Muslim American Youth Research Articles

Social identity development and religious discrimination among Muslim American youth.

The present study investigated the development of social identity centrality dimensions (i.e., Muslim, ethnic, and American identity centrality) among Muslim American youth as well as associations between religious discrimination and social identity centrality trajectories. Data were collected once annually from 2015 to 2017 with 220 Muslim American youth (M = 14.20, SD = 0.94) in the Midwest United States (girls = 53.2%; boys = 42.3%; missing = 4.5%). Participants were Arab (62.3%), Somali (15.9%), and African American (8.6%), among other ethnic groups (less than 2%). Latent growth curve models indicated that Muslim and ethnic identity centrality displayed negative trajectories and that American identity centrality increased over time. Surprisingly, religious discrimination was not associated with social identity centrality trajectories. This research suggests that Muslim American youths' minoritized social identities develop similarly, whereas youths' American social identity develops differently than these identities. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Muslim youth collective amnesia of US government-inflicted violence against Muslims in the War on Terror

Evidence suggests that incidents of US government-inflicted violence against Muslims are absent from the post-9/11 generation of Muslims’ collective memory. To examine and confirm this collective amnesia, young Muslim American adults were nationally surveyed and interviewed on their knowledge of the Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib detention centers. In total, 100 survey responses were collected and 5 interviews were conducted to examine the extent and formation of the Muslim American youth’s collective perception of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. While nearly all participants displayed awareness of the 9/11 attacks, a significant number of them were unaware of Guantanamo Bay, and most of them were unaware of Abu Ghraib. This study reveals a potential generational gap in the collective memory of Muslim Americans, the individual-level perception of post-9/11 violence against Muslims amongst young Muslim Americans, and new topics for future directions as outlined in the conclusion. It also argues that the absence of Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib from young Muslims’ collective memory of the War on Terror (WOT) creates an image of Muslims being the perpetrators of violence and never victims, making it impossible for young Muslims to break out of the dominant frame of memory of 9/11 and its aftermath.

Supplemental Material for Social Identity Development and Religious Discrimination Among Muslim American Youth

Supplemental Material for Social Identity Development and Religious Discrimination Among Muslim American Youth

What Helps Muslim American Youth to Thrive? The Role of Maternal Promotion of Volitional Functioning and Religiosity in their Civic Engagement

What Helps Muslim American Youth to Thrive? The Role of Maternal Promotion of Volitional Functioning and Religiosity in their Civic Engagement

Lived Islam: Embodied Identities and Everyday Practices among American Muslim Youth

This article explores lived Islam in the context of two young American Muslim women’s everyday lives. Although much of the scholarship on Muslim geographies is grounded in people’s everyday lives, the focus has been to situate and examine the specific meanings and expressions of “Muslim” identities. Whereas scholars intentionally have been writing against anti-Muslim racism and with the commendable aim of gaining extensive knowledge, our focus on “Muslim” has at times been at the expense of other salient identities, activities, and interests of interlocutors. Drawing on the broader scholarship on lived religion, this article offers geographers an approach to lived Islam influenced by feminist geographical and phenomenological frameworks. Through ethnographic methods, lived Islam offers a detailed picture of subjective everyday life, with a focus on embodied and emotionally charged memories, intersecting identities, and practices. Such a feminist approach to the lived enactment of religious faith rejects inherent identity categories as well as binaries such as religious–secular. Lived Islam contributes importantly to Muslim geographies and feminist geographies of religion by elaborating on the complexities of Muslim lives and identities, how being Muslim is integral to different kinds of nonreligious identities and practices in different secular and nonreligious spaces within specific social and political contexts.

11.1 SUICIDALITY IN MUSLIM YOUTH

Participants will review the DSM-5 Cultural Formulation Interview (CFI) and CFI Supplementary Modules to obtain a culturally informed history, including religious identification. Participants will consider the intersectional cultural identity of these youth. Participants will learn techniques to navigate culturally informed conversations about suicidality with Muslim youth and their families. A literature review was conducted to examine suicidality in Muslim youth. In addition, Sarah Arshad, MD, will share specific cases of Muslim youth from different cultural backgrounds with acute suicidality. American Muslim youth come from different cultural backgrounds. Understanding their intersectional cultural identities is critical in specifically navigating their religious identity. This can then be used to understand their presentation to mental health care and how their religious identity affects their symptoms such as suicidality. For many American Muslim youth, their religious identity may be different from their families, in part due to differences in other cultural factors, such as a desire to assimilate into American cultural norms, or result in barriers to communication with families. Therefore, culturally conceptualizing the youth’s identity and navigating familial expectations can help providers consider the unique circumstances that Muslim youth face and can help providers guide culturally sensitive conversations between Muslim youth and their families. In addition, some youth can find resilience in their Muslim identity, and providers can build upon these in safety planning. Suicide is a leading cause of mortality in teenagers, and there have been increased rates of suicidal youth during the COVID-19 pandemic. And although religious identity in general is thought to be a protective factor, this may be more nuanced in Muslim youth. As healthcare providers, it is imperative to be able to obtain and critically use culturally informed information in evaluation and treatment planning with these youth and families.

