Education,Citizenship,and the Politics of Belonging

Globalization, Transnationalism, and the Nation-State

The lives of youth from transnational communities must be understood in relation to critical questions about national belonging raised by contemporary global migration patterns. Transnational communities, along with modern technologies that facilitate the flow of goods, people, and information across borders, limit the salience of nation-states as organizing boundaries for people’s personal and political sense of belonging (Appadurai, 1996; Castles & Davidson, 2000; Suárez-Orozco, 2001; Yuval-Davis et al., 2005). However, even as the everyday experience of belonging is becoming more complex for young people who live their lives both imaginatively and physically across borders, nation-states remain intractable, powerful forces in their lives.

Nation-states regulate people’s belonging, both materially, by determining their access to a range of rights, and discursively, by linking these rights to inclusion in the imagined national community (Castles & Davidson, 2000; Hall, 2004; Soysal, 1998). Even as global migration challenges the salience of these imagined national communities, the boundaries of national belonging are continually being contested and remade through political and cultural discourses. The boundaries of national belonging change as different groups of people are included or excluded from the imagined community (Anderson, 1983/1991; Billig, 1995; Calhoun, 2005; Hall, 2002; Yuval-Davis et al., 2005). The work of maintaining an imagined national community is carried out, in part, through the practices of everyday nationalism that organize people’s sense of belonging to particular nation-states (Billig, 1995; Calhoun, 2005). Billig (1995) argues that nations reproduced themselves daily though practices he calls “banal nationalism . . . the ideological habits which enable established nations of the West to be reproduced in everyday life” (p. 6). After September 11, 2001, ⁴ these everyday habits took on new significance for youth from Muslim transnational communities living in the United States, as they had to consciously decide how to align themselves in relation to practices such as displaying flags or pledging allegiance in schools. At the same time, it is not only ideological habits that assert the boundaries of belonging to nation-states. Nation-states continue to exert significant power over people’s lives through governmental policies that regulate the rights of entry, work, and political participation. Our point is that even as youth from Muslim transnational communities live lives that cross real and imagined global boundaries, they do so in relation to the ongoing power of nation-states to regulate inclusion and exclusion through discursive constructions of belonging and through governmental policies and everyday practices of discrimination ( Abu El-Haj, 2007; Hall, 2002; Maira, 2004, 2009).

Imperialism

In this chapter, we also expand the frameworks within which youths’ lives have been understood to include imperial power (Abu El-Haj, 2010; Maira, 2009). It is beyond the scope of this chapter to discuss the extensive debates about imperialism. For our purposes, we are referencing the ways that the United States and European nations have exercised and continue to exercise military, economic, and political power on a global stage (see Justice, 2010; Khalidi, 2004; Maira, 2009; Mamdani, 2004). There has been little literature that uses imperialism as a framework for understanding the education of youth from Muslim transnational communities in today’s schools (see, for exceptions, Abu El-Haj, 2010; Maira, 2009). Imperialism must be considered in relation to both state policies (power and authority) and the cultural discourses that justify, and thus are intimately intertwined with, these state policies.

Understanding the war on terror as an expression of a new form of U.S. and European imperial power, we take its reach to be simultaneously global and local. Youth from Muslim transnational communities in the United States, as well as Canada and Europe, often are affected dually by the war on terror in the Middle East and Asia and by local manifestations of state surveillance, restrictions on civil liberties, detentions, and deportations. These young people are cognizant of, and some are affected directly by, the military and economic policies of Western nations globally. As they consume alternate media sources, speak with relatives and friends in the Middle East and South Asia, and travel, they often develop perspectives that are critical of Western policies. At the same time, they experience the local effects of governmental surveillance and disciplining of their communities. Thus, the lives of youth from Muslim transnational communities are influenced by imperial policies.

These state imperial policies are bolstered by a cultural discourse developed—as Said (1978) carefully explicated in his seminal work, Orientalism—over centuries of encounter between the West and the “Orient.” In its most recent iteration, the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis (Huntington, 1996; Lewis, 2002) argues that Islam and its putative “culture” are inimical to “Western” values. This thesis purports a fundamental difference between the liberal, democratic, and pluralist values of “Western” societies and antidemocratic, patriarchal, and even violent tendencies attributed to Islam. As a result of this pervasive cultural discourse, youth must navigate their everyday lives in families, communities, and schools in relation to these images of Islam, the Arab World, and South Asia as fundamentally repressive, antidemocratic, violent, and so forth.

We suggest that to understand the experiences of youth from Muslim trans-national communities—in schools and society—we must examine how the processes of globalization and imperialism take shape in their everyday lives. This does not mean positioning youth as simply acted on by these forces; rather, it implies exploring how young people negotiate membership, produce cultural forms, participate in politics, and so on, in relation to the local manifestations of these broader processes (Appadurai, 1996; Lukose, 2009).

