Research Papers

Islam is to Catholicism as Teflon is to Velcro: Theorizing Ambivalence About Religion and Ethnic Culture Among Second Generation Muslim Women and Latina College Students
by R. Stephen Warner, Elise Martel, & Rhonda E. Dugan
Department of Sociology (m/c 312), University of Illinois at Chicago
April, 1998

Revision of paper prepared for the 1998 annual meeting of the Midwest Sociological Society Kansas City, MO April, 1998

Part I

In this paper, we present some serendipitous preliminary findings from the Project on Religion and Youth at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). Our broader project is intended to specify how religious institutions can help youth--particularly minority youth--grow up successfully, dodging the many literal and figurative bullets that hit their less fortunate peers.

The idea for our project comes from stories like that of an African-American Muslim woman on our campus some ten years ago, who explained her involvement in the campus Muslim Student Association, in comparison to the (former) Black Student Retention Program (quotation from Warner 1994, p. 72):

In the MSA [Muslim Students' Association], no one expects me to fail. . . . Blacks give lip service to the importance of education, but if you are black and a good student while growing up, you do not get encouragement, at least not from anyone besides your parents. 'There she is with that book again,' they'd say. But Muslims expect me to be educated and to question things, so that I can use my education to live and spread Islam.

Another inspiration for the project comes from stories told to Nilda Flores-Gonzalez by evangelical and pentecostal "school-wise" students at the Chicago inner-city Puerto Rican high school where she conducted field research. In order to fend off recruitment efforts by gang members, these young men turn the tables on them. "When gang members approach them, they begin to talk about Jesus Christ and to invite the gang members to church. Surprisingly, this usually works, and the gang members back off and leave them alone" (Flores-Gonzalez 1998, MS p. 14).

What we see here are two narratives of how participation in religious institutions provides leverage to young people distancing themselves from threats and striving for success in school. We presuppose that these stories represent broader and more complex processes, where religion--whether conceived as systems of beliefs, normative authorities, or self-defined associations--has probably differential consequences for young people from the inner city in contrast to those from the suburbs; for young men as against young women; for African-Americans, Latinos, Asians, and whites; and for Catholics, Protestants, and Muslims, to mention the three most prominent religious communities represented at UIC. In other words, we assume that there is no one way that religious institutions serve the needs and interests of youth. We also knew that stories of these kinds are told by self-selected samples of students who think religion has somehow helped them. We realized therefore that we needed to hear the negative side from other students, those women, for example, who would tell of the discouragement of their aspirations they felt from their church elders, or those young men and women who have had to struggle to overcome the self-directed homophobia their churches instilled in them.

To begin this research--in which we eventually plan to go into religious institutions and member families to see for ourselves what they do--we recruited students for focus groups. Ideally, given our assumption of complexity, we would have conducted focus groups with each of the different constituencies we have identified: black, white, Latino, Asian, Christian, Muslim--groups of men and women for each constituency, at least sixteen groups. With limited resources, we could only afford six focus groups, and we recruited into categories that were more heterogeneous than would have been ideal, including the three groups that we draw on for this paper: Latinos, Latinas, and Muslim women.

The Latino group was very heterogeneous, with 3 self-identified Mexican-origin students, one Guatemalan, one Puerto Rican, one foreign student from Peru, and one of mixed Navajo-Latino parentage. Among the Latinos were one outspoken Pentecostal, two devoted Catholics, one who was religiously uninvolved (at least temporarily) but not atheistic, a student of comparative religion, and two outspoken anti-clericals. As you can imagine, there was much discussion, much of it derived from book learning rather than the experiences we were trying to tap, and little consensus, and we shall not have much to say from this group. But the Latina group was much more homogeneous, with seven of eight participants saying they had been "raised Catholic" and most having self-identified Mexican origins. (The other was a Puerto Rican Protestant.) And the group of Muslim women were relatively homogeneous, six of the eight Muslim women stemming from Indo-Pakistani immigrant families while another was Palestinian. Despite a theological dispute within the Muslim group between these second-generation Sunni Muslims and the lone African-American Muslim, who was a member of the Nation of Islam, both groups of women shared a great deal of personal experience on the issues that concerned us and they manifested much agreement, no doubt as much consensus as we could have attained had we recruited on narrower criteria.(1)

Let us begin the report from these focus groups with the Muslim women, of whom there were eight, all of whom had been informed that the group would consist of Muslim women. After telling them the ground rules--including the encouragement that "everyone here is the world's leading expert on themselves"--and asking them to identify themselves and their ethnic or national backgrounds, the moderator, Sharon Feldman, started the discussion by asking the participants to "tell me a little bit about the role of religion in the way you grew up, the kinds of things you did as a family, centered around religion."

The first person to volunteer had identified herself as the daughter of immigrants from India--we will call her Nusrat(2) --and she sounded a theme that informed the rest of the hour-long discussion. "For me, I know that when we grew up, my family - they really put culture more into our lives than religion" (italics added). The tape soon becomes uninterpretable as other second-generation Indian women jumped into the discussion, but it was clear that Nusrat's distinction between religion and culture had sounded a responsive chord. Soon, Layla, the self-identified Palestinian woman, also the daughter of immigrants, spoke of her experience in nearly identical terms. "Like them [referring to the Indian women who had already chimed in], when I was growing up, everything was culture more so than religion. I knew I was a Muslim, but we didn't really do much. Nobody in my house prayed or anything like that." She knew she was different from her suburban neighbors by reason of being an Arab as well as a Muslim but felt deprived that her family did not celebrate Christmas.

