Annotated Bibliography 5 sources/paragraphs

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1 Introduction

intisar : [People say,] “How do you handle the

differences [as a Muslim woman]?” Yeah, it’s not an agenda,

you know: every day in the morning you wake up and say, OK,

now I’m going to pray and I’m going to go play basketball! It’s

contradictory, but it’s just life, we just go through it. We don’t

have a journal; we don’t have a schedule every day.

Intisar: Muslim Women in the Spotlight

I met Intisar at one of the informal Muslim gatherings on the fourth fl oor 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 fl ed 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 basketball—and she played well. This gave her immediate entry into the mainly African Ameri- can basketball youth culture at school. Suddenly, the poor Somali refugee was a cool kid. She successfully performed being an “inte- grated” American youth—except that she was acutely aware of her performance.

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 .

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2 Introduction

Intisar’s life changed as she approached puberty. Like the Sikh mother in Bend It Like Beckham , Intisar’s mother disapproved of girls playing contact sports. It exposed sexual attributes to the public eye, and Intisar was, as she said meaningfully, “a big girl.” 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 fi rst 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 hadn’t 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 basketball— with boys !—while others admired her for being a “cool hijabi ” (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 peers’ scrutiny and “amazement,” and wearied of shattering the mold set for Muslim women by both groups.

Eventually, Intisar’s 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 secret—sports. 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 reli- giously 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, magnifi ed the implications of Intisar’s athletic activity. Intisar stopped playing bas- ketball. 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 Mus- lim femaleness and basketball were opposed to each other. Surely the very American qualities we see in the sportswoman—mobility, fl exibility, and freedom—are not qualities the immigrant and Mus- lim woman can or should share. Intisar’s experience shows us that,

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Introduction 3

though identity options on U.S. campuses are becoming almost cli- ché in their multiplicity and people identify with diverse, multiple, and changing identity backgrounds, these options are not freely available to all. Nor are these “options” 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 under- graduate women on U.S. college campuses. Most of the women in my research study were members of what is commonly called the fi rst generation of Muslim Americans raised in the United States after the 1964 immigration laws were liberalized. Muslim Ameri- cans are, overall, highly educated, with 40 percent holding a college degree or higher, compared to 29 percent among the general Ameri- can public (Gallup 2009: 22). In this book, I investigate the relation- ship between the reality of religious pluralism as it occurs on col- lege 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 minor- ity experiences generally, I fi nd that while the women experience double scrutiny—from their own communities and from the domi- nant ones—they fi nd and create spaces within both communities to grow and assert themselves as individuals. They encounter numer- ous confl icting expectations, and the process of becoming individu- als 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 women’s struggles on university campuses to pursue religious authenticity while being “normal” Americans/women/youth;

» majority Americans’ Orientalist stereotyping of Muslims; » how Orientalist images constitute a pervasive presence in

Muslim American women’s own identity constructions;

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4 Introduction

» campus social and leisure culture via a new window, the perspective of marginal students, demonstrating specifi cally how campus culture marginalizes some Muslim undergraduates;

» the fl awed pluralism in America and American campus culture.

My work is interdisciplinary, but grounded in the discipline of an- thropology. Anthropological studies of immigrants within fi rst world contexts explore a variety of minority identity strategies, such as as- similation into majority behavior patterns, selective “accommodation” of such majority norms as are perceived as positive or benefi cial 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 fi eld of critical ethnography, uses the case of Muslim American women as a vehicle by which to exam- ine the cultural strategies of minority and religious undergraduates.

My most important fi nding is that Muslim women have multi- dimensional identities—with religious, ethnic, racial, and gendered aspects—that fl y 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 “become themselves” within and against this context, I fi nd 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

amber : [I wish faculty and peers understood] the basics about what we believe, and to separate culture from the religion, that American Muslims are a lot different from Muslims [elsewhere]. . . . But that being American isn’t contrary. . . . Because I think a lot of people think Islam is such a monolith; that every Muslim’s like every single other person, and it’s not really like that. I mean, I

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Introduction 5

guess ideally it would be like that to some people. But it’s not like that. . . . Nowadays, typical stereotypes. Threatening, the whole clash of civilizations thing, especially with what’s going on.

I still wince at the memory of the above conversation I had with Amber, a Pakistani American senior and an offi cer 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 “imperial feeling” of post-9/11 America (Maira 2009: 24) as I encountered it in my youthful research participants’ stress, fear, and inner struggles, but as I did so, I was often faced with a wry, set, unhappy smile and diffi dent, 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 members’ inability to see par- ticular Muslim Americans, instead of the undifferentiated monolithic world of Islam, she also hinted at the Muslim imagined homogeneous community (“I guess ideally it would be like that to some people”) 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 iden- tities hypervisible while others become invisible. Among Muslim American women’s various legacies, which ones “crowd out” others? Why do we even speak of “Muslim American women” when we do not usually speak of, say, “white American Christian women?” While I recognize the religious affi liation 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 “Mus- lim” itself. Although “Muslim women” implies a primarily religious identity—and I certainly focus on their religious identities to the extent that my research subjects did—these Muslim women are also women , and the construction of gendered selves is extremely signifi cant to this book, to their religiosity—however they construct it—and 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 heads- carf and blue jeans open her mouth and speak “perfect” American

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6 Introduction

English. Why are Muslims and especially Muslim women so palpably foreign , so deeply other? I suggest that a signifi cant 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 “big” cultural spaces of national policy, military action, and popular cultural products. I investigate that Islam-West relationship as it is situated in the “small” moments of Muslim wom- en’s campus experiences. My research participants are also racially and ethnically defi ned, but all, even indigenous white and black Americans, become racialized, de-Americanized, and “religionized” 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 woman—because none of them is. Neither Intisar (devout hijabi and part-time sportswoman) nor Yasmin (avid clubber and introspective interrogator of religious absolutes) was a “norm” for all Muslim American female undergraduates. The super-identity of Islam often drowned their voices and overpowered their narratives, yet these women’s identities shattered the theologocentrism (Rodin- son 2006: 104) that equates all Muslims with Islam . These women’s identities remind us that they are young, female, American, ethni- cally 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 “just life” and they “just go through it”—all of it.

