From Identity to Belonging and Citizenship: Rethinking Research with and for Youth

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, there is growing concern that there is little knowledge about youth from Muslim-majority countries living in the United States. While much popular public discourse was whipping up moral panics about the threat that local Muslim communities posed to the United States and its values, researchers sought to explore the actual experiences of, and perspectives represented within, Muslim communities.

4.1 Negotiating Diverse Identities: Lives in Multicultural Societies

Much of the research has focused attention on the space between Muslim and American identities.

Although undertaken before 2001, Loukia Sarroub's ethnographic research with Yemeni American girls stands out as one of the most in-depth, nuanced portraits of youth from a Muslim immigrant community in the United States and for this reason is included in this review. (Her capacity to build such a detailed picture of this commu­nity can be attributed to her choice of ethnographic methods.) Her study explores how Yemeni American girls creatively negotiate between the norms, values, and practices of their cultural and religious home community and those of mainstream American society. Studying the girls' literacy practices as they moved between home, school, and mosque, Sarroub paints a picture of the girls navigating the rocky waters between “two worlds” and “different ways of being.” She writes that these young women's lives, “illustrate that an inevitable clash occurs at the intersection of US republican values and the sociocultural practices of the Southend” (2005, p.

Studies undertaken in the wake of September 11, 2001, suggest that rather than an inevitable clash of cultural systems, the particular ways that young people experience and take up cultural and religious identities are continually reshaped within a maelstrom of historical, economic, cultural, and political processes and the power relations that ensue from these processes. Research illustrates that the post-9/ 11 political context reoriented many young people from Muslim communities to consider religion as a primary focus for identification (Ewing and Hoyler 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher 2009; Grewal 2014; Sirin and Fine 2008; Mir 2014). This research shows that youth from various racial, ethnic, and national groups have increasingly come to identify primarily with their religious identities, as either Muslim Americans or pan-Muslims. This collective identification as Muslims serves as a source for mutual support and also for civic and political engagement. The research undertaken after 9/11 understands that youth identities are mutable, imagined, and reimagined within particular sociopolitical contexts.

Research in the post-9/11 era has shown that experiences with racism and the state's surveillance of their communities have led many youth from Muslim communities to question the relationship between their identities as Muslims and as Americans (Ewing and Hoyler 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher 2009; Maira 2009; Sirin and Fine 2008).

Given the public fear about disaffected Muslim youth that has periodically gripped the United States (and other “Western” nations), particularly in the wake of violent attacks undertaken by a small number of individuals, it is critical to note that the majority of youth from Muslim-majority communities identify as Ameri­cans, even in the face of the widespread prejudice and racism facing their commu­nities. Nevertheless, youth describe and experience the relationship between their American and Muslim identities in diverse ways. Sirin and Fine (2008) conducted a large research study with young Muslim Americans from immigrant communities in the New York metropolitan region (surveying 204 youth ages 12-25, leading focus groups and creating identity maps with a subset of those surveyed, and conducting six life history interviews).

Although the preponderance of evidence is that a majority of Muslim American youth integrate, and navigate successfully, their identities as Muslims and as Americans, there are some young people who assert a sense of “authentic” or “true” Muslim/ethnic identities that they feel cannot be easily reconciled with mainstream American identities (Ghaffar-Kucher 2009, 2010, 2014, Grewal 2014). Importantly, this research illustrates that the development of this sense of a “true” Muslim identity at odds with mainstream American identities is in large part a response to the ways that Muslims have been positioned as outsiders to the imagined national community.

4.2 From Identity to Belonging: From National to Transnational Citizenship

A second, related (and, in the case of Ghaffar-Kucher and Grewal, overlapping) body of research shifts focus from Muslim American youth identities to a broader question of how young people are negotiating belonging and citizenship, not only within the boundaries of the nation-state but also in relation to the transnational social fields across which their lives unfold. This body of research makes two subtle, but critical moves. First, moving from a framework of identity, to a concern with citizenship as lived experience, it focuses attention on the everyday practices through which young people negotiate social, cultural, and political belonging. Second, rather than taking Muslim and American identities as the boundary for investigation, this research illustrates the ways that many young people are crea­tively constructing a sense of belonging and citizenship well beyond the boundaries of the United States.

