On (Not) “Humanizing” Muslims: Challenge and Opportunity in an Oral History Project with American Muslims

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on an award-winning oral history project with American Muslims in a small Midwestern city. It addresses the challenge and opportunity of oral history at a time of Islamophobic rhetoric and threats to Muslims’ status as Americans. The article first examines critiques of the premise that Muslims must be “humanized.” In turn, it draws on the philosopher Jill Stauffer’s work, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard, to argue that oral history offers a form of “reparative” hearing. In this way, oral history can aid in transforming a sense of “ethical loneliness” in those who are treated unjustly and dehumanized, and whose experience is not heard. The article explores these themes through the Muslims in Muncie oral history and documentary film project carried out by eleven students at Ball State University in 2018. The article argues that a commitment to trust, sustained conversational relationships, and careful framing of questions fostered a transformative experience for both narrators and interviewers in response to a problematic humanizing agenda. The project’s contribution to ethical repair continues, moreover, through a publicly accessible digital archive that adds to the handful of oral histories with American Muslims. The twenty-two interviews and hour-long film also enrich Middletown Studies, a field dating to the 1920s research of Robert and Helen Lynd on Muncie, Indiana, as a “representative” American city.