The Research Moment

From 1996 to the present day (2013), I have keenly observed Mus- lim American youth and gender identities. I collected data at my research sites, George Washington University and Georgetown Uni- versity, 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 fi ndings. In 2010, I visited Georgetown and George Washington Universities, logged observation time, and collected

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Introduction 7

fresh interview data on Muslim American students’ identity con- struction. This updated data, while not the primary focus of this book, corroborates the conclusions of my earlier fi eldwork, albeit in a climate somewhat less charged than that of a year after the events of September 11, 2001. My fi ndings throughout this decade confi rm my conviction that racist Orientalist stereotyping and the consequently “spoiled” 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 Mus- lim community in the post-9/11 climate. Muslim Americans expe- rienced 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 ar- rested, incarcerated, and held without the presumption of innocence in the investigation. Muslims in the United States often had little re- course to fundamental legal rights. Political authorities, law enforce- ment, 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 politi- cal climate after September 11, 2001, and the War on Terror. Many have observed that my topic was timely, even professionally expe- dient, 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 Islamopho- bic 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 “as it is,” 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 terrifi ed immigrant families, who witnessed the fruit of their labors rot and stink before them.

And Muslim women were in the spotlight again. Hijab (the Mus- lim headscarf) being the second-highest “trigger” of discrimination

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8 Introduction

( cair 2005, Ghumman and Jackson 2010), hijabis were the fi rst to be recognized as Muslim and treated accordingly. Muslim women have historically been objects of both pity and fear because they are as- sociated 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 core- ligionists. “We are not terrorists,” they said ad nauseam. “We are not oppressed. Don’t pity us, but don’t fear us either. We are good people. We are just like you. Islam means peace. Muslims are also Americans”—but the unsaid part was: “We are very tired right now.”

This was the community I was investigating—tense, tired, and under several layers of surveillance.

By the summer of 2002, I had been a fi xture 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 West- ern Muslims’ identity and religiosity, Muslim women, progressive Islam, and Sufi sm.

I was an “insider” 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 progres- sive Islam, and for some years I had been, spiritually and intellectu- ally, 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 fi eldwork, I tried to drown many of my other roles in the researcher’s 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

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Introduction 9

that the specifi c possibilities of our agency—as well as the potential to stretch our agency—are structured by our given circumstances.

For my second-generation Muslim American youth, these circum- stances include the growing physical presence of immigrant popula- tions 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 “us” is transformed, surely our perceptions of “them” 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 Af- ghanistan. 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 “Mo” (for Mohammad) since his face was splashed all over the newspapers as the exotic foreigner, the attractive and debonair Pakistani student with a sports scholar- ship at the local university. Soon enough, Mo showed up to introduce himself to the mother of a young woman. Nancy’s mother wanted to know where the young suitor was from, but, being more familiar with the Bible than with the world map, she heard “Palestine” rather than “Pakistan.” Most 1950s Americans didn’t know Pakistan existed, after all. Young Mo adapted to being from Palestine for the moment since it was the only category available to him. When the subject turned to re- ligion, the youth tried to explain what Islam was, but being fairly un- lettered in such matters (religion was not very popular among mod- ern, Western-educated Pakistanis in those days), he did not get far. “Is that like being Catholic?” the mother inquired suspiciously. “Oh no,” Mo said. “Then,” Nancy’s mother announced, “you can date her!”

Mo assimilated steadily, raising a devoutly Baptist family with Nancy, and granting he was never especially immersed in Islam, he became a designated church speaker on the evils of Islam. In time, Mo’s nephew immigrated during the 1970s and stayed with Mo and Nancy while he attended college. The nephew was destined to become cofounder of a Dallas mosque and of networks that enabled his chil- dren to live rich and full Muslim and Pakistani American lives. In 1996, Mo’s niece emigrated from Pakistan and became an anthropologist aspiring to study Muslim American patterns of cultural adaptation.

While Euro-American Christendom is not new to horrid fascina- tion with Islam, Muslims became known to the United States in a

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10 Introduction

new light after the Cold War. With the Iranian Revolution and the collapse of the Communist bloc, the specter of Muslim power and protest became the primary threat to U.S. global supremacy. Times have changed. Today, Mo would have a better chance with Nancy’s mother if he was a Palestinian Catholic. Mo’s neighbors in South Carolina did not know what Pakistani Muslims were. Today Ameri- cans think they do.

The 1960s were an eventful period globally, with the Algerian and Iranian Revolutions and the rise of Islamist organizations. The Muslim Brotherhood (in the Arab world) and the Jamaat-e-Islami (in South Asia), ideological cousins in the Islamist movement, com- manded a signifi cant following among diasporic Muslims until the 1990s. Muslim students had created the Muslim Students Associa- tion ( msa ) in 1963, and in 1981, the founders created a community organization, the Islamic Society of North America ( isna ), for the Muslims who were no longer college students. When I arrived in the 1990s, Islamist and Salafi -oriented South Asians and Arabs were gatekeepers and activists within many predominantly immigrant Muslim American religious organizations. To openly subscribe to Sufi sm, feminism, or progressive Islam was to invite a good deal of trouble in many religious contexts (as I learned!). The immigrant and outwardly Islamist identity of these organizations remained quite solid until the mid-1990s, when Sufi orders began to attract the younger generation with the promise of deeper spirituality, the ap- peal to greater universalism, and (in many cases) roots in medieval Islamic interpretive sources. At the same time, the seeds of reform- ist critique sown by postcolonial intellectuals started to bear fruit as Salafi sm and Islamism began to lose their numerical majority.

