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), 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical theory
• identity
• inclusion
• racial discrimination
• curriculum studies

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Heba Elsherief, Wael El-Dakhakhni and the editorial team at Curriculum Inquiry for their invaluable feedback.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Throughout the essay, I refer to Western Muslims as people who live in the West of Muslim faith. Although the majority of Muslims are not Arab. However, I include Arabs in the permeable category of Arab/Muslim on the basis of being racialized due to “guilt by association” with the Muslim world. Arab Christians, Jews and followers of other religions considered to be minorities in the region get the short end of the stick both in the “Arab World”, where they are often targeted, and their rights are denied; and in the West, where their guilt by association is the result of a popular imagination that does not realize that there are non-Muslim Arabs.

2. A recent example would be the 2015 White House summit on “Countering Violent Extremism” that only engaged with Muslim extremism as a social problem.

3. Asad's impression in the 1920's of Indigenous Palestinians “people of the land, people who had grown out of its soil and its history and were one with the surrounding air” (p.90) is reminiscent of Indigenous relationship to Land: “Land is a spiritually infused place grounded in interconnected and interdependent relationships, cultural positioning, and is highly contextualized” (Styres & Zinga, 2013, p. 300–301).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucy El-Sherif

Lucy El-Sherif is a PhD student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto. Her research interests include pedagogies of citizenship, identity, intersectionality, anti-racism, settler colonial studies, decolonization and anti-colonial/post-colonial theory.