The works of three researchers are illustrative of this approach to understanding Muslim youth in the post-9/11 United States (Abu El-Haj 2007, 2009, 2010, 2015; Ghaffar-Kucher 2009, 2012, 2014; Maira 2009). Sunaina Maira's (2009) ethno­graphic study with South Asian Muslim immigrant youth focuses on expressions of national belonging and citizenship during the “war on terror.” Tracking young people across home, school, and community contexts, Maira shows how “the micropolitics of citizenship practices and performances of immigrant youth in these everyday contexts are linked to the macropolitical processes of the imperial state and global capital” (2009, p. 5). Thus, this work shows how young people forge particular forms of “cultural citizenship” in relation to both contemporary patterns of global capitalism that led them to migrate to the United States and the cultural politics of the “war on terror” that position them as enemy aliens in the United States. Cultural citizenship - a term coined by Renato Rosaldo - refers to “the right to be different and belong in a participatory democratic sense” (1994, p. 402). Maira's work situates these South Asian-Muslim youths' experiences with citizenship centrally within the workings of US imperialism. She notes that US imperialism entails not only economic, political, and military domination across the globe but also works through cultural politics that hide imperial power behind a discourse of democracy and freedom. These politics have proven particularly problematic for Muslims. As she writes, “The state of preemptive and ‘perpetual war' is built on the assumption that certain categories of citizens and subjects are criminal, undesirable, and unworthy of national belonging and so must be purged from the body politic” (Maira 2009, p. 70).

The question Maira addresses then is how, in this context, youth understand and practice citizenship - perspectives and practices they develop through their every­day experiences in schools, workplaces, and with popular culture. This approach situates young people as active shapers of their societies, and it understands citizenship to encompass more than traditional markers of political membership such as voting. Maira argues that there were three primary ways that the South Asian Muslim youth practiced cultural citizenship: flexible, multi- or polycultural, and dissenting.

Flexible citizenship (Ong 1999) references the ways that immigrant youth and their families leverage citizenship to access a range of rights (primarily economic, but also social, civil, and political) to respond to the conditions of neoliberal economic policies and the global unequal distribution of rights. As people move across borders in search of these rights, they maintain connections (economic, affective, cultural, political) to the places from which they migrated. For South Asian Muslim youth, this ability to maintain connections and to identify as Pakistani, Indian, and Bangladeshi was facilitated through transnational pop cul­ture. In the wake of 9/11, these practices of flexible citizenship were risky for South Asian-Muslim youth because their affiliations to places other than the United States were viewed as suspect.

Maira argues that youth also forged multicultural and polycultural citizenship practices in response to the economic realities they faced in the United States. As members of a working-class immigrant community, they experienced firsthand economic inequalities that are deeply racialized. At the same time, they are exposed to circulating discourses of US multiculturalism and consumer culture. Maira suggests that many young South Asian Muslim youth turn to multicultural citizen­ship that “foster(s) a cultural rather than a structural analysis of social inequality” (2009, p. 173). Schools encourage this type of citizenship by putting celebrations of “diversity” at the center of the educational endeavor. However, she also found that some youth affiliated with other students of color, particularly African American students, understanding shared experiences with racialization. Maira sees these affiliations as nascent “polycultural citizenship” which she suggests is “a more complex, less culturally essentialist notion of difference that allows for political, not just cultural, conjunctures between different groups and is situated in the realm of power relations” (2009, p. 179).

Finally, Maira found that some young people were beginning to articulate a position of dissent, refusing to simply line up with the politics of the state. After 9/11, Muslim youth were often called upon to educate members of the dominant public about Islam. There was a scripted quality to this education. It had to fit within a multicultural framework - one that sidelines conversations about political injus­tice, in favor of simply learning about cultural and religious diversity. However, some of the youth were aware of the inadequacy of this approach and started to develop more critical views on US politics at home and abroad.