Negotiating Multiple Identities

The ways that youth from Muslim transnational communities forge their sense of identity across multiple cultural worlds has been a primary focus in the research literature. An evaluation of this literature must consider the theoretical understandings of culture and identity that undergird the research design and analysis. Although, for the most part, the recent literature has recognized that the post–Cold War cultural politics of the “clash of civilizations” thesis and the current context of the war on terror create an environment in which one’s identity as a Muslim, Arab, or South Asian is likely to be experienced as being in conflict with one’s American, Canadian, or British identity, the research often take these identities at face value, exploring how youth make sense of their lives in relation to these multiple identities. Some of the literature adopts a view of these identities as tied into cultural systems that are treated as separate and bounded, positioning young people as navigating between often incompatible cultural divides (Sarroub, 2001, 2005; Zine, 2001). Even as these accounts describe how youth are actively constructing new identities at these crossroads, the research risks reinforcing notions of a fundamental clash between cultural systems. Other research attends to the post–September 11, 2001, political context in accounting for the ways that young people construct their religious/cultural identifications (Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Mondal, 2008; Sirin & Fine, 2008). This shift toward examining how identities come into being and take on meaning within particular historical, political contexts is of critical import to youth studies. We argue, however, that across the literature, the research often is designed such that it takes young people’s sense that they are negotiating between separate identities at face value rather than investigating the specific ways that claims of identity come to be taken up in particular local contexts in relation to the cultural politics of the war on terror.

The notion that youth are navigating cultural divides is most pronounced in recent literature that relies on research conducted before 9/11 (Sarroub, 2001, 2005; Zine, 2001). Although our concern here is to understand the impact of the post-9/11 context, we include these studies because they are illustrative of the frameworks that have dominated research on immigrant education, which focus primarily on processes of assimilation and acculturation for new communities (Hall, 2004; Suárez-Orozco, 2001). Zine’s (2001) research with Muslim Canadian youth and Sarroub’s (2001, 2005) ethnographic study with Yemeni American girls offer portraits of teenagers creatively negotiating the conflicting values, norms, and expectations of their religious/ethnic communities and those of the dominant Canadian and U.S. societies, respectively. Sarroub conducted an ethnographic study of Yemeni American girls and their literacy practices as they crossed the contexts of home, school, and the mosque. Sarroub argues that the girls found themselves living in “two worlds,” struggling to chart a course between “different ways of being”: the cultural world of their Yemeni homeland and the new world of the United States. Sarroub (2005) argues that the girls’ lives “illustrate that an inevitable clash [italics added] occurs at the intersection of U.S. republican values and the sociocultural practices of the Southend” (p. 44) in which families’ expectations, rituals and religious practices, early marriages, ongoing ties to Yemen, and the father’s lineage create a set of expectations at odds with the promises of academic achievement and careers in the United States. Connected to both worlds, but living fully in neither, Sarroub describes these young women as “sojourners” who carve out new imagined spaces between these conflicting cultures.

In an early study, Zine (2001) explores how 10 Muslim youth and their parents worked to sustain a Muslim identity within secular, Canadian public schools. Her research illustrates how these young people struggled to maintain siratal mustaqeem (the straight path)—an “Islamic lifestyle”—within dominant contexts in which expectations for teen behavior (such as drinking and dating) were at odds with those of their religious community. Similar to Sarroub (2001, 2005), Zine (2001) understands the boundaries of youth identities as contested and constructed, and she argues that young Muslims actively negotiated their identities in relation to the conflicting parameters of dominant (i.e., Canadian) and ethnic, religious, and cultural frameworks. Zine proposes that the work young Muslims did, individually and collectively, to actively commit to maintaining Islamic lifestyles reinforced their religious identifications that, in turn, helped them resist pressures for assimilation to dominant Canadian teenage norms. Zine’s work is sensitive to the discriminatory contexts of the public schools and the broader Canadian society, and she argues that Islamophobia—discrimination against Muslims—as well as racial discrimination interact to put these youth at risk for academic disengagement through, for example, placement in low-stream tracks. Zine argues that youths’ commitments to an “Islamic lifestyle” supported them to resist feelings of alienation and exclusion within these discriminatory contexts. Although she understands the assertion of Muslim identity to be an active form of resistance to these young people’s position as religious and racial/ethnic minorities in Canadian society, Zine implies that the boundaries of Islamic religious practices are clearly defined, unmediated by historical time, place, particular local practices, and so forth. She refers, for example, to “Islamic tradition” and “Islamic lifestyle” in ways that suggest these are given. The struggles of young Canadian Muslims to negotiate their identities are analyzed in terms of an active reaffirmation of their religious commitments, which protects against the influences of dominant Canadian culture.

Research that focuses on how youth from Muslim transnational communities fashion identities in relation to what are taken, a priori, to be clearly delineated, often conflicting cultural and religious values and traditions risks contributing to essentializing views of cultures. Moreover, this stance can inadvertently play into the “clash of civilizations” thesis that takes a static view of Islamic culture and society—a thesis that we must remember has held political sway since the end of the Cold War (Mamdani, 2004; Said, 2001). Research that explores the identities of youth from Muslim communities must be careful to acknowledge the dynamic and variable nature of all religious and cultural beliefs and practices. More important, the research must theorize the cultural politics—writ large and small—through which a sense of divide is created, resisted, and bridged in everyday discourse and practice. We must investigate youths’ struggles to establish or maintain a sense of cultural or religious authenticity or their feelings that they are negotiating between two different, sometimes conflicting, cultures, as products of sociohistorical processes and cultural politics—as ways that youth are positioning themselves and being positioned in relation to questions of identity, nation, and belonging (see also Kibria, 2007; Mamdani, 2004).

