July 1, 2009
Chicago's Muslims in Their Own Voices: Lived Identity in the First Person
An outreach initiative of the University of Chicago's Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Part of the Social Science Research Council's "Islam and Muslims in World Contexts" grant program.
In March 2008, the University of Chicago's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and South Asian Language and Area Center (SALAC), both National Resource Centers which receive federal funding from the US Department of Education, received a grant from the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) to conduct an outreach project entitled "Chicago's Muslims in Their Own Voices: Lived Identity in the First Person." The principal goal of the project is to document the wide range of experience and outlook among American Muslims, focusing on those residing in the greater Chicago area. As a result, we recorded over 100 interviews with members of Chicago's extremely diverse Muslim communities, including people of South Asian, Arab, Persian, Turkish, Bosnian, Hispanic and African descent, as well as several Anglo-American converts. These interviews are relatively unstructured and have allowed the speakers to determine for themselves what they find important to articulate about their identity and experiences as Muslims residing in the United States the interviews we have recorded will be made accessible through a new website, chicagomuslims.uchicago.edu.
The purpose of this project is two-fold. First, we intended to enhance our capacity as university National Resource Centers focusing on the Middle East and South Asia to talk to the public about Muslims in the U.S. and in the Chicago area. In recent years, we had detected among those making contact with our Centers increasing interest in not only Muslims abroad, but also Muslims in the U.S. This project was part of a response to that demand, and we believe the interviews will prove to be a powerful tool for talking both to and about local Muslim communities. Second, and perhaps more importantly, this project contributes to our on-going efforts to complicate the public perception of Muslims by puncturing stereotypes and by encouraging an approach to thinking about Muslims that focuses on lived experience rather than proscriptive definitions.
Media images and the public conceptions of Muslims tend to be located along a dual axis. One of these is based on a proscriptive and theologically defined understanding of Islam, i.e., the so-called five pillars, the Quran, the Hadith, with an assumption that "being Muslim" means following strictly certain theological formulations. This attitude towards Muslim identity can be clearly seen in the way the media, when looking for Muslim voices or for someone who "represents" the Muslim community (as if there is only one) often go directly to the Imam of a local mosque. Not only does such a conception of Islam not take into account different traditions within the Muslim world, it does not take account at all of the fact that practice differs from proscription, and that many people who identify themselves as believing Muslims or indeed as cultural Muslims may not adhere to some or any of these norms. The second axis is a cultural and ethnic axis. In many public fora, Muslims are portrayed as recent — i.e., first or second generation-immigrants — generally of Middle Eastern background (by which most people understand Arabs), olive skinned, bearded or veiled, strongly religious, and conservative in their outlook. Such notions ignore and conceal the fact that many American Muslims do not have a Middle Eastern background and that many others who are of Middle Eastern descent have been in the U.S. for generations. It is a view of Muslims that especially misses the well-established Muslim community among African Americans as well as the important and growing number of American converts to Islam. And once again, it is a view that tends to highlight the visibly pious while leaving other Muslims in the shadows.
To summarize, our major goals include challenging popular stereotypes about who Muslims are (both the stereotypes held by non-Muslims and those held by Muslims), and also fostering a way of thinking about Muslims that incorporates the idea of "Muslim-ness" as a cultural orientation or identity (one that could include non-observant Muslims or even atheists) as well as a set of religious beliefs. In our interview process, therefore, we have taken great care not only to interview Muslims from different religious and ethnic communities in Chicago, but also individuals with a wide range of lifestyles and careers and with differing degrees of piety and belief.