Most of my participants were raised in the United States by par- ents who had arrived in the 1970s or early 1980s. A small number of them were more recent arrivals, and a few were converts. There was a variety of types and levels of religious ideology, belief, and practice among my research participants, yet all self-identifi ed as Muslim. On most metropolitan American campuses today, the msa is solidly second generation, and the predominantly international (and male) msa is a thing of the past. An accurate count of Muslim Americans is impossible to fi nd, and estimates vary widely, depend- ing on the source, between 2.6 million and 6 million (depending on how much you like or fear Muslims). Some say almost half of Muslim

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Introduction 11

Americans are indigenous (mostly African American), while the re- mainder are immigrants from more than eighty countries (Read 2008, Cesari 2004: 10–11). Not only can Muslim Americans be racially and ethnically identifi ed in a multitude of ways, but their religious beliefs and practices are also legion.

Muslim Americans are situated at a nexus of political, religious, racial, ethnic, cultural, and transnational identities. This nexus can be most helpfully described as a “third space”—an in-between space awkwardly straddling recognized categories, fi tting into none. Mus- lim Americans’ identities do not fall into singular theoretical and census categories. Moreover, conversion among African Ameri- cans (though, in addition to new converts, there are a few genera- tions of African American Muslims), whites, Hispanics, and Native Americans means that Islam is not just an immigrant religion in the United States. Muslim Americans’ identity construction fol- lows the trends of earlier immigrants in many ways, but is compli- cated by the lens of Orientalism (Said 1978). This makes Muslims much less easily accommodated (Moore 1995: xi) and allows them to be preemptively stamped with the stigma of being “not ordinary” (Sacks 1984). The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and the fallout thereafter have threatened to further jeopardize the integ- rity of Muslim identity (Steinback 2011). U.S. identity shifted when, on that date, the United States experienced not only a rare chal- lenge from a foreign source but also a direct attack on its soil. The attacks gave birth to a new identity that combined the fragility and hypermasculinity of a threatened superpower. For the United States to fi nd itself in the shadow of real physical threat was a relatively new and overwhelming experience. No longer buttressed by its Cold War mission, America constructed itself in relation to “Muslim ter- rorism.” Because the specifi c attackers were Muslim, a broad swath of Americans decided that Muslims in general were fanatical terror- ists. The terrorists’ hatred and violence could be simplifi ed, defi ned, and explained briefl y by “Islam.” Images of men glaring through dark eyebrows (a throwback to Ayatollah Khomeini’s omnipresent image after the Iranian Revolution) and of fi gures enveloped in blue burqas fl ooded our screens. A modern-day Uncle Mo would be welcomed with suspicious glares and nseer (National Security Exit-Entry Reg- istration) queues, rather than with young white women eager to settle down with a handsome foreigner. As we learned in the case of

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12 Introduction

the Oklahoma City bombing, and years later in the case of the mass killings in Oslo and on a nearby island, almost no terrorism could take place in the world without the immediate assumption that the perpetrators were Muslim. In the Norwegian Anders Breivik’s video and written manifestos, he gives “frank, graphic expression to the very opposite of pluralism,” to “fear of diversity, anger at immigra- tion and multiculturalism, and a contempt for dialogue,” but we should be painfully aware that a “muted articulation of this same fear and anger can be heard in mainstream debates across Europe and in the United States around issues of immigration” (Diana Eck, e-mail communication, August 8, 2011). Recently, the Boston mara- thon bombing has reignited the fl ames of this hatred.

In the wake of 9/11, information about Islam and Muslims has been a hot commodity. Yet much of this so-called information is based on little but opinion (at best) or xenophobia (at worst): much of the content, like the Princess books about the Saudi royals, ad- dresses readers’ thirst to “know” the Muslim Other but serves merely to strengthen Westerners’ sense of superiority to Muslims ( fair 2008). On the other hand, in their effort to provide a counterweight to the demonization of Muslims, Muslim writers and spokespersons sometimes commit the common error of apologetics by idealizing Muslims as ahistorical and religious (Kandiyoti 1991: 1). Based on empirical data gathered by an insider, the present book attempts to correct this imbalance and more by avoiding errors of both apology and prejudice. I critique Orientalist stereotypes of sexist Muslims, but I also investigate gender inequity among Muslim Americans and examine the tendency of many of them to idealize their religious community as a timeless, unchanging monolith.

America and Muslims

zeinab : I don’t think that being Muslim confl icts with being American. . . . I’m not going to go out in shorts and a tank top because I’m American. I’m going to go out in pants and a shirt because I’m an American and I’m a Muslim. . . . I know so many Americans who are feminists who hate short skirts, would never wear it because it goes against their beliefs. There are so many Jews who wear the yarmulke or when they get mar- ried they put hats on or wigs on, but they do that not because

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Introduction 13

they’re un-American, but that’s what their beliefs are. A nun, or a monk, they have a certain life in America: it doesn’t confl ict with them. Similarly, I can be Muslim and live in America.

If a nun, a monk, or an Orthodox Jew can be an American and live by his or her religious precepts, should it not be natural to be able to live an Islamic life and be an American? Muslim identity or religiosity is not inherently opposed to being American. But to many Americans, the moniker “Muslim American” is an oxymoron rather than a de- mographic group, and in many academic circles such notions as uni- versal human rights and gender equality are perceived as inherently in confl ict with “Islam,” while Christian or Jewish theology need not be on the defensive. Islamophobia is neither fringe nor unusual and is often intimately linked with such positive values as patriotism in a nation where the president needs to emphatically clarify that he is not a Muslim; where some fbi trainees have been taught that “main- stream” Muslims (and not just extremists) are radical and violent, and that being devout is an indicator of radicalization (Ackerman 2011); where military trainees have discussed the use of “Hiroshima tactics” for “total war” against Islam (Shachtman and Ackerman 2012); and where the New York Police Department has conducted surveillance on Muslim neighborhoods and Muslim college students across the Northeast (Associated Press 2012).

A vocal segment of the American population believes that Mus- lim Americans are, and should be , seen as enduringly different, as un-Western and anti-Western. Campaigners against the tlc reality show All-American Muslim were angered by the depiction of Muslim Americans as utterly normal Americans. The bland, unremarkable depiction of the Muslim characters was perceived as a momentous threat—an attempt “to manipulate Americans into ignoring the threat of jihad” (the Florida Family Association). For such people, the normal Americanness of All-American Muslim characters only serves as a warning of how the hidden enemy only pretends to combine the qualities of clashing worlds (Nussbaum 2012).