Hall’s (2002) research with British Sikh youth—a non-Muslim community—illustrates a different approach to studies of youth identities and offers us a useful theoretical perspective to bring to research conducted with youth from Muslim transnational communities. Hall argues that British Sikh youth described themselves as torn between cultures, even as they produced cultural forms that reflected the dynamic processes of cultural production. Her work cautions us against reading the conflicts that youth feel between cultures as simply or primarily an outcome of actual differences between cultures. Hall argues that youths’ felt sense of conflict between cultural identities must be understood as an outcome of the politics of nation formation in the United Kingdom and postcolonial relations. Hall investigates British Sikh youths’ lives across multiple contexts (home, school, and community) in relation to broader governmental policies of social incorporation for new immigrant communities from former colonial countries. In doing so, she shows how youths’ sense of contrast between identities is related to conflicts over belonging to an imagined British national community. By including the process of nation formation in her analysis, Hall employs a framework of cultural production that shifts away from a picture of youth forming identities within and against static cultural planes, toward a critical account of how youth identities are forged in the crucible of the politics of migration, globalization, and imperialism.

Several recent studies of Muslim youth identities align with Hall’s (2002) more dynamic theoretical framework, examining how September 11, 2001, reshaped religion as a primary focus for identification for these young people (Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Mondal, 2008; Sirin & Fine, 2008). These studies illustrate the ways that “Muslim American” or “Muslim British” are identity categories around which Muslim youth from different ethnic, racial, and linguistic groups have recently been coming together for support and civic and political engagement. Thus, this work importantly acknowledges the ways that youth identities are flexible and emergent and are constructed within a particular sociopolitical context.

U.S. studies demonstrate that for youth from Muslim American transnational communities, post-9/11 encounters with discrimination and state surveillance of their communities often formed the backdrop against which they wrestled with the meaning of their multiple identities ( Abu El-Haj, 2007; Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Maira, 2004, 2009; Sirin & Fine, 2008). The tensions emerged from several sources. Many youth reported feeling the September 11, 2001, attacks as Americans, yet despite their resonance with the feelings of sadness and shock experienced across the country, they found their communities immediately marginalized and positioned as threatening outsiders. At the same time, many were critical of the United States’ decision to go to war in Afghanistan and Iraq with dire consequences for the majority Muslim populations in those countries. Several studies show that, as they responded to a context of heightened discrimination and the war on terror, youth from many different transnational communities felt compelled to identify more consciously as Muslim, highlighting religion above national or ethnic affiliations (Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Kibria, 2007; Sirin & Fine, 2008). Young people emphasized their identities as Muslims for multiple purposes, including creating collective safe spaces against a political climate that positioned them as threatening outsiders and educating the public about Islam and its positive contributions to a multicultural pluralist nation.

Overall, youth from Muslim transnational communities have also continued to identify as Americans despite the ways their communities have been positioned as outsiders to the imagined national community. However, there appears to be much more variability in the ways young people experienced and wrestled with their identities as Americans. Sirin and Fine (2008) conducted the largest research study with young Muslim Americans from immigrant communities in the New York metropolitan region (surveying 204 youth aged 12–25 years, leading focus groups, creating identity maps with a subset of those surveyed, and conducting six life history interviews). Examining how youth navigate hyphenated identities, their analysis concludes that a majority developed what they call “integrated paths—skillfully melding their ‘Muslim’ and ‘mainstream U.S.’ cultures” (Sirin & Fine, 2008, p. 141). A smaller group lived in ‘parallel worlds’ traversing between two compartmentalized lives as Muslims and American but comfortably were figuring how to build bridges between them. Only a small number of their participants expressed conflict between their identities as Muslims and as Americans. In contrast, a study with South Asian Muslim youth from professional families living in the Raleigh–Durham, North Carolina, area reported that many of the young people experienced significant struggle and ambivalence around the possibility of inhabiting both Muslim and American identities (Ewing & Hoyler, 2008). Importantly, the youth did not view their struggles as an outcome of the kind of cultural divide described by Sarroub (2001, 2005) and Zine (2001). The young people did not feel conflict between what they perceived to be dominant American, and their religious and ethnic cultural practices; rather, they wrestled with their experiences of social exclusion and drew self-consciously on their identities as both Muslims and as Americans to claim a public space for themselves in the social and political landscape. In fact, across the literature, there is evidence that many youth from Muslim transnational communities draw on their identities as Americans to demand inclusion and justice—a point to which we will return in our discussion of youth citizenship ( Abu El-Haj, 2007; Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Sirin & Fine, 2008).

