Research
It all started when…
In a two-family house situated in Queens, New York, a little girl sat reading words from a sacred text, squeezing her eyes shut in an attempt to sear them onto her memory. Words that held no true meaning to her but which she knew were of great importance, as her parents referred to them constantly. Born to a West African immigrant father and an American mother with Pan-African leanings, one would expect that the little girl's eyes would beam a confidence reflective of a luminous historical legacy, a self-assuredness compounded from a rich concoction of gender, race, culture, religion, and nationality. However, when she opened them, not a trace of such an elixir was detected. Instead, there she sat, an African-American Muslim girl, swirling internal chaos gathering inside, lacking a true understanding of the meaning of the words she had parroted. She passed through her years of education, gradually becoming an expert in ignoring the swirling chaotic confusion, a dim sense of ignorant familiarity. However, determined to address this ignorance and attend to teachers from countries who didn’t understand the context in which she grew up, lived, and continued to exist dictate her identity, one winter day, now a young woman, she emptied her bank account, and found herself at Cairo International Airport.
I remained in Cairo, the seat of religious education in Egypt, for close to two years, studying Arabic and other Islamic sciences. My interaction with the people and their culture enabled me to obtain a deeper understanding of the language and caused me to reflect on my own American culture and how religious practice attends to tradition as well as sociocultural context. It wasn't until the last semester of my master’s studies that the discord would begin to take on definable form. In a research methods course, I struggled to find a topic to analyse for my final project. I kept remembering the words of the professor, “find something that matters to you.” I began a process of reflection over the varied events of my personal, professional, and educational experiences and travels. Having only recently returned from a year and a half in Cairo, where I studied Arabic and other Islamic sciences, I thought back to the centres and institutes, their objectives, teacher-student relationships and methods of knowledge. Suddenly, the image of that little girl with her eyes shut trying to memorise Quranic verses became seared on the inner screen of my mind's eye. In a flash of intuition, the little girl's future projection drew a causal line connecting the effect of the shared sense of internal chaos to rote method of knowledge acquisition; a mere parroting of internally meaningless words, externally meaningful by scholars without any context to identity construction in America. “Yes, this must be the cause,” I intuited.
I scoured Islamic education in the American context and was frustrated by the dearth of material that addressed the authority of these scholars and the content of what they taught. With these findings in mind, I began to construct my thesis, working to bring my study area—computing in education—into contact with religious education and identity formation. I was prompted to take a look at the ways in which knowledge was traditionally acquired as I delved deeper into the ways in which technology is used to teach Muslims, contributing to identity development in a post-9/11 world.
About the Book
Drawing on immersive fieldwork in the United States, Canada, and Turkey, this ethnographic exploration illuminates the transformative experiences of emerging adult Muslims on their quest for religious knowledge. This book unravels the significance of four residential learning settings, revealing their role as catalysts for reshaping Islamic tradition. Delving into the interplay between technology’s pervasive influence and the decentralized nature of Islamic interpretation, I unveil a vibrant tapestry of knowledge producers vying to shape religious understanding and practice among Western Muslims.
At the heart of this narrative lies the delicate balance between teachers and students, continuously communicating and recalibrating components that bring religious authority to life. I dissect this relationship, highlighting the emergence of a complex landscape that she terms the ‘Muslim Education Industrial Complex’, where religious knowledge has become a commodity.
This study offers profound insights into the challenges of intra-Muslim dialogue and the adaptive resilience of American Sunni-Muslim communities. Amidst a digital age and the complexities of global geopolitics surrounding Islam, it showcases how these communities reinterpret classical Islamic narratives, navigating tradition to steer their path forward. I invite readers to ponder the evolution of Islamic learning, the dynamics of authority, and the enduring quest for knowledge amidst the currents of a rapidly changing world.