Abstract
The institutional accommodation of Muslim religious practice has posed a challenge to American college campuses. The installation of footbaths (used by Muslims to wash their feet before prayer) at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, in 2007 drew heated protest, as did Harvard University’s decision to grant Muslim women’s request for women-only gymnasium hours in 2008. At the same time, the presence of spaces in which Jewish students can practice religious rituals has not raised similar questions about the separation of church and state on these same campuses. This is because historical differences in the immigration experiences of Jewish and Muslim communities in the United States have meant that Muslims and Jews negotiate group identity differently on campuses. The overt nature of anti-Semitism on American campuses in the early twentieth century meant that Jews in higher education found ways to protect religious observance and promote group advocacy without relying solely on university funds. Today, privately funded Jewish groups such as Hillel are able to create spaces for Jewish religious observance without needing to use university funds to do so. Conversely, the relatively new presence of Muslims in institutions of higher education and the steep rise in anti-Muslim sentiment since the attacks of 9/11 have meant that Muslim student groups formulate methods of advocacy on campuses that appeal to the protection of institutional structures.
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Notes
See, for instance, Marzia Chowdhury, “The Fight for Footbaths at UM-D,” Muslim Media News Network, October 11, 2007, muslimmedianetwork.com/mmn/?p=1395, retrieved October 10, 2009. See also Tamar Lewin, “Universities Install Footbaths to Benefit Muslims, and Not Everyone is Pleased,” New York Times (August 7, 2007), www.nytimes.com/2007/08/07/education/07muslim.html?_r=1, retrieved November 8, 2009.
This parallel has been drawn by Becky Miller in “What’s the Big Deal over Footbaths?” [Weblog entry], Preemptive Karma (May 2, 2007), www.preemptivekarma.com/archives/2007/05/whats_the_big_d.html, retrieved October 10, 2009.
See, for instance, Debbie Schlussel, “So Long Church/State Separation: University of Michigan to Fund Muslim Footbaths” (May 30, 2007), www.debbieschlussel.com/1347/exclusive-solong-churchstate-separation-university-of-michigan-to-fund-muslim-footbaths/, retrieved May 7, 2010.
For an analysis in popular media about Harvard University’s women-only gymnasium hours, see Bob Considine, “Harvard Gym Restriction Stirs Controversy: To Accommodate Muslim Women, University Sets Aside ‘No Men’ Time,” MSNBC (March 10, 2008), www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23556551/, retrieved November 8, 2009.
There is also a body of literature that historicizes the presence of Muslim practices among black communities. See, for instance, Clifton E. Marsh, From Black Muslims to Muslims: The Transition from Separatism to Islam, 1930–1980 (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1984).
See also Harold Cruse, Plural but Equal: A Critical Study of Blacks and Minorities and America’s Plural Society (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1987), 232–236. Like Cruse, I view the Nation of Islam as a local movement that emerged against racist practices in America. This is why I have chosen not to include it in my analysis of Muslim immigration practices and campus politics in the early twentieth century.
For an analysis of Jewish immigration to the United States, see Calvin Goldscheider, “Immigration and the Transformation of American Jews: Assimilation, Distinctiveness, and Community,” Immigration and Religion in America: Comparative and Historical Perspectives, Richard Alba, Albert J. Raboteau, and Josh DeWind, eds. (New York and London: NYU Press, 2009), 198–223. For an analysis of Muslim immigration to the United States, see, in the same volume, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, “The Shaping of Arab and Muslim Identity in the United States,” 246–276. I rely on the work of both of these authors for the argument I make regarding the difference between Jewish and Muslim negotiations of ethnic and religious identity.
For a thorough analysis of Jewish students and anti-Semitism at elite American Universities, see Jerome Karabel, “Status-Group Struggle, Organizational Interests, and the Limits of Institutional Autonomy: The Transformation of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 1918–1940,” Theory and Society Vol. 13, No. 1 (January 1984), 1–40.
See Winton U. Solberg, “The Early Years of Jewish Presence at the University of Illinois,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation Vol. 2, No. 2 (Summer 1992), 215–249.
For the formulation of a Judeo-Christian heritage as Cold War rhetoric, see Michelle Mart, “The ‘Christianization’ of Israel and Jews in 1950s America,” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation Vol. 14, No. 1 (Winter 2004), 109–146.