But surely, some may say, these stereotypes belong in rural red- state communities, and among those with no access to social sci- entifi c analysis. Surely, in elite liberal college cultures, for example, where professors deconstruct myths, where freshmen live together in dorms, where students get credit for engaging in diversity-related

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14 Introduction

activities, Islamophobic stereotypes might seem outlandishly strange. Many Americans assume that university campuses are bas- tions of open, liberal, accommodating, and diversity-loving cultures where difference fl ourishes and is nurtured. If we are to believe the moral panic of the Right, the academy is the domain of “guilt-ridden” Muslim-lovers, leftists, atheists, and socialists (they are apparently interchangeable) (Spencer 2008: 228). Yet by examining how Mus- lim American women’s subjectivities interact with campus culture, I show that despite the fantasy (both liberal and conservative) of college as a hotbed of tolerance, minority students are still subject to majoritarian pressures to conform to Anglo culture. While I do not see the post-9/11 era as fundamentally new in terms of Islamo- phobic racism, this period offers rich and fresh possibilities for the scrutiny of Orientalist Islamophobia in our everyday American lives. While this book is about Muslim American undergraduates, it is also about America. I am equally interested in America, in who America is, and in who “America” thinks she is, via a study of Muslim Ameri- cans, as I am interested in Muslim Americans and who they think they are.

Muslims in College

To study America and Muslim Americans, I chose American univer- sity campuses. At liberal university campuses “America” is arguably at its most liberal and self-consciously inclusive. Since before 9/11, the neoliberal backlash and the campus adventures of the intelli- gence community and of law enforcement cast dark shadows on the ivory tower. The action of this book is set in the (mostly) social leisure spaces on campus and to a lesser degree, in the academic spaces. Often the distinction between academic and social spaces is an artifi cial one. Social spaces are “primal scenes of sociology” and of crucial importance to social scientists since it is in the sus- tained social encounter between “normals” and those who possess stigmatized identities that “the causes and effects of stigma must be directly confronted by both sides” (Goffman 1963: 13). As infor- mal social networks are profoundly powerful in the constitution of youth identity (Willis 1981), I focus on these in a variety of spaces— classrooms, the extracurricular spaces of student clubs, and leisure spaces such as parties, nightclubs, and bars.

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Introduction 15

In the fall of 2001, all across America, thousands of young Muslim Americans, along with their college classmates, entered or returned to college. A few weeks later, three planes fl ew into the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. Now these young Muslim Americans would have to prove continually that they were not potential terrorists. Long before they entered the classrooms and opened their mouths, they were known: they were Muslim. In the newly under-attack country where they were born and/or raised, they suddenly became xenophobic potential hijackers, infl amed by a timeless hatred; and if they were “good Muslims, they were attempting to exorcise that hatred.” The shadow of those planes, once it had fallen on these young people’s paths, remained. The dark shadow over higher education was lengthened when Dzhokhar Tsar- naev, a student at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, and his brother Tamerlan, a part-time student at Bunker Hill Community College, were identifi ed as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing.

This is a book about that long shadow. It is about how young Mus- lim Americans come up with a rejoinder to the identity stamped on them, how they snap back and explain and teach in many tones of voice that they are American and Muslim and not violent, bar- baric, or foreign. It is also about how they often cover those telltale signs of Muslim identity and sometimes pass as non-Muslim (Goff- man 1963). This book is about stereotyping, double consciousness, self-surveillance, and essentialism visited on Muslim Americans by both dominant majority Americans and other Muslim Americans. It is also about those among them who tire of the projects of cultural assimilation and social integration, who embrace the only identity category available and stick out their chins to assert that they are indeed different, religious, traditional, and weird. Their brows are al- ready stamped with this identity: they embrace it and accept the rep- resentative burden—because to refuse it would be cowardly, incom- prehensible to the interlocutor, and/or exhaustingly complicated.

Muslims at Georgetown and George Washington Universities

amber : I think it’s soooo stressful [being Muslim post-9/11]. . . . Things happen, that remind me, constantly. Like today I got a call from a good friend; she’s a very strong person, and she’s

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16 Introduction

sobbing on the phone. She’s like, “I can’t take it anymore. I’m so stressed out.” . . . She’s very active [as an activist], and she’s been on spring break so it’s been a week and she hasn’t done anything. I guess she feels bad. She was sobbing for ten min- utes on the phone, and she never cries, I never heard her cry, so I didn’t know what to say. And that reminded me of what’s going on. . . . Emotionally she’s just breaking down right now. I asked her, she’s like, “No, I don’t know what it is. I’m being stu- pid, I’m being stupid.” . . . And I can only attribute that to what’s going on. Like our friend’s house was raided [by the fbi ]. . . . All these things remind you: no matter how much you try to live in this moment, we have to think about what’s happened in the broader context. Yeah, we should try to have our own personal goals but—.

In the summer of 2001, I had just moved from my campus in Bloom- ington, Indiana, to live in Washington, D.C., with Svend, whom I mar- ried in March of 2001. When I took the yellow Metro line past the Pentagon on September 12, 2001, I felt a sick sense of shameful relief that I did not wear hijab and that I had with me a white husband who did not look obviously Muslim.

In the late summer of 2002, the memories of raids by fbi , customs, immigration, and law enforcement agents at local Muslim homes and offi ces were still fresh among prospective research participants when I visited the two campuses for fi eldwork. In the large Mus- lim American community of Greater Washington, D.C., Muslims like Amber, whom I quote above, recalled friends being criminalized, harassed, and humiliated in the post-9/11 raids (styled Operation Green Quest). These sweeps affected my friends and acquaintances, as well as prominent community leaders with a solid track record of working within the system to facilitate Muslim American academic and charitable pursuits. The efforts of these community activists to engage with American democratic institutions were now tarred as fronts for terrorism. Two of my research participants, Heather and Sharmila, told me of one case, in which the northern Virginia home of their girlfriend was attacked by law enforcement offi cers: a man broke down the door, handcuffed the mother and adolescent daughter, ignored their protests, and photographed them without their headscarves, only later troubling himself to inform them that

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Introduction 17

he was an offi cer with a search warrant. Such incidents could not fail to have the desired effect on other Muslims—including myself— instilling fear and a sense of perpetual surveillance.

