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Non-threatening Muslim Men: Stigma Management and Religious Observance in America

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Abstract

In Western contexts, the social identities of Muslim men pose a persistent predicament. Yet few studies have conceptualized the ways in which these identities are negotiated in encounters with non-Muslim publics. In this study, I examine how Muslim men experience, interpret, and cope with anti-Islamic attitudes by analyzing in-depth interviews with twenty-six young observant Muslims living in the midwestern United States. I find that participants use a combination of embodied, relational, situational, and gender-signifying strategies to manage interactions with non-Muslim audiences. Using a dramaturgical framework, I conceptualize these strategies as allaying embodiment, venial accommodation, and claiming normality, and distinguish each in terms of individual adherence and collaborative appeals to prevailing gender norms in American culture. This conciliatory course of action suggests that Muslims’ experiences of stigma are contoured by (a) an awareness of and ability to confront deviant gender displays, and (b) the physical, relational, discursive, and situational intrusions of these displays—the vicinity of stigma. The implications of this research for how stigmatized groups confront and reconcile in-group/out-group gender expectations are also discussed.

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Notes

  1. Participant ethnicities included Arab, Azeri, Bengali, Pashtun, Persian, and Punjabi. Participant nationalities encompassed countries in the Middle East and South Asia, including Pakistani, Indian, Iranian, Saudi Arabian, and Palestinian.

  2. F1 visas are a specific type of non-immigrant F visas that allow foreign students to pursue their education in the U.S., so long as they maintain full time status. For more details, see The ABC’s of Immigration – F3 and M3 Non-immigrant Visas – August 18, 2003. http://www.visalaw.com/immigration-resources/abcs-of-immigration/. Accessed January 14, 2014.

  3. The other participants attended the MSAs as a way to reconnect with their peers in the community, but admitted to being fickle in their participation. In these cases, school and job-related pressures, individual insecurities, and family concerns about their level of involvement were cited as reasons.

  4. As a second-generation Iranian-American, I was accepted by participants as someone wise to their situations and given access to settings and events generally closed to outsiders (e.g., Friday Prayers and MSA meetings).

  5. At the time of the interview, each person was handed an information sheet stating the purpose, procedures, and risks of this study and an informed consent form to be signed and returned to me.

  6. The names of all participants are pseudonyms or fake names. To facilitate member-checking, I allowed each participant to choose their names. Less than a third chose to do so, leaving the remaining pseudonyms up to me.

  7. For example, Imam Hanifah, Imam Malik, Imam Ash-Shafi’i, Imam Ahmad ibn Hanbal (Khalilullah 2011).

  8. Of the 12 men interviewed, nine mentioned shaving without prompts or probing questions.

  9. In Islam, the concept of “shirk” refers to actions that directly undermine the unity of God (Aslan 2006).

  10. Islamic principle of qawwam defines men’s roles in terms of breadwinning (see Brekke 2012, 257)

  11. There were two main audiences in this regard: discrete audiences, channeled through media and policy discourses, and immediate audiences, those encountered face-to-face. Though participants blamed discrete audiences for manufacturing and perpetuating stereotypes about gender in Islam, their focus and concerns remained with immediate audiences. It was in mixed-contacts wherein these stereotypes would be tested, and that certain gender displays could influence the attitudes and reactions of others.

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Dr. Joane Nagel, Dr. Robert Antonio, Dr. Eric Hanley, and Dr. Reza Aslan for their valuable input and steadfast support of this research, the anonymous reviewers for their keen comments and helpful critiques, the U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language and Areas Studies (FLAS) program for facilitating this study through fellowships awarded to the author, and my interview participants for their bold willingness to share intimate and thought-provoking accounts. A preliminary version of this paper was presented at the Midwest Sociological Society annual meeting (2016) in Chicago, IL.

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  1. Department of Sociology, University of Kansas, 716 Fraser Hall, 1415 Jayhawk Blvd, Lawrence, KS, 66045, USA

    Pooya S. D. Naderi

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Naderi, P.S.D. Non-threatening Muslim Men: Stigma Management and Religious Observance in America. Qual Sociol 41, 41–62 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11133-018-9372-4

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