Full Description
"While 9/11 and its aftermath created a traumatic turning point for most of the writers in this book, it is telling that none of their essays begin with that moment. These young people were living, probing, and shifting their Muslim identities long before 9/11.... I've heard it said that the second generation never asks the first about its story, but nearly all the essays in this book include long, intimate portrayals of Muslim family life, often going back generations. These young Muslims are constantly negotiating the differences between families for whom faith and culture were matters of honor and North America's youth culture, with its emphasis on questioning, exploring, and inventing one's own destiny."-from the Introduction by Eboo Patel
In Growing Up Muslim, Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny present fourteen personal essays by college students of the Muslim faith who are themselves immigrants or are the children of immigrants to the United States. In their essays, the students grapple with matters of ethnicity, religious prejudice and misunderstanding, and what is termed Islamophobia. The fact of 9/11 and subsequent surveillance and suspicion of Islamic Americans (particularly those hailing from the Middle East and the Asian Subcontinent) have had a profound effect on these students, their families, and their communities of origin.
Contents
Introduction
Eboo Patel
PART I. STRUGGLES WITH DIVERSITY
1. Far from Getting Lost
Zahra Ahmed
2. A World More Complex Than I Thought
Ala' Alrababa'h
3. My Expanding World
Asyah Saif
4. The Novice's Story
Abdul Moustafa
PART II. STRUGGLES WITH ISLAMOPHOBIA
5. A Muslim Citizen of the Democratic West
Aly Rahim
6. Living Like a Kite
Shakir Quraishi
PART III. STRUGGLES WITH SEXUALITY AND RELATIONSHIPS
7. The Burden
Abdel Jamali
8. My Permanent Home
Sabeen Hassanali
PART IV. STRUGGLES WITH PIETY
9. On the Outside
Arif Khan
10. Being Muslim at Dartmouth
Adam W.
11. Shadowlands
Sarah Chaudhry
12. The Headscarf
Sara L.
PART V. STRUGGLES WITH FAMILY
13. A Child of Experience
Tafaoul Abdelmagid
14. A Debt to Those Who Know Us
Nasir Nasser
About the Editors and Author of the Introduction
