Author Sumbul Ali-Karamali offers her personal account, discussing the many and varied questions she fielded from curious friends and schoolmates while growing up in Southern California—from diet, to dress, to prayer and holidays and everything in between. She also provides an academically reliable introduction to Islam, addressing its inception, development and current demographics. Through this engaging work, readers will gain a better understanding of the everyday aspects of Muslim American life, to dispel many of the misconceptions that still remain and open a dialogue for tolerance and acceptance.
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.
"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 PatelIn 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.
At nine years old, Amani Al-Khatahtbeh watched from her home in New Jersey as two planes crashed into the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. That same year, she heard her first racial slur. Muslim Girl: A Coming of Age is the extraordinary account of Amani's coming of age in a country that too often seeks to marginalize women like her. Her spirited voice and unflinching honesty offer a fresh, deeply necessary counterpoint to current rhetoric about the place of Muslims in American life.
This volume brings together scholarship from two different, and until now, largely separate literatures—the study of the children of immigrants and the study of Muslim minority communities—in order to explore the changing nature of ethnic identity, religious practice, and citizenship in the contemporary western world. With attention to the similarities and differences between the European and American experiences of growing up Muslim, the contributing authors ask what it means for young people to be both Muslim and American or European, how they reconcile these, at times, conflicting identities, how they reconcile the religious and gendered cultural norms of their immigrant families with the more liberal ideals of the western societies that they live in, and how they deal with these issues through mobilization and political incorporation. A transatlantic research effort that brings together work from the tradition in diaspora studies with research on the second generation, to examine social, cultural, and political dimensions of the second-generation Muslim experience in Europe and the United States, this book will appeal to scholars across the social sciences with interests in migration, diaspora, race and ethnicity, religion and integration.
"How can I prepare her for this new phase? I wanted to find a resource that can explain the details of this special stage while also integrating the important aspects of it from the Islamic religion. Being from the West, most books I found only explained the physiological changes. But I found that Muslim girls, especially ones from Western countries, need to know more about the religious implications of this stage. So I decided to write this guide to help young girls understand the basic things a Muslim girl should know about puberty, including the religious aspects that come along with it. However, this guide is just a starter to the journey ahead. I encourage parents to talk with your teens and pre-teens about this important stage of life to have a full and thorough understanding." - Natalia Nabil Includes: What is puberty and its stages. Hygiene tips. Religious duties to perform. And ones to stay away from. And much more
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.
A significant number of Canadian-raised children from post-1970s immigrant families have reached adulthood over the past decade. As a result, the demographics of religious affiliation are changing across Canada. Growing Up Canadian is the first comparative study of religion among young adults of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist immigrant families. Contributors consider how relating to religion varies significantly depending on which faith is in question, how men and women have different views on the role of religion in their lives, and how the possibilities of being religiously different are greater in larger urban centres than in surrounding rural communities. Interviews with over two hundred individuals, aged 18 to 26, reveal that few are drawn to militant, politicized religious extremes, how almost all second generation young adults take personal responsibility for their religion, and want to understand the reasons for their beliefs and practices. The first major study of religion among this generation in Canada, Growing Up Canadian is an important contribution to understanding religious diversity and multiculturalism in the twenty-first century. Contributors include Peter Beyer, Kathryn Carrière, Wendy Martin, and Lori Beaman (University of Ottawa), Rubina Ramji (Cape Breton University), Nancy Nason-Clark and Cathy Holtmann (University of New Brunswick), Shandip Saha (Athabasca University), John H. Simpson (University of Toronto), and Marie-Paule Martel-Reny (Concordia University)
With a new afterword Acts of Faith is a remarkable account of growing up Muslim in America and coming to believe in religious pluralism, from one of the most prominent faith leaders in the United States. Eboo Patel’s story is a hopeful and moving testament to the power and passion of young people—and of the world-changing potential of an interfaith youth movement.