However, there is also evidence that for some communities, particularly working-class Pakistani and Bangladeshi immigrants, youth are asserting Muslim/ethnic identities in opposition to American identities (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Kibria, 2007). Importantly, both studies show that young people are actively constructing a sense of an “authentic” Muslim/ethnic identity in response to the ways that they have been positioned as outsiders to the imagined national community. These young people’s sense of conflict between their religious/cultural identities and the broader American community is analyzed in relation to the cultural politics through which this conflict is constructed and mediated rather than being attributed to fundamental cultural clashes. Thus, again young people’s forms of identification are intimately linked with citizenship practices, which we discuss in detail below.

Studies of British Muslim youths’ identities offer a useful comparison with studies of Muslim youth in the United States, showing similar tensions and resolutions (Lewis, 2007; Mondal, 2008). British Muslims have faced long-term struggles for social, economic, and political inclusion in the context of decolonization; nevertheless, the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, the July 7, 2005, bombings of the London Underground, and the United Kingdom’s participation in the war on terror intensified questions about inclusion for their communities. Similar to their counterparts in the United States, British Muslim youth appear to be asserting the importance of their religious identities over and above their ethnic affiliations, in comparison with their parents’ generation (Kibria, 2007; Lewis, 2007; Mondal, 2008). The literature on British Muslim youth identities emphasizes the range of ways that these young people are defining and negotiating the meaning and parameters of what it means to be Muslim through expressions of pop culture, online communities, and religious practices. Through these expressions of religious identity, many young British Muslims are joining across ethnic lines to develop a collective identity from which, as we discuss below, they are demanding greater participation in the democratic polity.

Read collectively, these studies suggest that, overall, young Muslims in the United States and United Kingdom are navigating a sense of belonging to these societies, not without conflict but with more facility than often described in the popular imagination. Many Muslim youth see no conflict between their identities as Muslims and as Americans or Britons. In fact, for these young Muslims, it is precisely their sense of being American or British—part of a democratic polity—that drives many to speak out against the injustices that their communities have faced since 9/11. The two studies that do find Bangladeshi (Kibria, 2007) and Pakistani (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009) youth asserting a religious identity in opposition to British or American identities show that these forms of identification are allowing young people to respond to experiences of racialized marginalization they face in their schools and communities. Although both studies describe an uncomfortable fit between Muslim and mainstream identities, they argue that the sense of opposition between what it means to be Muslim and American or British is constructed within the cultural politics of globalization, decolonization, and the war on terror.

To avoid slipping into perspectives that reinforce the “clash of civilizations” thesis, then, it is critical that research on youth identities investigates how these identities get enacted and inhabited locally in relationship to particular broader sociopolitical contexts and processes. Moreover, it is useful to resist a picture of Muslim and American, British, or other identities as existing on two ends of a continuum rather than thinking of them as overlapping fields within which young people position themselves differently, at different moments in time. In addition, it is important to examine how youth who identify as Muslims are actively engaging in a range of discourses and practices about the parameters of what being Muslim entails.

We suggest two considerations for future research about Muslim youth identities. Research must be careful not to presume that Muslim and mainstream national identities should be the primary axes for investigation. This dualist framework misses other important identifications that youth from transnational Muslim communities enact. As one example, Sirin and Fine (2008) focused their analysis on the dimensions of “Muslim” and “mainstream American” identities, and in doing so, they left open questions about other dimensions of identity that were salient to the youth. In fact, a careful read of their data indicates other important lines of identification, as young people talked about being “Palestinian” or “Pakistani” or “Arab American” and drew identity maps that featured flags and symbols of other kinds of national unity. These identifications warrant further investigation as we seek to understand how young people navigate belonging and citizenship in contemporary times. Abu El-Haj (2007), for example, has shown that for Palestinian American Muslim youth, their national identity—as members of an imagined Palestinian diasporic community—is highly salient, and it is their relationship with the struggle for a national homeland that centrally shapes their lives. Moreover, by framing research around questions of Muslim American identities, we may also fail to capture the experiences of youth who might have chosen nonreligious responses to the context of the war on terror. Overall, we call for more research that takes a grounded look at how discourses and practices around particular forms of identification emerge in specific local contexts, intimately bound up with national and global contexts. We need more ethnographic accounts that examine the complex ways that youth inhabit particular identities in specific contexts and interactions, and across time, not only through talk but also through actions and forms of cultural production (see, e.g., Abu El-Haj, 2007, 2009; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Hall, 2002; Lukose, 2009; Maira, 2009).

