Title: Mirages in the desert: Theorizing Western Muslim identity across 60 years
Abstract: Theorizations on Western Muslim identity that are multi-layered and grounded in actual Western Muslim experiences are hard to find. Two exceptions to this are The Road to Mecca by Muhammad Asad (1954/2005), and Islam is a Foreign Country by Zareena Grewal (2014 Grewal, Z. (2014). Islam is a foreign country: American Muslims and the global crisis of authority. New York: NYU Press. [Google Scholar]), rich texts that span across six decades. Asad's classic account of a European convert's nested journeys and Grewal's historical ethnography of American Muslim student-travelers offer readers an opportunity to examine how theorizing Western Muslim identity has changed and to ask: How does theorizing Western Muslim identity construct itself? What does it construct itself against? What are some of the assumptions and contradictions that it tells us? In this essay review, I look at how travel, particularly travel as a quest for knowledge, has served as a way of becoming a sovereign human subject at home in the West through travel to the East. I argue that, paradoxically, Western Muslims may retrieve sovereignty through a process of becoming Western constructed against an Eastern Other. Juxtaposing Asad's and Grewal's writings shows conceptually similar blind spots that reveal the paradox of this pursuit of subjecthood. I argue that the strategies illustrated by the protagonists in the two texts utilize an Orientalist gaze within a framework of a Western human subject that entrenches the eternal Otherness of Western Muslims, even as it secures a Western selfhood for its individual subjects. In doing so, I seek to contribute to a broader debate in curriculum studies on anti-racism, decolonization and racialized minorities by complicating the frame of inclusion for equality.
Publication Year: 2016
Publication Date: 2016-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
Access and Citation
Cited By Count: 1
AI Researcher Chatbot
Get quick answers to your questions about the article from our AI researcher chatbot