What Is an American Muslim?

What Is an American Muslim? PDF Author: ʻAbd Allāh Aḥmad Naʻīm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199895694
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
Abdullah An-na'im offers a pioneering exploration of American Muslim citizenship and identity, arguing against the prevalent emphasis on majority-minority politics and instead promoting a shared citizenship that both accommodates and transcends religious identity. Many scholars and community leaders have called on American Muslims to engage with or integrate into mainstream American culture. Such calls tend to assume that there is a distinctive, monolithic, minority religious identity for American Muslims. Rejecting the closed categories that determine the minority status of a particular group and that, in turn, impede active, engaged citizenship, An-na'im draws attention to the relational nature of identity, emphasizing a common base of national membership and advancing a legal approach to a public recognition of a person's status as citizen. Rather than perceive themselves or accept being perceived by others as a monolithic minority, he argues, American Muslims should view themselves as American citizens who happen to be Muslims. As American citizens, they share a vast array of identities with other American citizens, whether ethnic, political, or socio-economic. But none of these identities qualify or limit their citizenship. An-na'im urges members of the American Muslim community to take a proactive, affirmative view of their citizenship in order to realize their rights fully and fulfill their obligations in social and cultural as well as political and legal terms. He shows that the freedom to associate with others in order to engage in civic action to advance rights and interests is integral to the underlying rationale of citizenship and not something that must be relinquished to become an American citizen. What Is an American Muslim? provides acute insight into the nature of citizenship and identity, the place of religious affiliation in American society, and what it means to share in a collective identity.

What Is an American Muslim?

What Is an American Muslim? PDF Author: ʻAbd Allāh Aḥmad Naʻīm
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199895694
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234

Get Book Here

Book Description
Abdullah An-na'im offers a pioneering exploration of American Muslim citizenship and identity, arguing against the prevalent emphasis on majority-minority politics and instead promoting a shared citizenship that both accommodates and transcends religious identity. Many scholars and community leaders have called on American Muslims to engage with or integrate into mainstream American culture. Such calls tend to assume that there is a distinctive, monolithic, minority religious identity for American Muslims. Rejecting the closed categories that determine the minority status of a particular group and that, in turn, impede active, engaged citizenship, An-na'im draws attention to the relational nature of identity, emphasizing a common base of national membership and advancing a legal approach to a public recognition of a person's status as citizen. Rather than perceive themselves or accept being perceived by others as a monolithic minority, he argues, American Muslims should view themselves as American citizens who happen to be Muslims. As American citizens, they share a vast array of identities with other American citizens, whether ethnic, political, or socio-economic. But none of these identities qualify or limit their citizenship. An-na'im urges members of the American Muslim community to take a proactive, affirmative view of their citizenship in order to realize their rights fully and fulfill their obligations in social and cultural as well as political and legal terms. He shows that the freedom to associate with others in order to engage in civic action to advance rights and interests is integral to the underlying rationale of citizenship and not something that must be relinquished to become an American citizen. What Is an American Muslim? provides acute insight into the nature of citizenship and identity, the place of religious affiliation in American society, and what it means to share in a collective identity.

Muslim American City

Muslim American City PDF Author: Alisa Perkins
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479892017
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Explores how Muslim Americans test the boundaries of American pluralism In 2004, the al-Islah Islamic Center in Hamtramck, Michigan, set off a contentious controversy when it requested permission to use loudspeakers to broadcast the adhān, or Islamic call to prayer. The issue gained international notoriety when media outlets from around the world flocked to the city to report on what had become a civil battle between religious tolerance and Islamophobic sentiment. The Hamtramck council voted unanimously to allow mosques to broadcast the adhān, making it one of the few US cities to officially permit it through specific legislation. Muslim American City explores how debates over Muslim Americans’ use of both public and political space have challenged and ultimately reshaped the boundaries of urban belonging. Drawing on more than ten years of ethnographic research in Hamtramck, which boasts one of the largest concentrations of Muslim residents of any American city, Alisa Perkins shows how the Muslim American population has grown and asserted itself in public life. She explores, for example, the efforts of Muslim American women to maintain gender norms in neighborhoods, mosques, and schools, as well as Muslim Americans’ efforts to organize public responses to municipal initiatives. Her in-depth fieldwork incorporates the perspectives of both Muslims and non-Muslims, including Polish Catholics, African American Protestants, and other city residents. Drawing particular attention to Muslim American expressions of religious and cultural identity in civil life—particularly in response to discrimination and stereotyping—Perkins questions the popular assumption that the religiosity of Muslim minorities hinders their capacity for full citizenship in secular societies. She shows how Muslims and non-Muslims have, through their negotiations over the issues over the use of space, together invested Muslim practice with new forms of social capital and challenged nationalist and secularist notions of belonging.