Gender and Islam

Much focus has been paid to the question of gender identities for Muslim youth. This focus cannot be divorced from the role that gender discourse plays in the cultural politics surrounding the war on terror. The dominant public political narratives about Islam frame gender relations among Muslims as primarily repressive and regressive—a product of outmoded cultural traditions. Importantly, these discourses coconstruct Muslim women as silent, passive, and victimized and “Western” women as agentic, free subjects. The pervasive claim that Muslim women need to be emancipated from their patriarchal societies has been mobilized to justify the U.S. war in Afghanistan and Iraq (Abu-Lughod, 2002; Haddad, Smith, & Moore, 2006; Zine, 2006). Zine (2006) shows how contemporary discourses are related to early Orientalist representations that rationalized imperial domination as a means to bring freedom for Muslim women. In the Orientalist imagination, the Muslim veil is the primary symbol of women’s oppression and subjugation (Haddad et al., 2006; Zine, 2006). Thus, the female body often becomes the icon around which the “clash of civilizations” hypothesis rallies (Abu El-Haj, 2010; Abu-Lughod, 2002; Haddad et al., 2006; Zine, 2006).

The practices through which gender relations are produced, negotiated, and contested in Muslim communities must be examined in relation to processes of imperialism, nationalism, and diaspora (Abu-Lughod, 1998). The bodies of women have often been sites through which, for example, the politics of nationalism (in anti-colonialist struggles) or ethnic preservation (in the context of migration) have been contested. Women (and their bodies) have often been the terrain on which colonized and oppressed people have reclaimed cultural rights, in part, through an assertion of an “authentic” identity. For example, as we discuss below, restrictions on girls’ sexuality can become a cultural boundary to create and maintain a distinction between Arab American culture and mainstream American culture, as a means to avoid assimilation (Ajrouch, 2004). However, women are also not simply pawns in anticolonial and antiassimilationist struggles. Muslim women, for example, have used the veil as a form of political identification and a means of resisting Eurocentric norms (Ben-Habib, 2002; Mushaben, 2008; Zine, 2006).

The research about gender and youth from Muslim communities can be characterized in terms of three, sometimes overlapping, themes that echo the patterns found in the literature on youth identities that we discussed above. One theme suggests that gender is a site through which youth are negotiating between “traditional Muslim” and “modern Western” cultural demands. Although this perspective investigates how youth construct new identities in relation to these two cultures, it also highlights cultural differences between “Muslim” and “Western” gendered practices (Sarroub, 2001, 2005; Zine, 2001). As noted above, this perspective is most pronounced in research that was conducted before September 11, 2001. Sarroub’s (2001, 2005) study of Yemeni American girls examines how the gendered practices of Yemeni culture, such as arranged marriages at a young age, the inability to pursue a college education, and the experience of being under surveillance by Yemeni boys and men in the community, were in direct conflict with school expectations for academic achievement and future education for girls. Similarly, Zine’s (2001) early study with eight Muslim Canadian students and their parents highlights how youth negotiated the different and conflicting expectations for gender interactions in Islam and the dominant culture. Both Zine (2001) and Sarroub (2001, 2005) show that the girls manage conflicting cultural expectations in creative ways, setting boundaries for public interaction to maintain their position as Muslim girls, even as they imagine alternate possibilities for their lives. Interestingly, Sarroub found that classrooms allowed for more interaction between girls and nonrelated boys because of the mediating role of teachers and the curriculum; however, ultimately the girls rejected postsecondary education and remained within the confines of their families’ cultural expectations. Importantly, these studies take girls’ agency seriously, exploring how they strategically navigate differing cultural expectations for gender relations. As we showed above, however, this approach fails to examine the cultural politics through which a sense of divide is created (and undone) in relation to broad sociohistorical processes and within particular everyday practices in local contexts.

A second theme in the research on Muslim gender identities explores the ways that young people are negotiating and enacting gender identities and practices in relation to the attempts by new immigrant communities to carve out forms of authenticity in these new contexts (Ajrouch, 2004; Zine, 2006). Ajrouch’s (2004) focus group study with Arab American youth highlights the roles of girls as the bearers of an “authentic” cultural identity. Youth maintained their sense of Arab American identity through a distinction they made between the ways that “White girls” and “Arab girls” act. Interestingly, these young men and women distanced themselves from recent immigrants whom they called “boaters”; nevertheless, they claimed a kind of authentic Arab American identity through the construction of particular forms of femininity and appropriate female behavior that were posited in opposition to the actions of White girls. In Ajrouch’s framework, restrictions on girls’ behavior must be understood as a social practice through which the boundaries of in-group membership emerge. Importantly, these social practices do not go unchallenged as some girls push back against these norms and expectations. Thus, Ajrouch shows how youth are actively constructing and contesting gendered practices as they work to resist assimilation and create a sense of identity and belonging in the United States.

A third approach reflected in Zine’s (2006) recent work (see also Mushaben, 2008) offers a more robust perspective, expanding beyond the theme of cultural identity to examine how Muslim girls’ gendered practices reflect struggles for citizenship in mainstream society. Analyzing data that she collected before 9/11 and showing how the emergent themes are echoed in the post-9/11 climate, Zine argues that Canadian Muslim adolescent girls attending Islamic school constantly worked against public discourses that positioned themselves outside the boundaries of Canadian citizenry and found ways to “negotiate the burden of representation and negative essentialism” (p. 246). At the same time, they wrestled with the dominant expectations within their Muslim school community that required the hijab as an expression of piety. Zine shows that most of the girls consciously chose to adopt the hijab as an expression of faith and spiritual freedom—a choice that held particular salience in the face of the broader context of Islamophobia. However, she argues that Muslim girls are constructing their gendered identities in relation to both the challenges of Canadian citizenship and patriarchal forms of social control within their religious community. Read together, the literature suggests that Muslim girls are simultaneously carving out legitimate cultural and political spaces for themselves— in school and society—and actively negotiating the parameters of what it means to be Muslim and female within their own families and communities.