Nusrat and Layla agreed on another aspect of this distinction that wound up carrying the day, the idea that in the nexus of religion and culture, religion represented the youths' striving for self-determination. Immediately after characterizing her upbringing as more cultural than religious, Nusrat said of herself and her sister, "But as we grew up, we started to look and search on our own," and they came to identify more with the religion. Layla, who was sent to an Islamic school beginning in the 6th grade, said she found religion on her own. "Religion didn't come into my home until I started accepting the religion and started learning. Then my parents started practicing and my brothers and sisters kind of too." Only when the family began to observe religious practices did she realize that as Muslims they had their own special holidays and didn't need Christmas; that freed her from envying the neighbors and gave her the experience of autonomy.

Noticing that four of these women wore a head covering--the "hijab"--and the others did not, Sharon, the moderator, asked the women how they felt about this matter, and they spoke about it in terms of the same theme of adult autonomy. Layla, the Palestianian, said that the decision to wear hijab was hers alone; her mother's generation did not cover. "When I did start wearing it everyone in my family discouraged it, because I was very young and stubborn. So I kept it on. I believed in it. I had learned about the religion. My parents didn't really teach me you have to cover, you have to do that, so when I learned about it I accepted it. As I got older I got to understand it more." Another of the Indian women spoke in similar terms: "It wasn't really taught to me. My Mom doesn't wear it, my grandma doesn't wear it. No one wears it. But I found out. I researched, I talked to people. Just one day it hit me and I decided to wear it." She added that the hijab prevents her "from being taken as an object" and allows her "to be taken for what's inside, not what's on the outside." Even those who were not covered tended to agree with these rationales, saying that hijab represents a principle of self-control and modesty of demeanor that directs attention to what is essential and away from what is superficial; yet some of them felt they were not yet ready for the "responsibility" that wearing hijab entails, given that it identifies the wearer as a representative of the Muslim community.

Throughout this discussion, "culture" was said to be the way one lived as a dependent child and coded as inferior, whereas "religion" and religious practice were things one chooses, a domain of autonomous determination, and superior. In the immigrant families (all but one of) these women were raised in, they can appeal to "religion" to trump parental demands that are seen as narrowly "cultural," for example, the attempt to arrange a marriage without the consent of the bride. Acknowledging an Islamic prohibition on "dating" (construed as premarital heterosexual physical contact), these women nonetheless maintained an Islamic right to choose their husbands. As Layla put it, "There are some cultures that do arrange marriages, but that's not an Islamic thing. I think that's cultural. . . . I don't plan on being arranged with anyone. I will choose my spouse." And Nusrat agreed: "[I]n Islam, the women has--if my parents came to me and said ‘marry this person.’ If I said no, there's no way in Islam they--they can't force me to marry that person. The woman's consent is ultimate in that."

As we had planned, Sharon explicitly tried to turn the discussion toward what might possibly be negative about the role of religion in these women's lives, but the response remained in the same vein. Any negatives attributed to Islam were due to ignorance on the part of the observer, not to the essence of the religion. As we analyzed the tape, a whole series of such oppositions emerged. "Religion" pertains to what is cosmopolitan, enlightened, and conducive to autonomy. Whatever is parochial, benighted, or driven by obsequiousness to public opinion is attributed to "culture." Even when critical observations were made about the local Muslim Student Association--for example an incident in which a woman's attempt to question the (male) presenter of the khutbah (sermon) was actively discouraged by her sisters at prayer--they were attributed to the ignorance, immaturity, or recent immigration of the malfeasants, not to Islam, the Qur'an, or the Prophet, all of which were said to embody perfection. In this story line, not all cultures were said to be the alike. In particular Layla addressed matter of respect for education, which she said was greater in the Indian cultures of the other participants than in her own Arab culture. "[I]n Arab culture, it [education] is more important for guys than for girls just because of the culture. The culture is like that. The culture is messed up." In the sense that nothing negative adhered to Islam for these women, we say it has the advantages of an ideological "teflon."

Only one of the Muslim women demurred from this interpretive line, Deena, whose family came from Pakistan. Early in the discussion, she noted that "Islam purports itself as not being a religion but as being a lifestyle. . . . It invaded every area of life. . . ." Later, she reiterated the point. "I guess you can't break apart the religion and culture," and she upheld both her religion and her culture as a "value system" or "lifestyle" in contrast to "American culture," which she said is "in a horrible state of degradation in various ways." For Deena, insofar as religion and culture are both group phenomena--and she spoke of Muslim student groups at UIC as "cliquish"--they promote conformist thinking and narrow-mindedness. For herself, Deena said, "I'm more into the spiritual part than the religious part. I think spirituality is the essence of the religion.(3)" She said she needed no reminder that she represents the Muslim community. "I have a system of ethics that I believe in and I have to follow that." Nonetheless, Deena said she felt a bond with the other women, a bond that she affirmed is a religious one, that of Islam.

1.We conducted three other focus groups, of African-American women, all of whom were Christian, "other" women, who were Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, Buddhist, and Sikh, and "other" men, who were Protestant, Catholic, Hindu, Baha'i, and atheist. The focus groups were conducted in April 1997. Sharon Feldman, of the UIC Prevention Research Center, was the professional moderator. Martel worked with the participants as administrator and recruiter, and they knew she was watching behind the one-way mirror during the discussion itself. They did not see or interact with Warner, who never emerged from behind the mirror. Each participant was paid $25 and a coke-and-pizza snack provided for all.
2.All names of participants are pseudonyms
3.Deena's way of speeking is reminiscent of Roof's "generation of speskers" (Roof 1993, pp.76-79) and the long-standing American evangelical discourse for which "religion" is what other people do.

Continue: Part II

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