Islamic Writers and Muslim Writing in the United States

Do you know what it’s like being an Arab heritage with a Muslim last name living in America in the last few years? … I go to bed on September 10^th white, wake up on September 11^th, I’m an Arab.

Dean Obeidallah, Axis of Evil Comedy Tour

One immediate consequence of 9/11 was to make Muslim minorities living in the US visible: all of a sudden, bearded men and veiled women were identified not simply as “immigrants” or “outsiders” but as “Muslims,” and their “marked” bodies gradually came to represent a collective threat to liberal democracies in the West, regardless of nuances in their religious and ethnic backgrounds or political leanings. The sweeping generalizations about the Muslim community, envisioned as a homogeneous and uncomplicated group, singled out Islam as a belief system incompatible with Western modernity. Perhaps more importantly, the demonization of the Muslim in media outlets covering the “war on terror” legitimated Islamophobia, then a relatively new and growing form of hostility. As one Muslim writer noted, “We got a glimpse of what to expect on September 12, when instead of continued World Trade Center coverage, the local news reported that three mosques in neighboring suburbs had been shot at that morning” (Hassanali 115). Indeed, the Gallup Poll conducted a year after 9/11 reported that crimes against Muslim minorities in the US had increased 1700% in the first few months after the attacks (Sheridan 329).

The escalation of intolerance is noted in Moustafa Bayoumi’s book, How Does It Feel to Be a Problem? (2009), which follows seven Muslim teenagers living in Brooklyn, New York. After studying the challenges awaiting these youngsters in the post-9/11 world, Bayoumi concludes that regardless of their cultural, spiritual, and national differences, Arabs and Muslim Americans had now become “the new ‘problem’ of American society” (2). His observations find an echo in discussions taking place on the other side of the Atlantic: Britain also had to wrestle with the idea of “homegrown” terrorists after the events of 7/7. The fact that it was the “Muslims here” rather than “Muslims there” who were responsible for the bloodshed in Britain signaled for many the failures of cross-culturalism as a viable model for national cohesion. Consequently, this one religious minority in particular became “the illegitimate child of British multiculturalism” (Modood 169). Both 9/11 and 7/7 illustrated that the West, which had long promoted secularism as a condition of modernity, now faced a specific challenge: how to integrate Muslim immigrants successfully into the Western, secular sphere while respecting their freedom to refuse and avoiding the risk of their radicalization during the integration process. For many, the difficulty of answering this question has led to a determination to restrict immigration. For others, even asking the question seems unproductive, an unfortunate side effect of the way the terrorist events have become the “iconic tropes that organise much of the debate about Muslim identities” (Gale and Hopkins 2).

In such a climate, literature has assumed an important role, offering a way to humanize the other and giving members of the Muslim community the “permission to narrate” their own stories, as Edward Said put it. Yet, the writing produced by the community faces its own challenges: Are all Muslim writers necessarily Islamic? Can Muslim writing avoid the topic of Islam altogether, in the way that other diasporic literatures can avoid religion, or must Muslim authors worthy of the label grapple with religious questions? Two recently published books engage with these questions in ways that indicate the growing energy and wide variety of the activity in the Muslim literary and cultural community: Growing Up Muslim: Muslim College Students in America Tell Their Life Stories, edited by Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny, and Contemporary Arab-American Literature, by Carol Fadda-Conrey. The two books tackle related questions about the politics of belonging, representation, and reception especially as they concern the experiences of marginalized Muslims in the West: the first is a compilation of first-person narratives, in which student writers attending Dartmouth College record their personal stories...