Thus, studies of gender in relation to youth from Muslim transnational communities must be careful to analyze how young people’s gendered discourses and practices are embedded within the field of contemporary cultural politics through which questions about the role of Muslim communities—their inclusion and participation—in North American and European democracies are being actively negotiated. As we argued above, if we fail to understand the ways that gendered identities are being constructed and enacted in relation to broader processes of globalization and imperialism, we often end up with a portrait of youth torn between cultures—a perspective that ossifies cultures and risks reinforcing the idea that there is a basic incompatibility between Muslim and Western ways of doing gender.

Youth Citizenship: Active Practice Within and Across Borders

We are suggesting, moreover, the importance of shifting from a narrower focus on how youth from Muslim transnational communities are straddling their multiple identities to an explicit exploration of how they are negotiating belonging and citizenship in contexts of globalization and imperialism. This means understanding youths’ cultural, civic, political, and economic practices as modes of active citizenship through which they are fashioning a place for themselves in their societies. It also means paying attention to how these young people are participating in diasporic communities—exploring how global processes are intimately imbricated with lives lived locally ( Abu El-Haj, 2007, 2009; Maira, 2004; 2009; see also Appadurai, 1996; Lukose, 2007).

As we discussed in the introduction, we are referencing expanded notions of citizenship that take seriously questions of identity and belonging. This expanded conceptualization of citizenship considers how identity and belonging influence individuals’ capacities for substantive inclusion into society and affect the ways people participate in local, national, and global contexts. Broad conceptualizations of citizenship implicate not only legal status but also the capacity to exercise a range of rights and responsibilities: civil, political, social, and cultural (Banks, 2004, 2008; Castles & Davidson, 2000; Kymlicka, 1995; Marshall, 1964; Rosaldo, 1994). Modern forms of citizenship evolved initially to include civil rights, which guarantee individual rights (such as free expression and equality before the law), and political rights, which grant people political power. These initial rights were expanded to include social rights that offer citizens benefits such as education and health care that are necessary to guarantee their capacity to participate fully in their societies. More recently, cultural rights—the right to maintain linguistic, cultural, and group affiliation—have emerged as a key aspect of modern citizenship (Castles & Davidson, 2000; Kymlicka, 1995; Rosaldo, 1994).

Cultural citizenship acknowledges that people’s capacities to participate as full and equal citizens are often limited by their position in a nation’s racial/ethnic hierarchy (Ong, 1996; Rosaldo, 1994). Cultural citizenship also references the ways that cultural forms and practices contribute to political and civic participation (Flores & Benmajor, 1997; Rosaldo, 1994). Cultural citizenship is an expansive concept that includes the everyday cultural productions through which people forge membership and actively participate in their societies. At the same time, global migration has led to citizenship practices that allow people to maintain connections across national boundaries, strategically acquiring economic, social, and political rights—what Ong (1999) coined “flexible citizenship” (p. 6). The concepts of cultural and flexible citizenship offer perspectives through which to understand the range of ways that youth from Muslim transnational communities construct group affiliations and act on their societies. Although not all the research consciously addresses young people’s citizenship practices, much of the literature points to the ways that youth from Muslim transnational communities are leveraging their membership as religious and ethnic minorities to challenge exclusionary and discriminatory practices and are demanding inclusion and equity.

Although the belief that Muslims are inassimilable outsiders is rooted in long-standing imperial politics of the United States in the Middle East and Asia (Khalidi, 2004; Mamdani, 2004), it was September 11, 2001, that dramatically changed the landscape for Muslim youth in the United States. This sudden shift in their position in U.S. society crystallized the salience of religious affiliation as a site not only for many young people’s identification but also for their citizenship practices (Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009). A range of studies (Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Sirin & Fine, 2008) showed that youth responded to the climate of the war on terror by engaging their identities as Muslims in a more politically conscious way, often transcending ethnic and national affiliations for an encompassing sense of belonging to a transnational Muslim community, the ummah. Ghaffar-Kucher (2009) argues that post-9/11, “the ‘religification’ of urban, working class Pakistani American youth, that is, the ascription and co-option of a religious identity, trumps all other forms of categorization, such as race and ethnicity” and “significantly influences the youths’ identities, notions of citizenship, and feelings of belonging” (p. 164). Ghaffar-Kucher (2009) shows how Pakistani American Muslim youth leverage their religious identities to build social relationships with other Muslims, push back against dominating images of their community, and make demands on their school communities (e.g., for recognition of religious holidays); but, for these young people, belonging to “American” society seems out of reach. The middle-class South Asian youth in Ewing and Hoyler’s (2008) study also became more self-consciously religiously identified in the wake of September 11, 2001; however, this did not mean they abandoned a sense of belonging to the United States. For some, the challenges of full inclusion in the United States led them toward a strategy of “flexible citizenship” (Ong, 1999) through which they anticipated drawing on the educational and political resources of U.S. citizenship to be able to relocate to other countries if necessary. The differences in how the young people in these two studies forged a sense of belonging to U.S. society, and the ability of the youth in Ewing and Hoyler’s (2008) study to imagine engaging in flexible citizenship practices may be an outcome of the differences in their social class status. This suggests a need to do more research that explicitly examines the impact of social class on how these youth navigate the struggles for belonging in the post-9/11 context.

