New World Islam: Religious Institutionalization & Generational Change among Somali & Palestinian Muslim Immigrants in the US

FAIN: FT-57607-10

Loren Diller Lybarger
Ohio University (Athens, OH 45701-1361)

The topic of Islam in America is poorly understood. Media reports stress terrorism while expert discussion emphasizes assimilation challenges. My project aims to enrich these discussions through a comparative ethnography of two groups: Somalis in Columbus, OH and Palestinians in Chicago. The study asks: How are U.S. Muslims adapting Islam to the social challenges confronting them? How do their differing ethnicities affect this process? My methods will include participant-observation and interviewing to assess how mosques, principally, are shaping social orientations within these groups. I seek a 2010 NEH Summer Stipend to intensify the Somali work. By the end of 2010, I hope to produce a report from the field based on my summer research for the Journal of the American Academy of Religion. I also will also address a general humanities audience locally and nationally through Ohio University's media resources and the Somali Documentation Project.

Associated Products

Nationalism and the Contingency of the Religious Return among Second-Generation Palestinian Immigrants in the United States: A Chicago Case Study (Article)
Title: Nationalism and the Contingency of the Religious Return among Second-Generation Palestinian Immigrants in the United States: A Chicago Case Study
Author: Loren D. Lybarger
Abstract: Drawing on dozens of in-depth life-history interviews and extensive participant observation in mosques and community centers, this article probes the interaction of religion and nationalism in the formation of individual identities within the Palestinian immigrant community in Chicago, Illinois since the late 1980s. The analysis focuses on three individuals who represent distinct approaches to negotiating the relationship of religion and nation. The first approach is context-adaptive, responding and accommodating to the diverging moral assumptions that underlie the ethos of religious and secular spaces. The second approach entails a transition from secular-nationalism to a type of Islamic nationalism or even Islamic secularism. The third approach resists both forms of nationalism, seeking a transcendent Islam in which ethnicity and nation recede within a new religious humanism. The core argument throughout is that processes of religious return, often analyzed in relation to transnational trends, take diverse and indeterminate forms. This fact results from the shaping effects of a range of “secular” factors — gender, generation, class, family dynamics, intercommunal interactions, traumatic events — which register within the specific local settings of ordinary life.
Year: 2014
Primary URL: http://https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/muwo.12055
Primary URL Description: The article website at the journal
Access Model: Subscription
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: The Muslim World
Publisher: The Muslim World Journal

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