ISIM NEWSLETTER 10/02
No r t h A m er i ca
N E G U I N Y A V AR I
The lives of Muslims in America changed on 11
September 2001. The initial reactions of panic, guilt,
defiance, and confusion, were accompanied in subsequent days with physical threats and hostile acts
against Muslims. An opinion piece in the New York
Times arguing that Muslims hate us not for what we
do but for what we are was widely quoted in the
media. Veiled women did not appear in public, several students on our campus left theirs at home. A great
number of scholars of the Middle East and the Islamic world shouted themselves hoarse insisting that
there existed a direct correlation between US foreign
policy and the events of 11 September, and others
reiterated their anti-liberal stance by pointing an accusing finger at what they regarded as their fellow
academics' failure to warn the public about inevitable
threats from the outside. Vigilance became the prescriptive word aimed at both New York landlords and
college professors.
From the mundane to the existential, and almost nine months after 11 September, Muslims in New York are grappling with fundamental dilemmas. Muslim communities
turned inward, and what followed was a resurfacing of the same isolationist trend that
was visible in the wake of the 1993 World
Trade Center bombings. In response to the
concomitant hostile rhetoric and the increased hostility, what are Muslim communities doing to alleviate the immediate
threats in the short run, and to promote toleration and respect for their traditions in the
future?
Several Muslim associations in and around
New York produced a statement1 condemning the attacks, and expressed solidarity
with the families of victims, their 'fellow
Americans' as they called them. Apart from
university campuses, the most visible and
successful support for Muslim communities
in this city is generated by religious organizations, justified along religious lines, and
expressed in religious discourse. Healing is
promoted in church gatherings, and anti-violence messages are conveyed from pulpits
in churches, synagogues, and mosques. The
essential political message is universalized
along religious lines: all religions are susceptible to hijacking by fanatical fringe
groups; all religions are prone to misrepresentation; the majority of the adherents of
all major religions shun violence and extremism; and Islam, as opposed to the essentially un-Islamic dogma of Usama bin
Laden and his supporters, is no exception.
This inherently religious response to the
events of 11 September is indicative of several trends. First among them is the steady
chiselling at the separation of church and
state, evidenced throughout the American
political landscape since the 1980s. From
the pro-life movement to the appointment
of staunchly religious officials to various
governmental positions, the religious right
in the Untied States is on the ascendancy. In
the meantime Muslim communities in
America have capitalized on existing patterns of religious participation in civic life to
foster the development of religious networks and organizations to channel the articulation of Muslim identity. In her study on
the transformation of Muslim life in the
United States in its multivalent encounter
with the American legal system, Kathleen
Moore has focused on the evolution of Muslim identity in the US as communities settle
into a visible and self-conscious religious
minority, depending on the American state
for protection. 'By virtue of the legislation of
federal hate crimes statutes, the interests
and rights of Muslims, including the security
of religious property, have become a protected category. Presumably, the state is
empowered to safeguard mosques and
Research
35
Muslim
Communities in
New York City
Muslim practices from the inherent risks
raised by their increased visibility, in becoming targets of animus directed toward
the Islamic world, and Muslims who report
the incidence of such crimes acquiesce in
the recognition of the capability of the state
to do so. Similarly, increased contact with
neighborhood groups and municipal politics has been part of the Muslim experience
in establishing mosques, and has brought
out the human factor in the social processes
of determining important spatial relationships. Such legal practices, deciding how
things get done, serve as a mediating and
transformative link.'2
Filling gaps in research
Scholarly interest in American Muslim
communities intensified in the 1990s, and
the consensus of the field tilted in the direction of increased integration and participation in civic life. But this surge of interest,
with its prescriptive implications, found itself at once lacking in essential demographic data and in-depth field studies based on
close contact with the concentrations of
Muslim communities in various states.
The 'Muslims in New York City Project'3 – a
collaborative research project conducted by
the Middle East Institute and the Center for
Urban Research and Policy at Columbia University – to which the rest of this article is
dedicated, was a major response to this
need. It set out to identify and map Muslim
communities in New York City and collect
data on the attitudes of Muslim New Yorkers
toward the social, civic and political life of
the city, and their participation in New York
public space. Between 1998 and 1999, a research team of graduate students canvassed nearly every neighbourhood in the
city's five boroughs to record the location of
mosques, Muslim-owned stores, professional offices, and service and cultural centres.