American Muslim Women

American Muslim Women PDF Author: Jamillah Karim
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 0814748090
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
"Focusing on women, who sometimes move outside of their ethnic Muslim spaced and interact with other Muslim ethnic groups in search of gender justice, this ethnographic study of African American and South Asian immigrant Muslims in Chicago and Atlanta explores how Islamic ideas of racial harmony amd equality create hopeful possibilities in an American society that remains challenged by race and class inequalities."--Page 4 of cover.

All-American Muslim Girl

All-American Muslim Girl PDF Author: Nadine Jolie Courtney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
ISBN: 0374309507
Category : Young Adult Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
A Kirkus Best Book of 2019 A 2021 YALSA Best Fiction for Young Adults Book Nadine Jolie Courtney's All-American Muslim Girl is a relevant, relatable story of being caught between two worlds, and the struggles and hard-won joys of finding your place. Allie Abraham has it all going for her—she’s a straight-A student, with good friends and a close-knit family, and she’s dating popular, sweet Wells Henderson. One problem: Wells’s father is Jack Henderson, America’s most famous conservative shock jock, and Allie hasn’t told Wells that her family is Muslim. It’s not like Allie’s religion is a secret. It’s just that her parents don’t practice, and raised her to keep it to herself. But as Allie witnesses Islamophobia in her small town and across the nation, she decides to embrace her faith—study, practice it, and even face misunderstanding for it. Who is Allie, if she sheds the façade of the “perfect” all-American girl?

Muslim American Women on Campus

Muslim American Women on Campus PDF Author: Shabana Mir
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469610787
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
Muslim American Women on Campus: Undergraduate Social Life and Identity

How to Be a Muslim

How to Be a Muslim PDF Author: Haroon Moghul
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 0807020745
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
A searing portrait of Muslim life in the West, this “profound and intimate” memoir captures one man’s struggle to forge an American Muslim identity (Washington Post) Haroon Moghul was thrust into the spotlight after 9/11, becoming an undergraduate leader at New York University’s Islamic Center forced into appearances everywhere: on TV, before interfaith audiences, in print. Moghul was becoming a prominent voice for American Muslims even as he struggled with his relationship to Islam. In high school he was barely a believer and entirely convinced he was going to hell. He sometimes drank. He didn’t pray regularly. All he wanted was a girlfriend. But as he discovered, it wasn’t so easy to leave religion behind. To be true to himself, he needed to forge a unique American Muslim identity that reflected his beliefs and personality. How to Be a Muslim reveals a young man coping with the crushing pressure of a world that fears Muslims, struggling with his faith and searching for intellectual forebears, and suffering the onset of bipolar disorder. This is the story of the second-generation immigrant, of what it’s like to lose yourself between cultures and how to pick up the pieces.

The Diversity of Muslims in the United States

The Diversity of Muslims in the United States PDF Author: Qamar-ul Huda
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Muslims
Languages : en
Pages : 20

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Book Description


American Islam

American Islam PDF Author: Richard Wormser
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0802776280
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 138

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Book Description
Interviews with young American Muslims highlight an overview of one of America's most misunderstood religious groups, showing how Muslims maintain their traditions in the face of the permissiveness of American society. Reprint.

This Muslim American Life

This Muslim American Life PDF Author: Moustafa Bayoumi
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479835641
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Winner of the 2016 Evelyn Shakir Non-Fiction Arab American Book Award A collection of insightful and heartbreaking essays on Muslim-American life after 9/11 Over the last few years, Moustafa Bayoumi has been an extra in Sex and the City 2 playing a generic Arab, a terrorist suspect (or at least his namesake “Mustafa Bayoumi” was) in a detective novel, the subject of a trumped-up controversy because a book he had written was seen by right-wing media as pushing an “anti-American, pro-Islam” agenda, and was asked by a U.S. citizenship officer to drop his middle name of Mohamed. Others have endured far worse fates. Sweeping arrests following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 led to the incarceration and deportation of thousands of Arabs and Muslims, based almost solely on their national origin and immigration status. The NYPD, with help from the CIA, has aggressively spied on Muslims in the New York area as they go about their ordinary lives, from noting where they get their hair cut to eavesdropping on conversations in cafés. In This Muslim American Life, Moustafa Bayoumi reveals what the War on Terror looks like from the vantage point of Muslim Americans, highlighting the profound effect this surveillance has had on how they live their lives. To be a Muslim American today often means to exist in an absurd space between exotic and dangerous, victim and villain, simply because of the assumptions people carry about you. In gripping essays, Bayoumi exposes how contemporary politics, movies, novels, media experts and more have together produced a culture of fear and suspicion that not only willfully forgets the Muslim-American past, but also threatens all of our civil liberties in the present.

Muslim Cool

Muslim Cool PDF Author: Su'ad Abdul Khabeer
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479894508
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.