Ghaffar-KucheUs (2009, 2012, 2014) multi-site ethnography with working-class Pakistani American youth living in New York City illustrates what she calls the “religification” of these youth. Conducting research across home, community, and school sites, Ghaffar-Kucher shows how, in the wake of 9/11, the possibilities for identification were narrowed in scope. On the one hand, racist discourses in both the public spheres of politics and culture, and in the intimacies of everyday encounters in schools and communities, focused on Islam as the most important aspect of these young Pakistani Americans’ identities. This focus on a monolithic view of Islam rendered invisible other rich sources of identification such as nationality, ethnicity, and linguistic diversity that characterize the variable Muslim communities living in the United States. On the other hand, as Pakistani American youth encountered these racist discourses about Islam, they increasingly adopted religion as the primary focus for their identification, setting aside other sources of identification. Thus, Ghaffar-Kucher shows that the sense of opposition between “American” and “Muslim” culture was produced out of particular political processes at a specific historic moment.

Whereas the broader political climate had a hand in shaping this turn toward religious identities, Ghaffar-Kucher (2014) shows how this process of “religification” unfolded through the everyday experiences young people had at home and at school. She argues that imagined nostalgia on the part of both their American teachers and Pakistani immigrant parents created essentialized and idealized notions of American versus Pakistani “culture.” At school, teachers longed for an imagined time when newcomers appeared to assimilate seamlessly into “American” culture. They contrasted this assimilationist goal with Islam, which they viewed as a problematic culture - one that was characterized by troublesome boys and oppressed girls. Pakistani immigrant parents, by contrast, imagined Islam as a form of cultural capital that could guide young people to be “good Muslims” and to resist what they perceived to be corrupting influences of American culture. Although both teachers and parents had stated goals for these young people’s academic success, teachers desired assimilation to American norms, and parents wished their children to be “good Muslims” and resist behaviors and values they viewed as American. Caught between these views, the Pakistani American youth experienced an incompatibility between the spheres of home and school. Increasingly identifying with their religious identities, youth drew on an idea of Islam as a superior culture to resist the racist views of their religion they encountered in school. Unfortunately, this resistance, at times, translated into some of the youth appropriating the terrorist stereotype or being attracted to gangs.

Abu El-Haj's ethnographic research (2007, 2010, 2015) with Palestinian American Muslim youth has focused attention on what she calls “disjunctures of citizenship” - conflicts between the ways that young Palestinian Americans expe­rience citizenship as flexible and transnational and the rigid, patriotic, and exclu­sionary views of citizenship they encounter in US schools and society. Palestinian American youth, growing up within transnational social fields, developed a sense of belonging to a Palestinian national imaginary - one that aspires for an independent state. Many of the youth had moved from the United States to Palestine with their mothers and siblings when they were children. Parents desired to offer their children a cultural, religious, and political education through which they forged a deep sense of belonging to the Palestinian national community. These families returned to the United States after the Israeli military response to the second intifada disrupted all aspects of life in Palestine. Returning to the United States as teenagers, these youth had a strong understanding of themselves as Palestinian nationals, but they also were deeply appreciative of and committed to the rights of democratic citizenship afforded them by their status as US citizens. They knew the injustices that follow from not having rights-bearing citizenship. It was, however, not only those young people who had lived in Palestine who developed a sense of belonging to a Pales­tinian national imaginary. Even young people who had grown up entirely in the United States forged a sense of themselves as Palestinian nationals. As members of a transnational community that sustained everyday connections to Palestine through language practices, familial relationships, remittances to family members living in the Middle East, cultural and political activities, and media consumption, these young Palestinians grew up with a strong experience of being Palestinian.

At the same time, the youth spoke of themselves as US citizens, and they understood well the value of the rights this citizenship conferred. As members of a stateless community, they knew the importance of democratic citizenship rights. They did not take for granted the rights that so many Americans have never had to question, and they believed these rights should be universal. From the most basic political and civil rights of movement, due process, and voting to social rights such as educational opportunity and social welfare, young Palestinian Americans described their appreciation for the rights their citizenship status conferred. Thus, the experiences of growing up in a transnational community made Palestinian Americans aware of injustices that crossed national borders and committed to an ideal that centered rights, rather than nationality, as the foundation for citizenship.

