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chapter 10 Keeping the Faith Convert Muslim Mothers and the Transmission of Female Muslim Identity in the West Marcia Hermansen This chapter is a study of Euro-American female converts to Islam in the United States who have raised daughters as Muslims since their conversion . Through a series of personal interviews conducted either in face-to-face meetings or over the telephone, I gathered data based on a loose protocol of questions. This study was intended to examine the experiences of convert mothers who attempted to raise daughters with Muslim identities. My theoretical analysis of the results frames their responses within identity issues —for example, how self-perceptions evolved during the individuals’ life cycles against the background of external factors such as the development of a Muslim immigrant community in the United States, cultural change in American attitudes toward women’s roles, and global political events. My sample is a group of eleven Euro-American women who converted to Islam between 1967 and 1980 who reflected on their experiences raising nineteen of their twenty-one daughters (I excluded two daughters who are under fifteen years of age). In a certain sense all the mothers are “individual” converts, that is, women who claim to have chosen conversion of their own volition. Although some converted only after marriage to Muslim males, they asserted that they never felt pressured to make that decision. Seven of the women are married to other Euro-Americans, and I will subsequently refer to this combination as an “AA” marriage, and four others married immigrant Muslim males, which I will mark as an “AI” combination. In order to limit the variables in identity transmission, I did not interview African American convert mothers as part of this research. The very fact that there is a new generation of Muslims born to the first cohort of convert women is a significant milestone. Allievi refers to the cohort of the convert mothers as “generation zero,” since it is their children who will really be the first ones growing up as “American Muslims” (1998, 216). Fifteen years ago I considered for the first time the types of American women whowerechoosingtoconverttoIslam(Hermansen1991,188–201).Atthattime, I concluded that the generational cohort of conversion (i.e., that of the 1960s, k e e p i ng t h e fa i t h 251 ’70s, ’80s, etc.) played in role in the style of Islam that attracted and sustained thesewomen’sinterestandcommitment.Ibelievethatthecurrentresearchsupports that conclusion. Since the current study selects women who have raised daughters to adulthood or at least adolescence, my age cohort are women who areatleastintheirlatefortiesorearlyfifties,withsomeoversixty.Thesewomen are therefore “pioneers,” converted before the largest impact of Muslim immigration and the conservative influence on the Muslim presence in the United States of organized Islamist movements, which began in the late 1970s. In the 1970s, when many of the interviewees converted, there often were no large Muslim communities or institutions such as weekend schools or mosques, much less full-time Islamic schools, to sustain Muslim identity among children growingupinalargelyChristianAmericanculture.Someofthathasnowchanged in the larger population centers. However, for many Euro-American Muslims the Islamicschoolsstillmaynotbetheanswerforreasonstobediscussedlater. This study is therefore a snapshot of a particular, fairly limited, and unusual group in its earliest phase of development. In another ten or fifteen years, another cohort of converted Euro-American women, who have raised daughters within a more institutionally supportive environment and with a more fully articulated conception of Islamic identity, can be studied. I interviewed a preliminary survey of eleven women for this study, based on a loose protocol of questions assessing their family background, conversion narratives, the experiences they had in raising daughters, and the situations of these daughters currently. As a researcher, I have the advantage of over twenty years as a Muslim convert; therefore, I know the community and could rapidly network through acquaintances and snowball methodology to find interviewees. As a female Muslim, I have natural rapport with the women being interviewed, and I have visited most of the communities where these women live, so that I understand the social and physical settings. At this point, I would like to indicate that there is a certain fluidity to the scene of emerging Muslim identities among the daughters’ generation. After all, the eldest of the daughters are now approaching thirty, while the youngest that I consider are still in their teens. Much is still to be determined in terms of their choices of lifestyle and religious commitment in the future. Composition...

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