Muslim student groups were under surveillance (Skolnik et al. 2002), and suspicion was so palpable that my most religiously skep- tical Muslim research participant once commented on her certainty of campus Muslims being monitored. Both Georgetown and George Washington Universities have local msa chapters, and these fi gure prominently in my fi eldwork. Local campus msas are relatively in- dependent of the msa of the United States and Canada (known as msa National). Like all predominantly undergraduate organizations, with their diverse membership and high turnover, local msas cannot be described in static terms. Demographic factors such as signifi cant Gulf Arab student populations and the presence of infl uential ex of- fi cio members—long-standing graduate students, for instance—can bring longevity to a specifi c collective style and in an msa ’s pub- lic character. The collective practices and identities of the Muslim campus group at my alma mater, Indiana University, for example, shifted in the 1990s, with a signifi cant rise in the number of second- generation Muslim Americans and Muslims from Southeast Asia and Turkey to rival the numbers of Gulf Arab students, ousting them from their gatekeeping position in the mosque and msa .

In the summer of 2002, I commenced feverishly negotiating ac- cess with Georgetown and George Washington authorities. I also so- licited permission and intermediary assistance from the msas as local gatekeepers and cultural spaces of resistance for many campus Muslims (hooks 1990b). My initial recruitment of participants relied on sign-up sheets at msa meetings and included msa members and student offi cers. As I became more integrated into the communities, I identifi ed and recruited participants who did not belong to the msa , some who had never attended an msa event, and a few who did not know that there was a Muslim club on campus.

Both the Georgetown msa and the George Washington msa had earned university awards for service and activism. Each had strong membership networks and held regular events such as lectures, ice cream socials, coffee nights, Eid banquets, and prayer vigils. Ra- madan was the most active time of the year, when msas organized fastathons (collective interfaith fasting) and congregational suhoor and iftar meals and prayers. The Ramadan meals of suhoor and iftar

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18 Introduction

were popular among a variety of Muslim students who gathered to alleviate some of the increased homesickness during this month. (Imagine, for example, Christian students attending college during the Christmas season).

In class and cultural style, the George Washington University ( gwu ) and Georgetown University (Georgetown) Muslim students were fairly similar with some subtle differences. Due to geographic proximity, shared nightlife venues, and similar academic foci, the two student communities also overlapped rather often at social venues and local events. It was not uncommon to see Georgetown Muslim students at gwu events and vice versa. Class and academic rivalries between the two universities have been highlighted in such formats as a student-produced video, gwu msa vs. Georgetown msa . In the highly exaggerated caricature, stocky gwu msa men in bulky navy hoodies and sweatpants were mocked as the poorer, ghetto, macho “Georgetown waitlist” by their slim, supercilious, bohemian Georgetown counterparts in khakis and colorful polo collars.

As affl uent, private universities with substantial numbers of Muslim students, Georgetown and gwu are quite comparable for my purposes. Both universities have majority white undergraduate populations and a large international student body. Georgetown, a Jesuit university and a “hot big city school” (Mathews 2007: 53), is popularly believed to be “hotter,” wealthier, more bohemian, more liberal, and more laid back than its secular counterpart, gwu . The physical and architectural layout of the campuses generate distinct styles of community: the urban campus of gwu tends to bleed into the urban off-campus world of Northwest D.C. more easily than does Georgetown, and gwu lacks Georgetown’s green and cobblestoned open public spaces that allow students to mill about within cam- pus limits. The upscale, off-campus commercial world adjacent to Georgetown seems to become absorbed within the Georgetown stu- dent population. There thus exists a more youth-centric, exclusive yet bohemian climate at Georgetown and a somewhat less bohe- mian and more urban and worldly feel within the gwu community, yet both campus cultures exude wealth and are characterized by a combination of hard partying and hard studying.

Most existing studies of Muslim American students tend to focus on minors who live with their families and attend grade school. My book focuses on what happens when adolescents grow up, go to

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Introduction 19

college, and move away from parental supervision. Most of my par- ticipants were residential students, but a few had families within commutable distance. My Georgetown sample was overwhelmingly residential, while my gwu sample was about one-third commuters. A few of my participants lived in a cluster of apartments designated as the Muslim Interest Living Community ( milc or “Muslim Hous- ing”): in these apartments, residents were not permitted to consume alcohol, nor could a man and a woman be alone together at any time. Muslim housing, open to students of all faiths with an “inter- est” in “Muslim lifestyle,” was particularly benefi cial for those who preferred an atmosphere free from the hedonistic excesses of cam- pus leisure culture.

Although Georgetown and gwu enroll undergraduates who pos- sess a combination of strong class and academic capital and my research participants all occupied elite spaces, these participants were not exclusively upper class. A few were solidly wealthy. How- ever, many benefi ted from the universities’ student aid packages, and some relied almost entirely on student aid. To classify them roughly by socioeconomic background, the South Asian participants were all middle to upper class; the Arab participants were middle class; the black and white participants were upper-middle to lower- middle class; and my Somali participant of refugee background was now a frugal member on the margins of the middle class. As a left- leaning scholar, I wish I could speak more about the women’s class backgrounds than I do in this book, but in the elite spaces of these universities, socioeconomic status was a sensitive matter and I did not want to pain (or lose) my research participants. I examine social class broadly, in terms of how social class (often treated as the pri- mary form of social advantage in anthropological studies of differ- ence) can be trumped by the stigma of religious identity, how being a religious Muslim can reduce socioeconomic privilege. My partici- pants’ sense of belonging in campus culture fl uctuated according to how visible their Muslim identities were.

