Muslim American Youth

Central to this book are Muslim American youth at the dawn of the twenty-first century who are preoccupied by this conundrum, one that American Muslims have been grappling with for decades. What makes Islam belong to a place? Can Islam be an American religion without being compromised, diluted, assimilated? Living with both the possibility and the impossibility of Islam being an American religion, American Muslims have internalized what the great black scholar W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as double consciousness, "a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double classes, must give rise to double worlds and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretense or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism." [12] Through the journeys of American Muslim seekers abroad, through their studies, struggles, and soul-wrenching debates about their place in the US and in the world, Islam Is a Foreign Country offers an account of deeply religious and politically disaffected American Muslim youth. They are not "homegrown" terrorists, but they fit what has become the de facto profile of "radicalized" Muslim youth, in their opposition to the political status quo, their global vision of justice, their attachments to Muslims abroad, and their sense of alienation from the American mainstream. Perhaps it is their idealism that is most radical, the persistence with which they desire a home.

Zareena Grewal, Islam Is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority. (New York: NYU Press, 2014), 7.