Parenting and social identity contributors to character development in Muslim American adolescents

Using a strength-based approach, the present study examined the mediating role of Muslim American adolescents’ (N = 212; 13- to 18-year-olds; 59% females) multiple-group social identities (i.e., religious Muslim and national American) in the associations between their perceived maternal religious socialization and positive character development. We also explored whether maternal warmth moderated the association between religious socialization practices and identity. Adolescents’ American identity did not mediate the relations between maternal religious socialization and character regardless of adolescents’ perceptions of maternal warmth. However, maternal religious socialization was associated with greater character through adolescents’ stronger Muslim identity, only at moderate and high levels of maternal warmth. Implications of our findings for promoting Muslim-American youth’s positive adjustment are discussed.

Black Muslim brilliance: Confronting antiblackness and Islamophobia through transnational educational migration

Black Muslim youth confront antiblackness and Islamophobia in US schools and society, yet few studies examine how this population navigates these intersecting oppressions. In addition, there has been a dearth of scholarly literature that explores the educational spaces in which Black Muslim youth are nurtured and affirmed. This article addresses these understudied areas by examining a community of African American Muslim youth who, amidst the overlapping deprivations of antiblackness and Islamophobia, opt to leave the USA and continue their education abroad. Based on a 14-month ethnographic study at an Islamic school in Medina Baye, Senegal that was established for African American Muslim youth, and additional fieldwork throughout the USA, this article utilizes data from classroom observations, participant observations, and interviews. I argue that the school, the African American Islamic Institute Qur’an School, and the communities related to it in Senegal and the USA operate from an axiomatic stance of Black Muslim brilliance. I further argue that such an affirmation of students’ inherent capacities expands these African American Muslim youth’s imaginative possibilities and provides them with new ways of envisioning what it means to learn at the intersection of being young, Black, and Muslim. This research: (1) demonstrates the affordances of transnational educational migration as a route to educational justice for Black students; (2) contributes a diasporic and intersectional perspective to understanding Black Muslim youth’s educational experiences; and (3) illustrates the value of providing opportunities for Black youth from the USA to study abroad on the African continent.

"A lot of us have a very difficult time reconciling what being Muslim is": A phenomenological study on the meaning of being Muslim American.

Little is known about the lived experiences of Muslim Americans and what it means to identify as "Muslim American" within the sociopolitical context of Islamophobia. Although xenophobia, racism, and religious discrimination have been shown to impact identity development, it is unclear how Muslim American youth negotiate and make sense of their identities against this backdrop. A qualitative, phenomenological approach guided the research design to explore how 11 Muslim American late adolescents/emerging adults make sense of their Muslim American identities. Using Critical Race Theory (CRT) and Social Identity Theory (SIT) to guide this investigation, we sought to explore the narratives of what it means to be members of the Muslim American community and how participants experienced cultural belongingness. Participants identified four key components that are central to their essence of being Muslim American. These elements were, having (a) a "built-in community," (b) "a lot of ethnic diversity," (c) "a religious practice," and (d) "a feeling that we all have to be this very united group." Our findings capture the complexities of what it means to be Muslim American, particularly given the heterogeneity within the community. Islamophobia contextualized their meaning-making process by perpetuating group homogeneity as the problem and solution. Clinical and research implications highlight the need to recognize intersectionality and systemic oppression as part of the identity negotiation. Pressures from within and outside of the community converged to impede participants' feelings of cultural belongingness and identity exploration. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

(Un)settling Methodology: Walking the City of Memphis with Transcorporeality in a More-than-Human World

In this paper, I explain how I engaged with walking as a sensory and relational inquiry that provoked thinking differently and intra-actively of research, and the entanglement (Barad, 2007) of our bodies with the space and matter. As I walked the city of Memphis, assemblages of my emplaced body movement, subjectivities, senses, feelings, and interactions with the materiality of the space deconstructed and interrogated the neoliberal normalized narratives of othering and belonging. Situating the walks within transcorporeality (Alaimo, 2012), transmateriality (Springgay & Truman, 2017a), and the spactimematter entanglement (Haraway, 2015), I share how these walks generated three lines of flight (Deleuze & Guattari,1987) that transformed my thinking of research methods and opened up spaces for new ways of knowing beyond the linear and the prescribed. The three lines of flight, I discuss in this paper, informed and shaped my thinking of: my research methods with respect to interviewing Muslim American youth, the embodied experience of walking within the entanglement of space time matter in a more-than-human world, and the concept of (dis)placed bodies within the postcolonial thought.