Georgetown and gwu both have fairly well equipped and well de- signed musallas (Muslim prayer rooms). The Georgetown musalla, in a residence hall basement, is decorated with Islamic art and a prayer carpet. The gwu musalla is located in the student union and has custom carpeting, conveniently low steel sinks for ablutions, and separate doors for men and women. The presence of the musalla

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20 Introduction

attracted gwu Muslim students to socialize in the nearby lounge area on the fourth fl oor; so many of my interviews took place in the surrounding classrooms. During my fi eldwork the gwu musalla was also spatially (but fl exibly) divided into male and female prayer spaces by a six-foot-high folding screen. When I visited the campus six years later, the screen had been set aside and I interviewed a male msa member in the musalla (he and I sat together alone, something I had never seen happen in that musalla before). Neither musalla was large enough to accommodate the entire Muslim campus com- munity for Jumʿah prayer. A church basement in Foggy Bottom was rented for the gwu Jumʿah prayer; this bare but convenient urban location brought local professionals and employees to the campus community. Typically, when students are obliged to fall back on the non-campus community for resources, the infl uence of outsiders is bound to increase (Hermansen 2003). I heard more conservative discourse at the gwu Jumʿah, due mainly to the presence of non- students and graduate students. The Georgetown msa held its Friday service in an activity room at the center of campus, which attracted far fewer non-campus attendees than the gwu Jumʿah service.

Many Georgetown Muslims proudly described their msa as more inclusive than others. Conservative Muslims at other local univer- sities (the msas at George Mason University and the University of Maryland at College Park were reputed to be very conservative dur- ing that time) disapprovingly described Georgetown Muslims as “too liberal” in their gender norms, measuring by the porosity of the Muslim community and the degree of gender “mixing.” Liberal Muslims at both gwu and Georgetown shuddered at the notion of separate Muslim organizations for women (extant at some universi- ties), preferring their own intertwined styles of religiosity, class, and gendered behavior.

A variety of ideological backgrounds were represented in both msas . The msa could be roughly divided into the relatively conser- vative, “offi cial” gatekeepers (this was in itself a diverse group) and large groups of more “liberal” individuals. As I examined their roles on campus, I realized that all of these various Muslim “types” were engaged in the construction of Muslim American youth culture, al- beit in different ways. Power shifted across and between these par- ties in different spaces and at different times. Mainstream American observers tend to identify the “liberal” Muslims as “oppressed” by the

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Introduction 21

conservative “gatekeepers.” Yet I found the Georgetown gatekeepers pitted against a hegemonic liberal secularity both within the Muslim community and in the broader campus culture.

While gwu had a short-lived part-time chaplaincy, Georgetown was the fi rst American Catholic university to hire a full-time Muslim chaplain, Imam Yahya Hendi, who served as a liaison between Mus- lim students and the university administration. Both institutions had strong academic programs focusing on Islam and the Middle East: Georgetown had the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (where I was a vis- iting researcher), while gwu had the renowned Sufi expert Seyyed Hossein Nasr.

Ethnographic Methods

In researching young Muslim American women who were engaged in constructing identities that were also being constructed for them, ethnographic methods were the only possible choice. I conducted participant observation at two private university campuses, as well as informal conversational interviews with twenty-six undergradu- ate Muslim women, thirteen at each campus. I spent over one year shuttling between these two Muslim college communities on and off campus, participating directly and indirectly in everyday campus events and non-events, immersed in my participants’ “interpreta- tions of their world” (Miles and Huberman 1994: 8).

On a typical day of fi eldwork, I would type up fi eld notes and head out to one of the campuses. I would wait for a prearranged interview in a university lounge while I transcribed interviews and watched students study, lounge, socialize, and vegetate. After two or three interviews, I would accompany a research participant to an msa lec- ture or an iftar meal, and we would proceed together to the Rama- dan tarawih prayer. As night fell, I would take the subway back to my apartment in Arlington. On other days, I would have one long inter- view at the local café, and then my participant and I would walk over to the Metro station together. Or I would arrive on campus just in time to lie down on the ground in the Red Square “die-in” sponsored by campus activists to protest the war in Iraq. Then I would proceed to a classroom observation and afterward hang out in Red Square at Georgetown or on the fourth fl oor of the student union building

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22 Introduction

at gwu , where I socialized and had valuable impromptu conversa- tions with Muslim undergraduate men and women. I watched bul- letin boards and the campus newspapers and kept myself abreast of major campus events. Along with participants, I attended lectures, day conferences, political demonstrations, music concerts, student performances, interfaith dinners, Nowruz celebrations, birthday par- ties, congregational prayers, class lectures, and even a bridal shower and a wedding.

Over the course of the academic year, I had 126 interviews with my participants (which, in addition to fi eld notes, I personally tran- scribed, being too poor to hire someone). I held interviews in library study rooms, student lounges, apartments, and cafés. During ini- tial interviews, I introduced my fi eldwork as being about university life and identity, and only asked “basic” and non-probing questions about participants’ majors, hometowns, interests, preoccupations, and the like. After this, I started asking open-ended questions like “How have you been?”; “What’s been happening lately?” My ques- tions during later interviews were a cross between my research questions and each participant’s particular interview content. This approach worked remarkably well most of the time. My participants would give me the latest news—academic anxieties, budding ro- mances, travel, and so forth. In an early interview, Amber expressed relief that she would be fi nished with msa work on graduation, so we fell to chatting about the different types of people involved in the msa , without my having to probe her on Muslim identities. When I told Elizabeth how diffi cult it had been to identify African Ameri- can Muslim participants, she explained why the African American students were “undercover,” and marginal in the predominantly im- migrant msa . When I pressed Intisar for details about the social dif- fi culties of sophomore year, she told me of her sense of emotional- cultural isolation, and her desire to create a Somali student club. We discussed religious, ethnic, cultural, youth, and gender identities, being Muslim American in that historical moment, but particularly experiences on and off campus that shed light on being Muslim American female college students.

As my participants and I shared many of the same cultural and social fi elds, they accepted me as an insider with relative ease. Ob- servant Muslims accepted me as a Muslim who observed obligatory rituals and important practices. Less religiously observant Muslims

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Introduction 23

confi ded in me as a critical Islamic feminist with progressive lean- ings in religion. I shared something important with all of them.