Sirin and Fine (2008) examined how young Muslims in the United States drew on their religious affiliations to challenge discrimination and oppression. Interestingly, they found that there was a gender difference in the ways that the youth engage in what they call “contact zones”—spaces in which Muslim Americans encounter people from diverse communities. The young women often took a stance of educator, feeling an obligation to teach others about Islam, to counter stereotypes and misinformation. These young women were optimistic about the promises of a pluralist multicultural America. Young men, on the other hand, were more skeptical and embittered about the possibilities of inclusion and belonging and as a consequence were less committed to civic engagement and social action. Sirin and Fine (2008) speculate that these differences may be related both to the deeper exclusions experienced by Muslim men, given pervasive images they face as terrorists and oppressors of women, and to the fact that their encounters tended to be with people in positions of authority. Women, they suggest, may be more willing and able to be civically engaged precisely because the spheres in which they operate offer more possibility for movement and action. Thus, looking across the U.S. literature, we see that many young Muslims are leveraging their religious identifications as a means for active participation and civic engagement across the boundaries of ethnicity and nationality (Ewing & Hoyler, 2008; Kibria, 2007; Sirin & Fine, 2008). However, we need more research that investigates how other factors, such as gender or socioeconomic class, may be mediating citizenship practices for these youth.

The context for the growing religious affiliation among youth from transnational communities is different in Great Britain where economic, social, and political exclusion has been decades in the making; however, recent history has heightened the status of Muslims as inassimilable outsiders. The rise in religious affiliation among second- and third-generation Muslim British youth is related to their efforts to forge social inclusion and engage in active citizenship practices (Kibria, 2007; Lewis, 2007; Mondal, 2008). Through explorations of young British Muslims, Lewis (2007) and Mondal (2008) seek to dispel the popular narrative that Muslim youth are increasingly alienated from British society, at risk of becoming violent extremists. Both studies show that, for the majority, increasing religious affiliation is not primarily a sign of alienation from British society. In fact, many young British Muslims are strengthening their commitments to Islam to collectively combat the social and economic marginalization their communities have traditionally faced and to claim full participation as British citizens. Kibria’s (2007) research with Bangladeshi youth offers a somewhat different perspective. Although her research concurs that young people are embracing Islam and its connection to the ummah—the global Muslim community—as a means of resisting social, economic, and political exclusion, she also finds they are taking up religious identities as a way to resist what they imagine to be the corrupting moral influence of dominant British culture. Despite these differences, the research has found that religiosity is one path through which second- and third-generation Muslim youth seek to achieve social, cultural, and economic empowerment in the face of the discriminatory social and economic contexts in which they find themselves. (2008) found that, unlike their parents who still view the countries from which they migrated as “home,” second- and third-generation Muslim youth see themselves as British and are, in fact, carving out a sense of belonging to British society. Importantly, for this generation, “being British” does not reference some imagined cultural ideal; rather, it is about a “lived practice” of “integration that demonstrates a commitment to living and working in a particular locality, being interested in local politics or volunteer activities or social work, and having friends from other social groups” (Mondal, 2008, p. 95). Mondal challenges dominant definitions of social integration that are assimilationist in nature and suggests that Muslim youths’ commitments and sense of belonging to British society do not depend on giving up their religious and ethnic affiliations. Moreover, unlike Kibria (2007), Mondal (2008) finds that young Muslims’ strengthening commitments to the ummah are not in conflict with their commitments to Britain; rather, they suggest that young people today are actively engaged with local, national, and global contexts at the same time.

Resonating with these findings in Great Britain, Zine’s (2004, 2006) studies with Muslim Canadian youth show how religious affiliation is a source of resistance to the dominant Canadian context (especially its discriminatory aspects) without signaling a rejection of the goals of inclusion and belonging to Canadian society. Across these studies, we see youth developing forms of social integration that do not depend on conformity to an imagined national ideal (as American, British, or Canadian). Thus, despite the different historical and political contexts, across the United States, Canada, and Britain, religious affiliation among Muslim youth has become a resource for cultural citizenship through which they challenge exclusionary practices and seek full participation in the social, cultural, economic, and political spheres of these democratic societies. Through a range of activities including forms of cultural production and consumption (such as pop music, fashion, online forums, and educational and political activism), young people from Muslim transnational communities are asserting their right to belong and participate as full members of their societies.