Struggles and Strife: Treating American Muslim Youth in 2018

Our goal is to increase awareness of the challenges that mental health professionals face when dealing with Muslim youth and their families. The presenters will address ways to meet these challenges. The child and adolescent psychiatrist will be able to use “best practices” with their Muslim patients. They will be able to provide a culturally and religiously aware approach in their treatment of American Muslim youth. Because of the trauma and increased stress faced by Muslim youth and their families, a better understanding of the effect of the trauma and the stress on the Muslim patient will be emphasized.

Muslims Nusantara in America: Nurturing a Hybrid American Muslim Youth Identities

This paper studies the discursive construction of Islamic and civic identities among Indonesian Muslims in the United States. There has been a hybridity process where the background identity of Islam Nusantara which emphasizes on moderation, harmony, and Islamic manners is continuously maintained and reinvented but at the same time it needs to be readjusted with a modern, civil and progressive America. Moreover, being Muslims Nusantara has been a unique experience in itself. In a sense, that Islam came peacefully and became the religion of a pluralistic society of Nusantara through trade and cultural means without dismissing any traditional pearls of wisdom. As a result, it created a complex religious and civic identity of Muslims Nusantara. This research uses a purposive sampling technique by focusing on individuals and families within the Muslim Nusantara networks who embrace Islamic identities publicly and assertively. The paper starts by providing a historical and demographic description of Muslims Nusantara in America. Then, it analyzes the discursive construction of their identities through the religious education conducted within the family, informal groups and formal institutions such as schools and Islamic centers. Three main areas are being addressed: their engagement with the capitalist economic system, secular democracy and nationalism, and modern/traditional cultures. This analysis resulted in several typologies of how Muslims Nusantara in America is expressing their identities. Finally, it ends with an assessment of to what extent that this case study can contribute to a further discussion on nurturing a positive hybrid American Muslim Youth identity.

14.0 Mental Health Challenges for American Muslim Youth in an Age of Terrorism

14.0 Mental Health Challenges for American Muslim Youth in an Age of Terrorism

Learning to Be Muslim—Transnationally

This essay discusses the religious upbringing experiences and reflections upon them articulated by 53 Muslim American youth who were interviewed as part of a larger sociological study of Arab American teenagers living transnationally. On extended sojourns in their parents’ homelands, these youth—most were born in the US although some migrated to the US at a young age—were taken “back home” to Palestine and Jordan by their parents so they could learn “their language, culture, and religion”. They were asked about learning to be Muslim in the US and overseas in the context of a much larger set of questions about their transnational life experiences. The data provide insights into the various types of early religious learning experiences Muslims have access to in a US Christian-majority context. The essay then examines how these youth later experienced and interpreted being Muslim in a place where Muslims are a majority. The study found that while a majority of youth said they learned more about their faith, almost half (42%) said that it was the same as in the US, that they did not learn more, or that the experience contributed both positively and negatively to their religious understanding. Key to these differences was the character of their experiences with being Muslim in the US. A majority of girls and of youth who attended full-time Islamic schools and/or were part of a vibrant Muslim community in the US gave one of the latter responses. On the other hand, most of the boys who grew up isolated from other Muslims in the US reported learning more about Islam. They were especially pleased with the convenience of praying in mosques and with being able to pray in public without stares. The data show that living where one is part of the dominant religious culture does not necessarily make for a deeper experience of religion. What seems to matter more is the type of experience with being Muslim each youth brings into the situation, as it was these that informed their subjective interpretations of what it means to be Muslim.

Muslim American youth and secular hip hop: Manifesting “cool piety” through musical practices

Informed by three and a half years of ethnographic fieldwork, this article will demonstrate how a group of Muslim American youth uses specific kinds of interactions with hip hop music to manage the cultural tension between religious piety and profane pop culture forms. I identify three musical practices (DeNora, 2000) through which youth work together to forge local solutions to the pop culture–religiosity dilemma. I also show how these actions contribute to the ongoing production of a collective identity performance that blends religious commitment with youthful secularity – a cool piety. This analysis reveals one means by which highly religious youth in America work to smooth the friction between their religious and youthful cultural obligations. More generally, my analysis establishes that specific modes of pop culture reception – and the bi-cultural identity performances and experiences they generate – can assist actors in negotiating situations of conflicting social and cultural expectations.