Alcohol, Clothes, and Dating

If you have eyed the titles of my chapters with curiosity, you may want to hear why alcohol, clothes, and dating are the themes that or- ganize a book about Muslim American undergraduate women. Some readers have wondered if the choice of these tropes illustrates a lam- entable Orientalist tendency to focus on the image, both desexual- ized and hypersexualized, of the Muslim woman.

Muslim American undergraduate women function within major- ity social and leisure culture, even as many of them wrestle with it. As peer culture is the most powerful stuff in the construction of youth identities, it was no surprise when the prominent motifs of alcohol, clothes, and dating emerged from the data during analysis. After completing data collection and the grueling task of transcrip- tion, I searched through my data and played with it, arranging and rearranging, reading and rereading observation notes and interview transcripts, inserting parenthetical comments, profoundly over- whelmed by the quantity of data, issues, and tropes. I started try- ing to identify patterns and themes to represent my fi ndings. While patterns aplenty arose from the data, I agonized over identifying the right patterns, the ones real anthropologists would construct. I did not pull fi ndings out of the void. To use a more painful metaphor, I pushed them out after the data had gestated for a time, half encoun- tering and co-creating the fi ndings within data.

Initially, I established several categories of data analysis— pluralism, integration, identity, gender, Muslim student groups, and parents/families—but these categories unsettled me: as a qualita- tive researcher I, of course, acknowledge my role in constructing fi ndings, but these were entirely my own categories—nerdy, meta- analytic themes that could have emerged from keywords in jstor . I contemplated structuring chapters around large themes such as the relationship between being American and being Muslim. But as I re- hearsed organizing a document around cerebral “big themes” (found in my research questions and the literature), I noticed that doing so distanced my analysis from the data and broke up the connecting issues in an artifi cial manner. One of my main goals was to show

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24 Introduction

how being American, being Muslim, being youthful, being students, and being women happened seamlessly in these women’s lives. How could I make sense of their lives if I chopped them up, like body parts in horror fi lms, into “chapters”? Added to this discomfort were the scholarly trepidation of being one of the fi rst researchers to treat the subject and the anticipated guilt of “doing it all wrong” and estab- lishing a pattern for others thereafter.

As I plowed through the data, I grew increasingly appreciative of how my participants had expressed their engagement with identities not in abstract terms but through particular, concrete experiences, such as the pervasive presence of alcohol on campus. In fact, they talked about drinking a great deal . They also seemed very interested in (surprise!) boys, dating, romance, marriage, fashion, and clothes. Identity themes were traceable in these behaviors and among them with greater integrity and greater fi delity to my participants’ voices.

This is how domains of behavior emerged as vehicles to represent how Muslim American women handled the radioactive elements of campus sociability and how they identifi ed themselves and cate- gorized themselves vis-à-vis Muslim and non-Muslim Others. For example, almost every participant raised the issue of alcohol con- sumption, her position on it (whether she drank or not, whether she occupied drinking spaces), and her opinion of others’ alcohol-related practices. Every participant deeply pondered the problem of clothes, her own sartorial practices (whether she wore hijab and what she considered modest garb), and a survey of Muslim and non-Muslim sartorial practices. And everyone wanted to thrash over gendered behavior, the opposite sex, and various gendered practices such as courting and dating. Drinking or not drinking, clubbing or not club- bing, dating or not dating, observing current fashions or not—these factors were signifi cant determinants of how one became an integral member of core peer culture and of Muslim community culture/s. These three groups of practices emerged as the most salient expres- sive principles or heuristic tools in the data, and three data-driven chapters grew around them.

But What about Academic Concerns?

You may ask why academic concerns are not salient in my book. I asked the same question as I approached my fi eld data: why did my

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Introduction 25

research subjects talk endlessly about bars and clubs (or not going to bars and clubs), about headscarves and not wearing headscarves, and about boys, but not so much about that fascinating seminar or that fi nal exam? The issue at stake is what scholars believe should preoccupy undergraduates at college as opposed to what really con- sumes them. While my research subjects studied hard, academic work was not so much at the heart of their Who am I journeys. Un- dergraduates’ academic and social lives were profoundly social. Therefore I concern myself with Muslim students’ experience of the social dimension of college, but, for all that, my participants’ aca- demic lives are integral to the book (e.g., in chapter 4, see Latifa’s engagements with classroom spaces and Amber’s engagement with the politics of political debate in class.)

The importance of peer social cultures informs scholarly work in education in general and in higher education in particular, and it is refl ected in the sexy course titles to be found in college course catalogs today. Social connections are important to youth. Moreover, it is in the social spaces of educational cultures that youth identi- ties are most vulnerable to symbolic violence. In the United States, being “normal” is closely coupled with being white and Christian, or at least with conformity to majority cultural practices of a social nature—among those, drinking, sartorial style, and dating.

The Research Sample

I have provided a table with participants’ basic demographic infor- mation in the appendix. The members of my research sample dif- fered in age, race, ethnicity, and types and levels of religiosity. My participants included hijabis and non-hijabis who would be de- scribed as pious and, on the other end of the continuum, very liberal participants who were unrecognizable as Muslim, as well as a num- ber of middle-of-the-road Muslims. I chose to steer clear of an es- sentialist view of “Muslim” while not draining the term of all mean- ing. I therefore made sure to select participants who self-identifi ed as Muslim, whatever their religious practice. Some questioned the fundamentals of Islam, others were devoutly pious, and most took a position between these two points.