See William Marra, “Muslim Student Groups Turn to Jewish Organizations for Inspiration: Cash-strapped Muslim Student Groups Learning about Organizing from Hillel,” ABC News (August 8, 2007), abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=3459548&page=1, retrieved July 8, 2010. According to this report, the international budget for Hillel is sixty-six million dollars.
For an analysis of ethnicity among Muslim groups, see Karen Leonard, “South Asian Leadership of American Muslims,” Muslims in the West: From Sojourners to Citizens, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 233–249.
For a summary of the conference, see Mumina Kowalski, “Muslim Chaplains: Challenges, Opportunities, and the Road Ahead,” September 1, 2005, www.isna.net/Leadership/pages/ First-Annual-Muslim-Chaplain-Conference.aspx, retrieved November 25, 2009.
Sherman Jackson argues that the wave of Muslim immigrants into America in the late 1970s meant that it was their voices rather than those of black American Muslims that came to dominate public discourse and representations of Islam in America. See “Preliminary Reflections on Islam and Black Religion,” Muslims’ Place in the American Public Square: Hopes, Fears, and Aspirations, Zahid H. Bukhari, Sulayman S. Nyang, Mumtaz Ahmed, and John L. Esposito, eds. (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2004), 201–221.
While a full discussion of campus politics between black Muslims and Muslim immigrants is outside the scope of this essay, I would venture that the involvement of African Americans in the Civil Rights Movement was based on shared experiences of racial discrimination. This would mean that Muslim identity would play a secondary role in the affiliations of black Muslims. Furthermore, the role played by racial prejudices among immigrants to America toward African Americans cannot be discounted. See Bruce Lawrence, New Faiths, Old Fears: Muslim and Other Asian Immigrants in American Religious Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), 20–21, 80–84.
See Karen Bouffard, “Muslims Won’t Fund Footbaths,” Detroit News (June 18, 2007), pluralism.org/news/view/16707, retrieved November 25, 2009.
The phenomenon of an ethnicity-free Islam has been discussed at length. See Mohamed Nimer, “Muslims in American Public Life,”, Muslims in the West, 169–186. See also Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, “The Dynamics of Islamic Identity in North America,” Muslims on the Americanization Path?, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and John Esposito, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 19–46.
At the same time, alliances with Jewish organizations exist in an uneasy space between collaboration and conflict. See Karen B. Leonard, “American Muslim Mobilize: Campus Conflicts in Context,” Centre for Minority Studies, History Department, Royal Holloway University of London, November 29, 2007, eprints.rhul.ac.uk/622/1/Karen_Leonard.AMERICAN_MUSLIMS_MOBILIZE.pdf, retrieved December 20, 2009. Leonard provides an analysis of Muslim mobilization on college campuses and relations with Jewish groups.
Matthew Goodman, “Falling in Love with Yiddish,” The American Scholar Vol. 69, Issue 3 (Summer 2000), 37–47.
The disappearance of Yiddish has been documented by Hasia Diner in The Jews of the United States, 1654–2000 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 241–243. I am grateful to Tony Fels for this reference.
Questions of collaboration across minority groups have been examined by Cheryl Greenberg in the context of Jewish and African American civil rights individuals and agencies, and I am grateful for her willingness to correspond with me as I thought through these questions. I am also grateful to Daniel Horowitz, my former professor at Smith College, for putting us in touch. See Cheryl Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006). Greenberg addresses the common obstacles that brought Jewish and black Americans together and how racial and class differences— obscured by a dialogue of shared suffering—eventually led to a parting of ways. It is precisely this obscuring of context that hampers constructive collaboration between Muslims and Jewish students on campus. Their religious practices may be similar, but their positions within broader structures of privilege are markedly different, as are the historical processes by which their communities have engaged with such structures.
For an article about Muslim academics at Jesuit institutions, see Thomas Michel, “An Unusual Partnership: Islamic Academics at Jesuit Universities,” America: The National Catholic Weekly (September 15, 2008), www.americamagazine.org/content/article.cfm?article_id=11038, retrieved December 21, 2009.
For a brief account of Sarmad, see Nathan Katz, “The Identity of a Mystic: The Case of Sa’id Sarmad, a Jewish-Yogi-Sufi Courtier of the Mughals,” NUMEN: International Review for the History of Religions Vol. 47, No. 2 (2000), 142–160.
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© 2011 Reza Aslan and Aaron J. Hahn Tapper
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Zaman, T.R. (2011). Muslims, Jews, and Religious Visibility on American College Campuses. In: Aslan, R., Tapper, A.J.H. (eds) Muslims and Jews in America. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230119048_8
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