With this information, researchers forged
networks to recruit community members
for interviews. They observed the patterns
by which immigrant Muslims have joined a
small but well-established and active community of African American Muslims whose
presence in the city dates back at least 70
years. Twenty years ago there were fewer
than 20 mosques in New York. Today, there
are at least 80 mosques in Brooklyn and
Queens alone, a world-renowned Islamic
centre in Manhattan, and a major philanthropic organization headquartered in Jamaica, Queens.4
In the summer of 2000, the project convened 27 focus groups with over 200 Muslim New Yorkers to ascertain their attitudes
toward community and civic engagement,
and to probe the processes by which minority identities are formed. Muslim New Yorkers are grappling with problems of assimilation to the mainstream secular American
culture while attempting to ensure continuity of tradition through the creation of philanthropic and educational institutions to
transmit culture and tradition to younger
generations. At the same time, they are
learning to 'manage' in New York through
interfaith dialogue, political coalition-building and cooperation with their neighbours
of all faiths and backgrounds in order to improve the quality of life in the city. The initial
findings of the focus groups were presented
in a panel at the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in San Francisco in November 2001. In
March 2002, the Muslim Communities of
New York Project co-sponsored a conference organized by The Muslim Women's Institute for Research Development on 'Contextualizing Islam in the United States: A
Charge for Muslim Women Scholar-Activists', identifying their target audience as
'Muslim women willing to engage in the discipline of Islamic scholarship that motivates
to action'.
The challenges confronting the project organizers since its inception were a microcosm of the dilemmas facing the Muslim
communities of New York. As mentioned at
the outset, in conceptualizing the project,
the conveners decided to map Muslim communities, and not simply ethnic minorities
whose worldviews are informed, in radically
diverging ways, within the cultural confines
of multiple permutations of Islam. In so
doing, however, the project has had to
grapple with the underlying tensions between spiritually religious Muslims and culturally religious ones, assuming that the latter also wish to be represented within the
rubric of Islam. Participants in this project
are acutely aware of the misleading lopsidedness such an appellation might produce.
Another important consideration is that of
segregated focus groups, which brings us to
the question of American, or perhaps democratic political discourse. An overwhelming
majority of the participants in these focus
groups did not choose to articulate political
demands in local terms. Loyal to the language of politics in their homelands, their
concern if at all political, was with overarching, macro-level issues, foreign policy, prejudice, and bigotry.
this city who were born outside the United
States left Iran in the aftermath of the 1979
Islamic Revolution, and most of them did
not choose to cooperate with the focus
groups organized by this project. Their personal and professional lives disrupted by a
religious revolution, these women nonetheless express affinity with myriad religious
and spiritual organizations in the city; this in
spite of their reluctance to regard Islam as a
defining component of their identity. How
do these women participate in such activities, and how do they articulate their religious affiliation? Even at this preliminary
stage I have found conflicting voices and
contradictory descriptions of how women
define their identity and how they relate
their everyday conduct to the principles espoused by organizations and communities
to which they belong or towards which they
feel a sense of affinity and loyalty. By focusing on a small community in some detail,
bearing in mind the artificial and at times ad
hoc taxonomies and dividing lines imposed
from the outside, I hope my report will reflect the changing attitudes and outlook of
these women, many of whom lived through
almost two years of revolutionary turmoil in
their country of origin and, just over two
decades later, a calamitous day in their
adopted city.
Silent women: further
research questions
On taxes, social security benefits, pension
plans, mortgage and interest rates, fiscal
policy, educational initiatives, budgetary
concerns, on all those wide ranges of issues
that define local politics and safeguard
democracy in America, our Muslim women
fall silent. Are they silent women, are they
silent Muslims, are they Muslims and therefore silent, or are they highly politicized
Muslim citizens who reveal in their responses more the organizational shortcomings of
the focus group than an organic Muslim
self? Are women who are willing to identify
themselves as harbouring Muslim proclivities, by definition therefore etching their autobiographical horizons along norms and
metaphors that in their own minds echo
those of their Islam? In narrating their
selves, pasts, and ambitions, are they emulating an imagined Muslim ideal?
These and related questions form the crux
of my area of research in this project, still in
its preliminary stages. I am focusing on the
religious and spiritual organization and activities of Iranian Muslim women in New
York City. The majority of Iranian women in
Notes
1. The full text of this declaration is found on the
website of the Islamic Circle of North America,
www.icna.org.
2. Kathleen Moore, Al-Mughtaribun: American Law
and the Transformation of Muslim Life in the United
States (Albany: State University of Albany Press,
1995), 139.
3. The presentation of the aims of this project is
taken from the Newsletter of the Middle East
Institute of Columbia University (June 2001); see
http://sipa.columbia.edu/REGIONAL/mei/
4. See e.g., Abdelhamid Lotfi, 'Creating Muslim Space
in the USA: Masajid and Islamic Centers', Islam and
Christian-Muslim Relations 12/2 (2001): 236–54;
and Jerrilynn D. Dodds & Edward Grazda, New York
Masjid: The Mosques of New York City (New York:
Powerhouse Books, 2002).
Neguin Yavari is assistant professor of Islam at
Columbia University's Religion Department.
E-mail: ny71@columbia.edu
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