Strategic Deployments and Engagements of Americanism and Citizenship Among Muslim College Students

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

Abstract

In this paper, Ali explores aspects of how hegemonic ideologies and images of the Muslim as a figure take hold and find legs in the lives of young people who are the target of these images. Ali examines tropes of Muslim citizenship and hyper-patriotism to explore how college students respond to and re-deploy some of these images in their own definitions of self. Ali specifically explores how ideas that circulates in the worlds of political discourse, speech, and actions have real and manifest relationships to the lives, perspectives and experiences of the youth who are the target of that speech.
Specifically, Ali uses the public talk of Congressperson King’s (R-Long Island) at Senate Committee on Homeland Security’s Hearing on The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response” (March 14, 2011) to examine the underlying assumptions and ideologies of Muslimness. Ali focuses on tropes of defining citizenship and patriotism for Muslim communities. Next, Ali examine a CBS Interview in Fall 2010 with Imam Abdul Rauf, the Director of the Park 51 Islamic Cultural Center in Lower Manhattan. Ali argues both these positions rest on the same motifs of Muslimness and the Muslim personhood. They are organized around disciplining the Muslim, into ‘appropriate’ forms of participation in liberal Americanism through the articulation of the ‘Good Muslim/Bad Muslim’ motif (Mamdani, 2004).
Ali extends Butler’s (1997) conception of a linguistic community beyond a slur, but asks ‘what happens when the term itself isn’t a slur, but the term carries slur within it?’ When the term carries such an embedded meaning, those who take on the identifier – the slur- must respond to, in some way the ideological meanings associated with the word. Relying upon empirical data gathered through ethnographic life history interviews conducted with 24 Muslim undergraduate students at four colleges in the Los Angeles area in 2008-2009, he explores how this trope of patriotism and citizenship is taken up, responded to and re-deployed by these youth, specifically within the context of a college campus. The students expressed the construction of Muslim in public discourse was not simply ‘bad’, but rather a reflection of the Muslim as being wholly and totally outside of the narrative of Americanism and liberalism. Arguably, this construction of US Muslim is outside of rationality and modernity. In this manner, Muslim students are constructed as the inhospitable, the untamable, uneasy participants in liberal democracy. College campuses are useful sites to explore the fracturing of political and cultural citizenship for US Muslim students.

Author

• Arshad Imtiaz Ali, Institute of Education - University of London