Effects of Religious Discrimination and Fear for Safety on Life Satisfaction for Muslim Americans

Objectives: The purpose of the current study was to examine the relationship between two forms of religious discrimination (religious prejudice and environmental discrimination) and life satisfaction among a sample of Muslim Americans. Based on the framework of minority stress theory, we also hypothesized that higher levels of religious prejudice as well as environmental discrimination, would significantly relate to higher fear of safety, and in turn, would relate to lower life satisfaction. Method: A total of 192 Muslim American participants (Age M= 27.87) completed an on-line survey about their experiences as Muslim American. Women made up almost 75% of the sample.Results: Findings revealed that higher religious prejudice as well as environmental discrimination were both significantly related to lower life satisfaction and that fear of safety partially mediated both of these relationships. Conclusions:  Findings help illustrate that Muslim Americans are not immune to the social-political climate of Islamophobia and can experience religious discrimination in different ways. In addition, women and younger participants expressed higher fear of safety when compared to men and older participants. Professionals who work with individuals from the Muslim community are encouraged to consider the chronic and on-going impact of stress that Muslim Americans face especially within the context of the United States.

Gender, Space, and Muslim American Women

This chapter analyzes how Yemeni and Bangladeshi American women and teenage girls in Hamtramck establish a particular type of gender organization—what I call “civic purdah”—across a variety of different contexts. Although there is no exact word for it in Arabic, Bangladeshis and other South Asians use the word “purdah” to signify gender separation, most often in expressed through patterns of dress (hijāb) and proximity, enacted in an effort to protect the sanctity of women’s bodies and spaces from the gaze and interference of unrelated men. Civic purdah signifies the way that women interpret and apply the purdah ethos in the municipal context as a means of participating in different aspects of city life. When enacted in public spaces and institutions, civic purdah can be considered a means for advancing cultural citizenship, defined as engaging in the dominant society while maintaining differences from the norm.

The Transnational Ethics of Four Muslim American Women in Jordan

This chapter begins with a description of the shifting terms of Muslim American political engagement in the 1970s as Muslim immigration increased and many African American Muslims sought a rapprochement with American liberalism. It shows how the attacks of 9/11 shifted concerns of US policymakers away from African American Muslim men toward Muslim women who wore head scarves and toward “brown” Muslims--those perceived to be from Arab and South Asian backgrounds. Exploring responses to this changing political landscape, this chapter provides an in-depth examination of four Muslim American women who theorize alternatives to an American nationalism defined largely in terms of the war on terror and Islamophobia. Like the previous chapter, it analyzes how their travel to a Muslim country—in this case, Jordan—shapes their political consciousness. The chapter shows how their ethics, unlike that of Malcolm X, sustains political loyalty to the United States and avoids the call for political revolution while also articulating a hope for change in the US war on terror and other foreign policies.

Itinerant Data: Unveiling Gendered Scrutiny at the Border

As national borders are being transformed into technologized zones of securitization and national power, the surveillance of particular individuals and groups has become routine. Aided by a public culture of suspicion and belief in the neutrality of technology, national borders work to ferret out the digital tracks of those predetermined to be of risk or threat. Fortifying discriminatory structures of immigration control, the reworked digital frontier filters gendered bodies of risk and drafts their visual records for scrutiny. Engaging with the objections raised by Muslim American women wearing head cover to the unwarranted search of mobile phones at the border, this article addresses the entangled connections between nationalism, digital archives and transparency. The objections which center around the veil and data visibility serve as an embodied point of departure to rethink and render visible assumptions regarding national belonging in terms of the new itinerancy of data and marked bodies.