Why here, why now? Young Muslim women wearing Hijāb

Muslim World

Volumn 95, Issue 4, 2005, Pages 515-530

  Ali, Syed ^a  

^a LONG ISLAND UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34848892473     PISSN: 00274909     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1478-1913.2005.00109.x     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. While ISNA estimated 35,000, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter put attendance at 25,000 people (Ernest Tucker, "Muslims Gathering in Chicago for Islamic Convention," Chicago Sun-Times [September 3, 1999], 31)
2. Fredrik Barth, "Enduring and Emerging Issues in the Analysis of Ethnicity," in The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond 'Ethnic Groups and Boundaries', eds. H. Vermeulen and C. Govers (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994), 12
3. See Aminah McCloud, African American Islam (New York: Routledge, 1995)
4. Richard Turner, Islam in the African-American Experience (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997)
5. Yvonne Haddad, and Adair Lummis, Islamic Values in the United States: A Comparative Study (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 132
6. Jane Smith, Islam in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), 108
7. Caryle Murphy, "Modesty and Modernity: Some Muslim Women Choosing Not to Cover Their Heads," Washington Post, Metro Section, (December 9, 1999), B1
8. Some see it as Allah's will, while others see it as superfluous since hijāb is meant to enjoin modesty, which, they assert, Muslim women practice anyway (see McCloud, op. cit., 135-45)
9. Erin Trodden, "Anti-Muslim Bias is Rising, Survey Finds," Los Angeles Times (July 18, 1998), Metro, Part B, 4
10. Garbi Schmidt, American Medina: A Study of the Sunni Muslim Immigrant Communities in Chicago (Lund, Sweden: University of Lund Press, 1998), 138
11. David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic Books, 1995). This multicultural turn is correlated with increasing numbers of Hispanics, Africans and Asians, both immigrants and native-born in the post-1965 immigration wave
12. Nathan Glazer ( We Are All Multiculturalists Now [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997], 10) writes that for most of those who advocate multiculturalism, "It is a position-taking stance on the racial and ethnic diversity of the U.S. It is a position that rejects assimilation and the 'melting pot' image as an imposition of the dominant culture, and instead prefers such metaphors as the 'salad bowl' or the 'glorious mosaic,' in which each ethnic and racial element in the population maintains its distinctiveness. The maintenance of distinctiveness is seen as a proper task of the school, rather than relegated to the family or the ethnic school or neighborhood, as those who defend assimilation would advocate." It is this sense of multiculturalism that I employ here
13. Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan in their famous book, Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1963) argue that the melting pot was, even in 1963 when the book was first published, more of an ideological fiction than an empirical reality
14. The shift toward multiculturalism is reflected in changes in theories of immigration, which have gone through a sea change, especially since the publication of Milton Gordon's classic Assimilation in American Life: The Pole of Race, Religion and National Origin (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964)
15. Examples of recent theoretical approaches that reflect this trend include Josh DeWind and Philip Kasinitz, "Everything Old Is New Again? Processes and Theories of Immigrant Incorporation," International Migration Review 31 (1997): 1096-1112
16. Alejandro Portes and Ruben Rumbaut, Immigrant America: A Portrait (Berkeley: University Of California Press, 1996)
17. Alejandro Portes and Min Zhou, "The New Second Generation: Segmented Assimilation and Its Variants," The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science 530 (1993): 74-97
18. Murray Milner, Jr., Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids: American Teenagers, Schools, and the Culture of Consumption (New York: Routledge, 2004)
19. Murray Milner, Jr., Status and Sacredness: A General Theory of Status Relations and an Analysis of Indian Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994)
20. Milner, Freaks, Geeks, and Cool Kids, 2004
21. How much it has grown is an open question, as there is no census data on religion. A 1981 estimate put the population at 1.2 million (Arif Ghayur, "Muslims in the United States: Settlers and Visitors," The Annals of The American Academy of Political and Social Science 454 [1981]: 150-63)
22. Karen Leonard, "South Asian Leadership of American Muslims," in Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens, ed. Y. Haddad (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)
23. Agha Saeed, "Muslim Activism: Past, Present, Future," paper presented at the Muslim Identities in North America Conference, University of California, Irvine (May 20-21, 2000)
24. On the surface, this seems to contradict my earlier contention that public practice of ethnicity is more acceptable. But accepting ethnic otherness and scapegoating ethnic others are not mutually exclusive processes. On the one hand, the media and politicians stereotype Muslims as bloodthirsty fundamentalists (Esposito, John, The Islamic Threat: Myth or Reality? [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999]
25. Woods, John, "Imagining and Stereotyping Islam," in Muslims in America: Opportunities and Challenges, eds. H. Asad, J. Woods, and J. Akhtar [Chicago: International Strategy and Policy Institute, 1996]). On the other hand, newspaper and magazine stories about Muslims in the U.S., especially around Ramadan (the month of fasting in the Islamic calendar), portray them in a nuanced, positive light
26. Richard Wormser, American Islam: Growing up Muslim in America (Walker and Company: New York, 1994), 46
27. During the month of Muharram, Shia reciters recount emotional stories about the tragedy and martyrdoms at Karbala, where the Prophet Muhammad's grandson Hussain and others were killed. These recitations are clone at meetings called majlis (pl. majalis). Interviewed in Hyderabad, India, December 29, 2000
28. Denise Al Johar, personal communication, May 21, 2000
29. Sarah Wayland, ("Religious Expression in Public Schools: Kirpans in Canada, Hijāb in France," Ethnic and Racial Studies 20 [1997]: 545-561) makes a similar point for the acceptance of hijāb in Canada