Religion as a “Way of Life”: Examining International Muslim Students Worldview and Campus Experiences in the U.S.

• In Event: Academic mobility: Acknowledging talents and knowledge for inclusion and diversity

Proposal

Purpose
The purpose of my research study was to understand undergraduate international Muslim students’ experiences of navigating a secularized higher education environment. Muslim students in U.S. universities regularly experience stereotypes, social ostracization and discrimination as they navigate a dominant campus culture that views Muslim identity as foreign, violent, and suspicious (Mir, 2014). These negative experiences may be harder to cope with for international Muslim students who often do not have local familial and social support structures available to them (Azim & Happel-Parkins, 2019). Given the cultural dominance of Christian ways of being on U.S. campuses, the growing racism, xenophobia and Islamophobia in the U.S. and the hands-off approach most higher education administrators tend to display when it comes to tackling religious diversity (Goodman et al., 2015), it is important to understand how international Muslim students are negotiating their various identities and making meaning of their campus experiences.
My arguments in this paper are grounded in decolonial approaches that critique and challenge the colonial, Eurocentric/Christian-centric discourse on religion and secularity within higher education and examine its impact on minoritized religious students’ campus experience in the United States. Through a narrative-based inquiry into the campus lives of five international Muslim college students, this study examined how international Muslim students negotiate dominant narratives about religion, Islam, and their religious selves in a secular/Christian-centric higher education environment in the U.S.

Framework and Literature Review
This study critically explored the experiences of international Muslims students using a decolonial lens that situated their experiences within the larger socio-political and historical context in which Islam and Muslims have been demonized and perceived as inferior in relation to the secular/Christian West (Mielants & Grosfoguel, 2006). The vast majority of published research on experiences of Muslim students in higher education uses a microaggression or discrimination lens to talk about Islamophobia on campus (Nadal et al., 2012; Shammas, 2017; Stubbs & Sallee, 2013), with some incorporation of power, privilege, and oppression frames. There is also growing research that focuses on racialization of Muslim students and places Muslim college students’ experiences within the racist, orientalist and colonist discourse on Muslims and Islam (Ahmadi & Cole, 2020; Ali, 2014; Azim & Happel-Parkins, 2019; Mir, 2014). My research builds on the latter by examining the perception and responses of international Muslim students within the colonial and decolonial contexts in which narratives about religion and Muslim have been constructed and normalized in the U.S. By using a decolonial conceptual framework, my research questions the epistemological hegemony of the West with regards to religion and challenges the structures of Islamophobia and ways of thinking and being that make Muslims always the ‘other’, alien, and radicalized.

Method
I used narrative inquiry as a decolonizing methodological approach as it allows for a critical, in-depth analysis of the life stories of people, affirms multiple ways of knowledge creation and disrupts dominant narratives arising out of western point of view (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Smith, 2012). In the narrative inquiry method, participants are co-creators of the stories being produced; narratives are negotiated and constructed by them and the researcher (Clandinin & Connelly, 2000). My research was conducted at a public research univeristy. In order to collect meaninful stories, I conducted 2 semi-structured guided conversations and a photo elicitiation exercice with five international Muslim students over a period of a 4 months. Students were asked to talk about positive or negative experiences related to their religious identity, their observations about religion on campus and discourse on and support/treatment of religions/worldviews different from their own.
Interview transcripts were coded using Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) three-dimensional narrative inquiry space: I coded the transcripts for elements that contain the temporal (i.e., background/history of growing up Muslim in XY country that shapes their perception of the present campus religious climate in U.S. which informs their hopes for the future), the personal and social (individual’s perspectives and emotions as well as the conditions in society that influence those views or their experiences i.e., negative narratives about Muslims), and the situational context (e.g., specific to higher education in the U.S). Using these elements, each participant’s stories were then written down in descriptive detail (Saldaña, 2013) and re-told using much of the participants’ words (long and short quotes), before applying my interpretation to it (Lemley & Mitchell, 2012). These individual narratives were then analyzed for recurring themes.

Results & Significance
Preliminary analysis reveals that international Muslim students are negotiating their religious and culture identities simultaneously within higher education institutions in the U.S. Three preliminary themes have been identified. First international Muslim students perceive a lack of understanding or knowledge on part of U.S. peers about global concerns that directly impact Muslim students or their families. Secondly, international Muslim students shared that they view their religion as “a way of life” and that it is an important part of who they are, but that part is not accepted fully by their U.S. peers. Some participants tried to adapt to the dominant culture to appear ‘normal’, while others quietly slipped into the periphery, finding their own communities. Thirdly, higher education institutions may seem to promote one kind of diversity at the expense of another (i.e. religious diversity). By critically examining these narratives, I offer ways in which higher education scholar-practitioners, trying to support a diverse student body, can move beyond simple ways of incorporating religion into diversity work and consider critical perspectives based in issues of power and systematic oppression that affect the lives of minoritized religious students on campus.

Author

• Sadaf Latafat, University of Massachusetts Amherst (UMass Amherst)