Virtual Umra: An Interdisciplinary Faith-Based Pedometer Intervention for Increasing Steps at School

Curriculum interventions aimed at increasing physical activity in schools may prove useful in contexts where changes in policy/environment are not feasible. Design/evaluation of interventions targeting minority groups is important in light of well-publicized health disparities. Religious minorities represent a special subset that may positively respond to interventions tailored to their unique beliefs, which to date have been relatively underreported. Muslim American youth (n = 45) attending a parochial middle school participated in a religiously- and culturally-tailored 8-wk, interdisciplinary pedometer intervention. School-time ambulatory activity was quantified using a delayed multiple-baseline across subjects ABA design. Visual analysis of graphic data as well as repeated-measures ANOVA and ANCOVA and post hoc contrasts were used to analyze step counts including the moderating effects of day type (PE, no-PE), gender, BMI classification, grade, and time. The intervention elicited modest increases in males' steps only with effect decay beginning midintervention. BMI classification and grade were not associated with changes in steps. Full curricular integration by affected classroom teachers, staff modeling of PA behavior, and alternative curriculum for girls' PE classes may further potentiate the intervention.

‘Just to make sure people know I was born here’: Muslim women constructing American selves

The scene for this paper is set in the USA immediately post-9/11 when the meaning of nation shifted dramatically, in turn shaping Muslim American identity. I examine Muslim American undergraduate women's performance of immigrant, gendered, youthful, Muslim and American identities. The findings are framed within symbolic interactionist, Foucauldian and cultural production frameworks, and I use ethnographic vignettes gathered during research in Washington, DC from 2002 to 2003 to illustrate the discursive and performative construction of an imagined American community by Muslim Americans and majority Americans respectively. Muslim American youth both experience and conduct acts of ‘everyday nationalism’ and construct Muslim American citizenship, deploying and covering racial, cultural, religious and immigrant attributes contextually. Facets of identity such as birth, transnational ties, racial and facial features, cultural practices, types and degrees of religiosity, all come into play in a battle for survival that is at once personal, political, social and symbolic.

Educating Muslim American Youth in a Post-9/11 Era: A Critical Review of Policy and Practice

Through a review of educational research literature this piece explores how federal politics and policies have trickled down into secondary schools, and what the effects of these policies have been on secondary schools, paying particular attention to the effects on Muslim American youth. The main research questions are: What federal and state policies, specifically those constructed as measures of ensuring national security, have affected secondary schools? What are the effects of this policy on Muslim American youth? What pedagogical practices can be changed to engage these youth in active citizenship-in a post 9/11 context- for meaningful inclusion and participation in their societies? This review will critically examine the USA PATRIOT Act, a federal law designed and implemented after the terrorist attacked of 9/11, with the aim of understanding how the law has contributed to the growing national anti-Muslim sentiment. Findings suggest that this law has contributed to the over-targeting of Arabs and Arab-American families and students, and has had damaging effects on their educational outcomes, psychosocial well-being and sense of nation and belonging. Additionally, findings suggest that laws framed around securitization are constructed around problematic ideologies that lie beneath dominant and main-stream discourses around Islam.

Spoiled Group Identities and Backstage Work

How do persons with a stigmatized identity learn potential responses to discrimination and harassment? Drawing on three and a half years of ethnographic data, this paper demonstrates how members of a group of Muslim American youth are socialized in locally dominant stigma management strategies through stigma management rehearsals. Stigma management rehearsals are small group interactions through which leaders and members encourage their peers to adopt normative stigma responses. I identify two rehearsal types that vary in their socializing function as well as in their temporal orientation toward stigmatizing incidents. In direct preparation rehearsals, individuals anticipating a stigmatizing encounter are quickly taught the normative response. In deep education rehearsals, stigmatizing incidents set in the past or hypothetical future are used to teach justifications underlying local responses and to allow for the private expression of publicly inappropriate responses. These findings suggest that intragroup dynamics and backstage processes are important considerations when investigating issues of stigma and stigma management.

Muslim American Youth: Understanding Hyphenated Identities through Multiple Methods (Qualitative Studies in Psychology) - By Selcuk Sirin and Michelle Fine

Muslim American Youth: Understanding Hyphenated Identities through Multiple Methods (Qualitative Studies in Psychology) - By Selcuk Sirin and Michelle Fine