However, these rich transnational commitments were at odds with the expecta­tions for citizenship they encountered in their school. Here it was patriotic affilia­tion to the United States and its putative ideals that was demanded. Similar to the teachers in Ghaffar-Kucher's research (2014), a majority of educators in Abu El-Haj's (2010, 2015) study viewed education as a pathway for liberating Palestin­ian (and other Muslim) youth from what they imagined to be their community's antidemocratic “culture.” From educators like the one Samira encountered who assumed that all Muslim women were oppressed, to others who believed that violence and intolerant attitudes characterized these young people's families and communities, teachers imagined education as a disciplinary mechanism through which young Palestinians might be taught to be the free, tolerant citizens of the United States. Teachers' expectations that the Palestinian American students would assimilate and express unambiguous loyalty to the United States had serious consequences for the youth. Students were silenced and even disciplined for expressing their political perspectives on a range of issues from the Palestinian- Israeli conflict and the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to the unrealized commitments to “liberty and justice for all” at home. Thus, the ambivalence that many of the Palestinian Americans expressed about their identifications as Amer­icans was an outcome of the rich, multifaceted relationships they had with the Palestinian national community, the paradoxical experiences they had with the rights conferred by US citizenship, and the exclusionary cultural politics they faced in schools and in wider society.

Most important, Abu El-Haj's research illustrates that the disjunctures of citi­zenship that Palestinian American (2007, 2010, 2015) and other Arab American (2009) youth experienced spurred most to be actively engaged in resisting oppres­sion and inequality both within the United States and elsewhere. The sense of relationship that these young people had built with communities near and far led them to feel deeply injustices and denial of rights that were not bounded by the patriotic borders of nation-states. Thus, their lived citizenship practices suggest that rather than negotiating between identities they experience as oppositional, many young people from Muslim communities are figuring out creative ways to carve out practices of cultural and political belonging across national imaginaries.

This point is best illustrated by the words and actions of Samira Khateeb, the Palestinian American youth whose voice opens this chapter. Samira had, along with a Jewish peer, cofounded a student group at the community college they both attended to educate about and advocate for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine. A trip she had taken to Palestine after her senior year in high school led Samira to become more explicitly politically active on behalf of Palestinian independence. Samira described her goals for initiating the community college student organization.

My main goal is to get people to be aware of what's going on there because not a lot of people do know. Everybody can hear stories about what's going on but they really don't know you know the full story. And really my main focus is on Americans, you know whether you're white or black. Some people might not just care. Some people would like to listen to it for you know two minutes, think about it for a day and then get on with their lives, like you know, what can I do? Some people really do care and do want to help. I'm planning to work on you know, getting, grabbing people's attention and have them focus on this in their everyday lives. I want them to really think about it—think about what the kids are going through, think about what the mothers are going through. Just forget the fact that they're Arabs, just you know they're people and this is what they're going through everyday and hopefully when we do get a lot of people to think about it and the boycotting starts and we have good feedback or whatever from the boycotting and from informing a lot, as many people as we can, hopefully the [U.S.] government is able to do something. Hopefully once the government sees that so many people really want change over there they would do something about it.

Samira felt that her firsthand experiences with the harsh and violent Israeli military occupation of Palestine put her in an excellent position to make those stories come alive for Americans who rarely see the impact the occupation has on the lives of ordinary Palestinians. Samira believed that if she could make those stories visible, more and more Americans might be drawn to pressure the US government to push for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Her words illustrate two moves important for realizing the political actions she desires. She hopes that the stories of ordinary women and children will push Americans to think outside of the categorical boundaries - transforming Palestinians from “Arabs” into “people.” Samira's perspective, born out of her experiences in transnational social fields, calls upon humanist, universal values to make a case for breaking down nationalist affiliations and recognizing all humans as equal. Perhaps just as important, if not more critical, she speaks of the need to get Americans to care about justice in Palestine in their everyday lives - rather than moving on quickly and getting reimmersed in their local lives. Samira aspired to make visible the lives of Palestinians in ways that highlight the interconnectivity of US policies in the region and the ongoing brutality of the Israeli occupation, in the hopes that more and more Americans might come to understand how deeply injustices occurring elsewhere are inextricably interwoven with policies - polices that too often engender violence and conflict - made in this country.

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