non-Muslim Majority Research Articles

Introducing a New Course: Muslim Women in Twentieth-Century Literature

A recent revision of requirements for the English major at Montclair State University has prompted many of us who teach there to design new courses that meet the new guidelines-in particular, those involving multinational study-or to revise existing courses so as to bring to the fore issues of gender, class, and ethnicity. In the new major there are no more required courses, only guidelines that have to be followed, so students can develop concentrations in their areas of interest. Since I was hired at MSU in 1987, I have taught primarily in the World Literature Program, which consists of two thematically organized undergraduate courses, Coming of Age and Voices of Tradition and Challenge, meant to introduce students to non-Western literatures either written in English or in translation. Neither course counts toward the major, however, since both are intended to meet the GER (General Education Requirement). With the creation of the new major, I, along with other faculty whose primary interests are in non-Western or, perhaps more accurately, global literatures and cultural histories, felt encouraged to create and try out courses that could eventually be clustered into a permanent concentration called Multinational Literary and Cultural Study for students majoring in English. In the past few years, I have noticed an increasing number of Muslim students in my World Literature classes, some of them women wearing a version of the hijab-in this case the Middle Eastern head scarf, often accompanied by a loose-fitting outer garment. Their attire stands in contrast to my own self-presentation as a middle-class woman of MuslimPakistani background who grew up wearing a combination of Westem and Pakistani-style clothing without the hijab. Although, given this contrast, my students should have seen that not all Muslims are alike, I realized that the perceptions of the non-Muslim majority were hampered by a lot of media disinformation about the Islamic world, as well as general ignorance. I also realized that simply reading a short novel or a couple of stories by a Muslim woman writer critical of many so-called Islamic practices was feeding their prejudice rather than alleviating it. Although some exposure

Toward Explaining Communal and Ethnonational Resurgence and Separatism

Liberalism and the Quest for Islamic Identity in the Philippines, by KennethE. Bauzon. Published by the Acorn Press, Durham, NC, in association withDuke University Islamic and Arabian Development Studies, 1991, pp. xx + 219.Ethnicity, Pluralism and the State in the Middle East, edited by Milton J. Esmanand Itamar Rabinovich. Published by Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London,1988, pp. viii + 296.Ethno-National Movements of Pakistan, by Tahir Amin. Published by Instituteof Policy Studies, Islamabad, Pakistan, 1988, pp. xxix + 285.Most of the scholarly writings on Muslim minorities have focused on thesocioeconomic and political issues and religious concerns that tend to dividethese minorities from the mainstream of their respective societies. Particularemphasis is often given to the religious nature of the conflict between the Muslimminority and the non-Muslim majority communities, especially as it relatesto the pracesses of socioeconomic change and modernization in the larger society.This conflict is also explained in terms of integration versus separatism,universalism versus particularism, and secularism versus communalism.Theorists of the civil society persuasion have looked at the politics of minorityunrest as essentially a product of socioeconomic changes brought about bythe processes of modernization, including social mobilization, and the expansionof education and mass communication. Hence, according to this perspective,ethnic and religious particularism in postcolonial societies is a necessaryconcomitant of modernity. The statist view, on the other hand, regards thepolitics of religious and ethnic separatism as a function of public policies.Nothing is predetermined and inevitable; public policies can restructure andreshape the environment within which communal and ethnonational movementscan either flourish or disappear ...