From an initial reliance on convenience sampling (recruiting “whoever I could get”), I started trying to obtain maximum-variation

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26 Introduction

sampling as soon as my fi eldwork took off, locating research par- ticipants of divergent racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds and employing snowball sampling as I was introduced to potential par- ticipants by existing ones. In terms of representing a diversity of racial and ethnic backgrounds, I was generally fortunate, but I could not hope to be comprehensive: my participants encompassed some of the range of the Muslim American population, as I had black, white, and Hispanic Muslim women, and Muslim women of Paki- stani, Bangladeshi, Indian, Iranian, Arab (Libyan and Iraqi), and Afri- can (Somali) origins. Examining my sample of primary participants critically in early 2003, I found it to be composed mainly but not exclusively, of rather religious undergraduates who were associated with the msa . The range of Muslim religious identities on campus was far wider than I had initially generalized from my previous expe- rience of Muslim student communities. In the course of data collec- tion, I also discovered that some potential participants had gathered from my initial e-mail (recruiting “Muslim students” for research) that I was looking for “good Muslims.” These potential participants had then decided not to volunteer since they were not good Mus- lim representatives. At this stage, however, my desperate eagerness to fi nd “less religious” participants was borderline laughable. I tried every strategy except outright requests for introductions to Muslim women who drank and slept around. I searched university e-mail directories, using common Muslim last names of South Asian and Middle Eastern origin, and selected women’s names. In a recruit- ment e-mail to students with last names like “Khan” and “Moham- med,” I asked them if they would be interested in participating in a research project, and purposely toned down the “Muslim” element in my letter. This staggered and refl exive search for participants re- sulted in far more participants than I had originally intended to in- terview, twenty-six to be exact. Scheduling all the interviews into my participants’ busy schedules and into a comparative study of two campuses was somewhat onerous, but such are the unpredictable vagaries of fi eldwork.

Most participants were born and all were raised in the United States. Most of my research participants were of immigrant back- ground, while others (and this was a deliberate choice) were not. The Americanness of Muslim Americans complicates the racism and na- tivism that easily relegates Islam to foreignness but also illustrates

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Introduction 27

the power of Orientalism in trumping the racial and indigenous ad- vantage of white and black Muslims. Four participants were converts: two whites, one black, and one mixed race (Hispanic and black). I had eleven Pakistani Americans, fi ve Bangladeshi Americans, two Iranian Americans, two Arab Americans, one Somali American, and one Indian American. I had participants from all academic years of college. Most of my participants were Sunni, but I had two Shi’as from each campus. Two of the Georgetown and six of the gwu par- ticipants were hijabi during the fi eldwork: the numerical difference results partly from sampling procedures and partly from the respec- tive msa ’s cultures. Although non-hijabis held offi ce in both msas , non-hijabis felt more comfortable in Georgetown’s msa than in the one at gwu . I had four commuter participants, while the other par- ties were residents in dorms or in off-campus apartments.

All the Muslim undergraduates I encountered during my fi eld- work were academically and professionally driven, and most had relatively clear plans for future careers. Most of my participants were quite ambitious in terms of career plans: Washington, D.C., was a city hospitable to professional development in the foreign service, law, development, and academic careers in religious and area stud- ies. Since students in the sciences tended to be too engrossed in their own academic and social networks for participation in a research study, I had only a few such participants—Muna, Faiyza, and Roshan. Almost all of my twenty-six primary participants had a strong sense of combined religious, cultural, and civic mission to be exemplary, productive, successful, and “normal” as Muslims, students, and Mus- lim American women.

In addition to the primary participants, I interviewed other female Muslims, some Muslim male students, and some non-Muslim stu- dents and conducted observations of the broader campus commu- nity. The rich data I gathered in the fi eld strengthened my certainty of focus on Muslim American women due to the unique gendered na- ture of Muslim religiosity and its interactions with campus culture. But my research also whetted my appetite for future research that would include male Muslim American youth and other faith groups.

Most of the success of my research project must be attributed to the trenchant analysis, the tremendous candor, and the excel- lent good humor of my participants. These young Muslim Ameri- can women wanted to fi t in, to resist and transcend assumptions,

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28 Introduction

to be happy in romance and marriage, to be high achievers, to have successful careers, to serve, to change, to be safe, and to rock the boat. They experimented with different ways of being ethnic, cul- tural, American, Muslim, successful, and “normal”—all at the same time. In order to build a picture of their campus lives, I use their own words culled from interview data—hard-hitting, often hilari- ous, never one-dimensional, acidly realistic about their challenges, and irrepressibly ambitious in their desire to break the molds within which they often found themselves trapped.

In this book, you will fi nd an ethnographic portrait of Muslim women’s identities as they become on two East Coast metropolitan, private, elite campuses—in their own accounts and in my observa- tion. As a portrait is inevitably somewhat static in nature, it cannot capture motion, process, or change over time. Today, my participants may not identify with all their identity work and their comments in the past. But in this book, I attempt to capture that fl eeting yet powerful moment of their college lives, demonstrating how the pro- cesses of becoming Muslim, women, college students, and American youth are multifaceted, complex, and widely divergent for Muslim women. Like many researchers entrusted with intimate musings, I remain intensely invested in my participants’ success and their happiness. In many cases, we have long transcended the research moment and become close friends. I root for them as, today, they complete graduate and professional studies, enter career fi elds, gain promotions, and are rising stars within their various professions— medicine, diplomacy, religious studies, area studies, law, interna- tional development, and so on, many of them also falling in love, getting married, and having children. In more recent conversations with them and with other Muslim American students, I fi nd that the concerns appearing in this book regarding identity, campus social cultures, gender, and Muslim religiosity remain a constant.

A Map of This Book

In chapter 2, I discuss the powerful campus culture of hedonism and sociability and how this focus gives the lie to the college narrative of freedom and pluralism in Muslim American women’s experience. I also name the Orientalist and essentialist discursive construction of Muslims on American university campuses and discuss what

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Introduction 29

Muslim students do to comply with, resist, adopt, and exploit the prevalent Orientalist discourse that threatens to “spoil” their identi- ties on campus.

In chapters 3 to 5, I discuss the ethnographic data closely, zero- ing in on particular areas of campus social experience. In chapter 3, I explore how participation in alcohol culture informed Muslim American women’s identity construction and participation in cam- pus culture. In chapter 4, I examine how Muslim undergraduate women sought to be authentic and normal while constructing third spaces of hybridity with and in spite of particular kinds of attire. In chapter 5, I show how my participants constructed normal, different, and fusion identities with reference to sexual and gendered behav- ior. In the conclusion, I discuss my research fi ndings pertaining to Muslim women’s identity work, pluralism on university campuses, and broader American culture.

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