or doesn’t do the [religious] study, or outwardly doesn’t look im- mediately to someone as Muslim, then something’s not right.”

At the margins of the Muslim American community and with deep involvement in “normal American” culture, Yasmin staked her claim as a Muslim woman with a right to speak as a Muslim woman. As she did so, she contrasted her fl exible, “some of the time,” half- concealed (“covered,” as Goffman would say) Muslim identities with those real Muslims who projected visible, forceful, representative identities in the political sphere (“always organizing the protests”) and in the religious sphere (“doing the [religious] study”), who “out- wardly look immediately to someone as Muslim.”

People like Yasmin shrank when called on to “represent Islam,” not because they were not Muslim, but because the terms of the discussion were all wrong. Who could claim to be the real Muslim people? More important, during the War on Terror, who would want to be those real Muslim people?

Those visible Muslims had the power and the glory of being rep- resentatives. It was to them that “heads turned” (Amber), and it was they who were perpetually interrogated about the Islamic stand- point on terrorism and polygamy. These representative Muslims were reduced to just Muslims. They were “the Muslim girls[s] who don’t [drink/have sex/party]” (Sarah). Yasmin was free to be complex and American, and Tehzeeb to be “low-key and on the margins.” But Amber’s politicized and religionized identity was drained of its nor- mal American youthfulness. Hijabis were not free to play basketball, and non-hijabis’ temperance was endlessly shocking to their non- Muslim peers. Yasmin chafed against her invisibility as a Muslim representative, while Amber was trapped in the task of ineffectual Muslim representation, always apologizing, always defending, al- ways in vain.

Muslim women asserted that majority peers really could not fi gure them out without abandoning previous assumptions about Muslims. To understand, they had to directly approach these fellow Americans without the use of discursive translations. As she con- structed new modalities of Muslim and American youthful gendered

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

182 Conclusion

codes, Intisar claimed fundamentally that her peers “really couldn’t fi gure [her] out” until they came directly to her and “embraced that difference” (chap. 4). It was not enough that they tolerated her hijab: she demanded that her peers master a new vocabulary. But Intisar’s challenge was stifl ed by America’s existing vocabulary about Mus- lims. She was not , she explained, “your regular Muslim girl.” And Latifa added, she was not “your typical, traditional Muslim female.” Given a chance, my participants could remedy your “perception that all Muslim girls cover their heads, all Muslim girls don’t talk to people that are not Muslim, all Muslim girls are very intolerant or uncomfortable” (Amira). They could demonstrate by their “normal American” comportment that they were “a little different” (Latifa), and then non-Muslim Americans could “approach [Amira] about it.” (What was “it”? Muslim womanhood? The true nature of Islam? The normalcy of Muslim Americans?)

Intisar, Amira, and Latifa were compelled to begin with a negative statement, an apology, an explanation, a footnote. To reshape the terms of the discussion, they had to employ the Orientalist, essen- tialist American vocabulary about Muslims. In order to edit the ste- reotypical image of a subjugated, immobile, timid, xenophobic Mus- lim woman, Muslim American women were obliged to fi rst adopt that image and to work with it. The stereotype was unavoidable.

As Muslim women revised stereotypical images, they in the pro- cess perpetuated these images. And as they adopted their peers’ vocabulary and attempted to correct it, my participants found that they had become offi cial representatives of “Islam.” By its very na- ture, such representation was centered on static images, rather than on the constant fl ux of diverse lives and identities.

In this book, I have shown the play of multiple identity layers and the manner in which Muslim American women contextually em- phasize and overemphasize particular identities. This kind of ethno- graphic scrutiny enables us to jettison such old and overused iden- tity tropes as the oppressed Muslim woman, the angry hijabi, and the secularized non-hijabi Muslim. On encountering these tropes, we may also become aware of how they are forged. Today, in aca- demic publications and popular diatribes, the notions of timeless, unchanging, angry, and essentially un-Western Muslim identities feed the right-wing frenzy for such civilizational confl ict and spells danger for our very survival on this planet. In this climate, as we

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

Conclusion 183

explore the dynamic, changing, and strategic nature of identity, we may come to see the Other as a complex work in progress, rather than as a fi nished product perpetually engaged in warfare against Us. We may also realize that They are really part of Us .

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use

This page intentionally left blank

EBSCOhost - printed on 1/17/2021 4:13 AM via AMERICAN UNIV OF KUWAIT. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use