Discursive Constructions of Good Muslims and Normal Americans: Ethnographic Data on Campus Culture

• In Event: Radicalized, Fundamentalist, and Terrorist: Muslim College Students and Their Ascribed Identities

Abstract

Neelam: [Our parents] don’t use the word “dating,” even. I mean, they say, “seeing each other.” Or, like “they talk.” And you’re like, “You mean, they’re dating?” [Laugh]

In this paper, based on ethnographic fieldwork from a 2002-03 study on campus culture, Mir shows how the meanings of terms changes depending on the context and the representative. Conservative religious Muslim youth who engaged in courtship, for instance, claimed that “Muslims don’t date:” in other words, in politicized Occidentalist discourse, dating is what the majority does and not what we do. When moderate religious Muslims explained what “Muslim dating” really meant, they did so in terms amenable to American mainstream practice, and participants said that they “left out” details that would be “really weird” to non-Muslims. In intra-community circles, the emphasis was on the discursive construction of the good Muslim. Religious Muslim women did not say that they were “dating,” but that they were “talking” to someone. In Muslim circles, “talking” was assumed to be for marriage purposes. It often fell under the rubric of courtship but at other times it was part of undefined, flirtatious semi-romantic relationships. This type of flirting was different from “ordinary” flirting in that it had more highly developed expectations of marriage.
While many Muslim women participated heartily in campus party culture (drinking, dating, fashion, etc.), many worked hard to construct authentically religious Muslim identities. In being different from their majority peers, however, they were careful to be both normal and different – authentically normal American youth and authentic moderate Muslims. In this paper, Mir follows their discursive construction of these shifting, complex, hybrid identities, among peers and faculty on campus, parents and families, as they battled, corrected, edited and even deployed pervasive Western Orientalist cultural stereotypes of Muslim women.

Author

• Shabana Mir, Millikin University