Muslims In Post-9 Research Articles

Driving While Brown: The American Road Trip in H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy

ABSTRACT H.M. Naqvi’s novel Home Boy features three men of Pakistani background who embark on a cab ride from New York City to Westbrook, Connecticut. They wish to check on an elusive character, Mohammed Shah (a.k.a. the Pakistani Gatsby or the Shaman), who is missing after 9/11. I analyze this journey, known as the “Shaman Run,” as an American road trip. For critical analysis, I synthesize Nancy Leong’s concepts of “open road” and “traffic stop narratives,” highlighting the racialization of American roads, with Sarah Sharma’s notion of “Brown Space” regarding the post-9/11 criminalization of cabdrivers with ties to the Global South. I argue that the Shaman Run begins as an open road narrative but is transformed into a traffic stop narrative overlaid with Brown Space, leading to a reconsideration of the possibilities of open road narratives. Naqvi incorporates elements of road trip fiction in Home Boy to recount how certain Americans did not regard Muslims as fellow mourners in the aftermath of 9/11. Writers and filmmakers from Pakistan and the Pakistani Diaspora have depicted the othering of Muslims in post-9/11 America, but Naqvi is distinctive in foregrounding this theme by repurposing a well-known genre of American literature.

Examining the relationship between encouragement and health-related quality of life among Muslims

ABSTRACTThis study examines the relationship between encouragement and health-related quality of life (HRQOL) among a sample of American Muslims, in tandem with the potential mediating effects of depression and spirituality. To conduct this cross-sectional study, a model was developed and tested using structural equation modeling (SEM) with a community sample of Muslims (N = 284). The results indicate that encouragement has a direct, positive effect on HRQOL. Neither depression nor spirituality mediated the relationship between encouragement and HRQOL. Rather, both variables exhibited a direct, independent effect on HRQOL. In addition, spirituality exhibited an indirect effect on HRQOL through attenuating depression. The findings underscore the importance of encouragement as a pathway to enhance HRQOL among Muslims in post-9/11 America. The results also suggest that spirituality can play a significant role in fostering HRQOL among Muslims, both directly and indirectly by reducing the effects of depression on HRQOL.

Bangladeshi Muslims in Mississippi: Impression management based on the intersectionality of religion, ethnicity, and gender

The existing literature on Muslims in post-9/11 America largely focuses on cities where Muslims are organized and visible in large numbers. This interview-based qualitative study instead focuses on Bangladeshi Muslims in Mississippi. Using intersectionality and impression management as analytical tools, I explore how these individuals negotiate their identities to navigate interactions with Mississippi’s predominantly White Christian society. I identify three patterns of impression management: distancing religious identity, highlighting ethnicity, and confronting stereotypes. These patterns provide insight into the conceptual tools used, as well as the overarching racial dynamics in America.

Islam in the Hinterlands

There have been few studies on Islam in Canada. Hence this publication is awelcome addition to the list. Its ten chapters, divided into four sections, examinediverse issues regarding Muslim cultural politics in the Canadian hinterlands.More specifically, it seeks to understand how they have been affectedby the post-9/11 era of wars, domestic security policies, calls for reformation,and media sensationalism, as well as how these, combined with racial and re-ligious profiling, have impacted Muslims in the Canadian diaspora. The booktries to construct multiple readings of Islam and Muslims by examining thiscommunity within its social, cultural, educational, and political settings andthe integration of these diverse factors in the formation of the national Islamicmosaic.The first section covers gender, race, the Shari‘ah debate, and Muslimwomen’s political engagement. Section 2 focusses on media representationand examines the construction of the “Muslim other” post-9/11, the politicsof reform as articulated by two Muslim female journalists, and the representationof Canadian Islam in a popular Muslim sitcom. An important theme insection 3 is the civic engagement of the country’s Islamic schools. The lastsection looks at security issues and the targeting and profiling of Muslims inpost-9/11 Canada.As Jasmine Zine correctly points out in the introduction, Muslims havebeen living peacefully in Canada since the middle of the nineteenth centuryand are proud to be Canadian. However, since 9/11 the debate on their integrationinto the mosaic and their appropriation of Canadian values has intensified,especially in Quebec, where discrimination and prejudice haveincreased due to the issue of veiling. Women who choose to veil are exiledfrom public services and space by means of Bill 94. In essence they are portrayedas victims of patriarchal violence ...

Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Belonging in Contemporary French Novels and Films by Vinay Swamy (review)

Reviewed by: Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Belonging in Contemporary French Novels and Films by Vinay Swamy Michael Gott Vinay Swamy , Interpreting the Republic: Marginalization and Belonging in Contemporary French Novels and Films. Lanham (MD): Lexington Books, 2011. xxxiv + 171 pp. Interpreting the Republic moves deftly among interdisciplinary approaches ranging from cultural and postcolonial studies to political analysis, film criticism, and literary theory. The thread linking a seemingly disparate assortment of primary texts is the theme of belonging in the Republic. At times, this implicates the individual; at others, the notion—more problematic in the French context—of community affiliation. Swamy suggests that this tension lies at the heart of the question and that "different interpretations of the Republic(an model) are clearly dependent on an understanding of the relationship between co-called 'private' action and public consequence" (xviii). Interpreting the Republic examines the ways in which gender, sexual orientation and ethnicity intersect within these parameters. It is in this multifaceted approach that Swamy offers a fresh and important contribution to the scholarship on the identity debate, which was raging well before Sarkozy launched his short-lived official débat sur l'identité nationale in 2009. Swamy's approach breaks free of the theoretical discursive categories into which minorities are often pushed by French political and media debates as well as in Anglo-American academic discourse, whether delimited by ethnicity (Beur, Franco-Maghrebi, or simply Maghrebi), gender, sexuality, or the spatial organization of French society (the banlieue). While there are certainly a number of valuable academic contributions to the debate that are organized around such categorizations, the approach espoused by Swamy offers the promise of a fruitful and indeed essential expansion of the parameters of the debate. This approach is compelling because Individuals maneuver within society and the Republic not only, and sometimes not at all, as members of a particular ethnic group or other marginalized category. As perceptive observers such as Mireille Rosello and Patrick Weil have argued, individuals may opt to align themselves with a variety of groups, whether marginal [End Page 296] or otherwise, and their affiliations and affinities may shift throughout the course of their lifetime. Thus, any attempt to "interpret the Republic" must take into account the complexities of belonging and exclusion at play for individuals across and beyond particular marginalized categories. Interpreting the Republic links the ethnically-focused exclusion that was brought to the forefront in the 1990s to the debate waged near the end of that decade over the Pacte civil de solidarité (PaCS),which extended some of the rights and protections afforded to homosexuals and unmarried heterosexual couples. Swamy argues that "France's thrust to maintain a robust national selfidentification [. . .] can be found at the root of many debates about non-normative sexual orientations" (131). Turning both to texts that explicitly invite such an approach, notably Drôle de Félix (Ducastel and Martineau, 2000) and Chouchou (Merzak Allouache, 2003)—whose titular characters conform to neither perceived ethnic nor cultural norms of the Republic—and to less obvious choices such as Francis Veber's hit comedy Le Placard (2001), Swamy foregrounds the ways in which these diverse works "appeal to tactical interpretations that allow them to define what it means to be French from their perspective" (xxv). The first portion of the book examines literature by writers of Maghrebi origin with different levels of connection to France, starting with a look back to the 1980s, a period when issues of so-called beur identity did not play a central role in public discourse, as Swamy points out. In Le Gone du Chaâba and Béni ou le paradis privé, the first two novels by Azouz Begag, the author and his protagonists seek to tactically reinterpret the Republic by hinting "at the possibility of moving beyond ethnic differences" (5). The next case study analyzes a decidedly less optimistic novel by Algerian émigré Yassir Benmiloud. The satirical Allah Superstar, a surprise hit of the 2003 rentrée, examines the place of Muslims in post-9/11 France. With Renan's notion of national citizenship as a "daily plebiscite" in mind, Swamy contends that the novel interpolates the reader through satire, bringing to the...

Historical Events and Spaces of Hate: Hate Crimes against Arabs and Muslims in Post-9/11 America

This research investigates variation in hate crime offending against Arabs and Muslims across U.S. counties in the months before and after September 11, 2001. Four questions are of particular interest. First, what were the determinants of anti-Arab and Muslim hate crimes prior to 9/11? Second, in what social contexts were Arabs and Muslims at greatest risk of victimization? Third, to what extent did hate crimes against these groups increase after the terrorist attacks? And last, did the predictors of hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims change appreciably after 9/11? Findings show that hate crimes targeting Arabs and Muslims increased dramatically in the months following 9/11, although the structural determinants and geographic concentration of these crimes remained largely consistent after the attacks. Negative binomial regression results further suggest that counties with larger concentrations of Arabs and Muslims have higher incidents of such hate crimes, which likely reflects the availability of targets for this type of offending. At the same time, the likelihood of victimization for a given Arab or Muslim person is lowest in counties where the percent Arab or percent Muslim is highest, in line with a power-differential perspective on discrimination and intergroup violence. The findings imply that terrorist attacks may indeed incite retaliation and set off a wave of hate crime offending, but the location of these crimes is likely to remain consistent after a galvanizing event.