Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority

7. Muslim Reformers and the American Media: The Exceptional Umma and Its Emergent Moral Geography

292 > 293 Asma remarried; she says she “accidentally fell in love” at a cousin ’s wedding with a businessman based in Italy. She hopes that when the economy improves, they can move back to the United States. She tells me she no longer wears hijab and that she thinks of herself as a practicing Muslim feminist. Sakeena confesses that the demands of married life and her three children have prevented her from keeping up with her study circles and that her Arabic has lapsed since leaving Egypt. She wishes she had more time to herself these days. Her greatest pride is the successful business she and her husband opened three years ago, a cute floral shop in a little suburban strip mall just outside Boston. She named her baby Zahra, after the Prophet’s daughter, Fatima Zahra, “Rose.” Sakeena worries that African American Muslim youth in her generation are losing their faith; her own older brother frightens her with his doubts and his irreverence, his new friends and his bad habits. Their mother is shattered over the changes in him, and Sakeena wonders with trepidation what things might look like once her small children come of age as fourth-generation American Muslims. She still nurtures an ambition to be a leader in her Muslim community, but her goals are less scholarly than they were as a student in Egypt. She would rather be a shoulder to cry on than a preacher, inspiring people with love and kindness rather than speeches at conferences. Once her kids are in school, Sakeena hopes to get a degree as a chaplain, to support Muslims on college campuses and in prisons grappling with the meaning of their lives and the permanence of the afterlife. Paths loop, crossing and recrossing. Leila and Fawzia both teach Quranic recitation in their mosque communities and privately to female college students at local campuses . Leila remains in regular contact with Ansa Tamara, who moved to the US in 2012 with the escalation in Syria’s civil war and began hosting retreats for American Muslim women in different cities. Leila continues to rise up the ranks in the order, and she also serves on the board at her mosque. She is married and has a son and a daughter. She prides herself on the fact that she has committed half the Quran to memory. Fawzia is frustrated that she is still single and living with her parents in the suburbs of Los Angeles. A successful dentist, these days the white coat is the only coat she wears over her clothes. Her lucrative 294 > 295 he teaches a Quranic calligraphy class at his local mosque on the weekends . He calls his time in the Middle East his “lost” period; if he had to do it all over again, he would not have spent a year of his life there. He says he does not regret his year in the Middle East so much as he regrets spending so much of it looking for something he could not find there, a peace of mind he says he has now, a way to be himself, white and Muslim , spiritual but not that religious. There are many, many students and teachers whom I met in my time in the Middle East, men and women who inspired me with their sincerity and their curiosity about the meaning of our place in the world. Most of the students and teachers who crossed my path did not make their way into this book. Nevertheless, their prints are on these pages. Their questions and insights are here. Good Muslim Citizens Over the past few decades, hundreds of American student-travelers have traveled abroad to pursue religious studies in global pedagogical networks in the Middle East. Although there are no empirical studies that have produced a statistic, my estimate is conservative; one would be hard-pressed to find a mosque community in the US, which now number over two thousand, that has not produced student-travelers who have since returned to their US mosque communities. Despite the prevalence of the phenomenon, the results on the ground, in Muslim American counterpublics, have been mixed and difficult to measure. In my follow-up interviews with returning student-travelers, I found a general pattern of frustration over conflicting expectations. Although these American Muslim youth see their journeys and studies abroad as a way to resolve the crisis of authority in...