Keeping It Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys

217 Pages·2017·1.35 MB·English

by  John O’Brien

KEEPING IT HALAL
Keeping It Halal
The Everyday Lives
of Muslim American
Teenage Boys
John O’Brien
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON AND OXFORD
Copyright © 2017 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press,
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press,
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press. princeton. edu
Jacket illustration, lettering, and design by Amanda Weiss
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: O’Brien, John ( John Hofman), 1973- author.
Title: Keeping it Halal : the everyday lives of Muslim American teenage boys / John O’Brien.
Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references
and index.
Identifers: LCCN 2016058249 | ISBN 9780691168821 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Muslim youth—United States—Social conditions. | Muslim men—United
States—Social conditions. | Muslims—Cultural assimilation—United States. | United
States—Race relations.
Classifcation: LCC E184.M88 O27 2017 | DDC 305.6/97073—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016058249
British Library Cataloging- in-P ublication Data is available
Tis book has been composed in Adobe Text Pro
Printed on acid- free paper. ∞
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Hamza, Nailah, and Shazia. Your Dad loves you.
For Ed O’Brien (1945–2015). I love you, Dad.
CONTENTS
Preface: Finding Everyday Muslim American Lives ix
1 Te Culturally Contested Lives of Muslim Youth
and American Teenagers 1
2 “Cool Piety”: How to Listen to Hip Hop
as a Good Muslim 22
3 “Te American Prayer”: Islamic Obligation
and Discursive Individualism 50
4 “Keeping It Halal” and Dating While Muslim:
Two Kinds of Muslim Romantic Relationships 78
5 On Being a Muslim in Public 112
6 Growing Up Muslim and American 149
Appendix: Te Legendz 169
Acknowledgments 171
Notes 177
References 183
Index 191
vii
PREFACE: FINDING EVERYDAY
MUSLIM AMERICAN LIVES
Tis is a book about young Muslim men growing up in the United
States. It is not a book—n ot directly, anyway—a bout the Islamic
State, Al-Q aeda, radicalization, or terrorism.
Why do I feel the need to make this point right away? Because,
according to a recent nationally representative survey, almost half
of the American people still believe that there is an inherent as-
1
sociation between Islam and violence. Afer being consistently
bombarded with news coverage and political discourse in which
Muslims and terrorism are almost always linked, and with precious
few counternarratives or corrective experiences to draw upon, many
Americans assume that when we talk about Muslims we must also be
talking about issues of terrorism and militant violence. Te complex
and dynamic reality of Muslim American lives is (of course) much
broader, deeper, and richer than this narrow and security-o bsessed
view allows.
Guided by the traditions of sociological ethnography, this book
takes a fne-g rained and long- term look at the lives of a group of Mus-
lim American youth growing up together in the early twenty-f rst
century. In telling the story of these Muslim American young men,
the book seeks to broaden the analytical frame, to look beyond the
default issues of radicalization, terrorism, and even Islamophobia
and instead ground the analysis in the set of issues and concerns
most central to young Muslim American men themselves. Te result
is a book that reports on the real experience of growing up Muslim
and male in the contemporary United States, an experience primar-
ily centered on managing the competing cultural demands of reli-
gious Islam on the one hand and American teen life on the other and
ix