From The Christian Science Monitor
Islam in America: A new generation of Muslim Americans separate what is cultural, what is religious, and what is American, finding that the ‘straight path’ isn’t the same path for all.
By Lee Lawrence, Correspondent / February 16, 2014
Listening to immigration attorney Muna Jondy talk about growing up in Flint, Mich., it’s easy to imagine her as a teenager, eyes ablaze, hands on hips, confronting her Syrian-born parents with her all-American attitude. A petite woman with a strong, expressive face, she sits cross-legged on her couch and leans forward to recount the day, at age 13, that she wanted to go to the movies with a friend.
Ms. Jondy says her mother, a devout Muslim, responded “like I had asked to snort cocaine.” She was incredulous, and Jondy recalls her asking: “Did you just ask that? Did you just say that out loud?”
Jondy had already started to cover her hair with a head scarf out of modesty. She never questioned the family’s dietary restrictions. She prayed faithfully, and duringRamadan she fasted. But not go to the movies at the mall with her female friends? She balked: “Really? Is that Arab or is that Islam?”
Going to the movies is “just for loose people,” her mother replied.
“Maybe in the Middle East way back in your day,” Jondy thought.
She might be Arab by ethnicity, “but this does not define me,” Jondy told herself. And ever since, she has parsed family beliefs, separating cultural expectations from religious tenets.
In this respect, Jondy is typical of the largest and fastest-growing demographic of Muslim Americans: the 59 percent who are between the ages of 18 and 39. This includes many who have come of age in the United States and are as culturally American as the 37 percent of adult Muslims who, like Jondy, were born here and are, in turn, raising American-born children.
Nevertheless, the perception of Muslim as “other” – and a dangerous or suspicious other, at that – persists, stoked by post-9/11 insecurities. One of the reasons is that most Americans know little about Islam and, in many cases, don’t know a Muslim personally. When they do, stereotypes fall away, revealing a diverse and dynamic population that is doing what Americans have historically done: figuring out how to be themselves.