Whereas the studies above illustrate how youth are engaging their religious affiliations to combat exclusion and forge a place for their communities in the countries in which they reside, a small, but growing literature attends to the ways that youth from Muslim transnational communities experience the post-9/11 context not only in relation to the United States but also in relation to their lived experiences and imagined relationships across the boundaries of nation-states ( Abu El-Haj, 2007, 2009; Maira, 2004, 2009). These studies complicate the picture of religion as the only source of affiliation for these young people. Abu El-Haj’s (2007) research with Palestinian American youth from a working-class immigrant community illustrates the ways that transnational affiliations shape their relationship to citizenship and belonging. Palestinian American youth distinguished between citizenship and national belonging. They described “having” U.S. citizenship but “being” Palestinian—part of a diasporic and, in their case, transnational migratory, Palestinian community. Their sense of national (Palestinian) identity was forged through direct and mediated experiences with the Israeli occupation of Palestine and in relation to the exclusionary definitions of “American” national identity they encountered in schools and communities, particularly after September 11, 2001. Practicing “flexible citizenship” (Ong, 1999) these youth drew on the rights afforded them as U.S. citizens to be actively engaged in the social, cultural, economic, and political spheres both in the United States and in Palestine. Importantly, they understood that the power afforded them by their U.S. citizenship enabled the youth and their families to exercise rights (e.g., to travel, work, and dissent) that they did not have living under occupation.

Maira’s (2004, 2009) ethnographic study of South Asian Muslim youth also explores the ways that young people fashion citizenship and belonging in relation to local, national, and global politics. Maira is critical of multicultural discourses that attempt to fit Muslims into a frame of racialization rather than parsing the ways that these communities are politically profiled in relation to U.S. imperial power. Similar to the Palestinian community in Abu El-Haj’s (2007) study, the families of the youth in Maira’s (2004, 2009) research engaged in the practice of flexible citizenship through transnational migration to attain economic and educational resources unavailable in their countries of origin. U.S. citizenship—or the desire for it—did not erase their strong sense of belonging to the national community of the countries from which their families migrated. Young people maintained affective ties to their imagined national community through the consumption of popular culture, participation in cultural events, and creation of strong relationship with other South Asian families. At the same time, the demands of work and school changed the shape of cultural practices: for example, more girls and women worked outside of the home in response to the economic demands of the family, and working youth found little time to engage in activities with other members of their community. Against a picture of two binary cultures in conflict, Maira shows how transnational affiliations take particular local shape in the everyday practices of youth and families in complex affective and material ways. Maira also shows how the knowledge of, and connection to, South Asia, coupled with their communities’ experiences with the policies of the war on terror, shaped powerful discourses of dissent in relation to the United States’ position as an imperial power. Thus, like Abu El-Haj (2005, 2007), Maira’s (2004, 2009) work illustrates the ways that youth from transnational communities articulate political commitments that take into account people’s lives near and far. Maira’s (2004, 2009) and Abu El-Haj’s (2005, 2007) research suggests that youth from transnational communities are creating everyday practices through which they engage in cultural, economic, and political actions across the borders of nation-states.

We have argued for consciously shifting our analytic focus from questions of identity to young people’s discourses and practices in relation to rights, citizenship, and belonging in the post-9/11 era. The multifaceted discourses and practices of new forms of citizenship that youth from Muslim transnational communities are forging offer a grounded critique of national belonging as the primary basis for affording inclusion and citizenship rights. Looking across the complex and variable ways that youth from Muslim transnational communities are fashioning different ways to belong within and across the literal and imagined borders of nation-states challenges our understanding of citizenship and civic participation and raises critical questions about the education of young people today.

Schooling and Youth Citizenship

As the primary institutions through which youth from transnational communities encounter the state, schools are a key site for shaping citizenship and democratic participation for young people. As Levinson (2005) reminds us, schools “play a preponderant role in projecting the discourses that define the limits and necessary qualities of political participation and social belonging” (p. 334). Given the cultural politics that position members of Muslim transnational communities as inassimilable outsiders, accounts of the lived experiences of youth from these communities in U.S. schools is of critical import; however, there are few such studies ( Abu El-Haj, 2005, 2007, 2010; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Maira, 2009; Sarroub, 2001, 2005; Sarroub, Pernicek, & Sweeney, 2007). These studies take two primary approaches to their investigations: (a) focusing on processes of acculturation and assimilation by examining how differences in cultural norms and practices affect academic engagement and achievement (Sarroub, 2001, 2005; Sarroub et al., 2007) or (b) investigating how racial/ethnic and religious discrimination and the politics of the war on terror shape the everyday experiences and academic achievement of these young people (Abu El-Haj, 2005, 2007, 2010; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Maira, 2009).

Sarroub and her colleagues (Sarroub, 2001, 2005; Sarroub et al., 2007) explore educational attainment for immigrant youth from Middle Eastern communities in relation to the disjuncture between their home and host cultures. In her ethnographic study conducted before September 11, 2001, Sarroub’s focus is on questions of immigrant acculturation and assimilation. She argues that, for Yemeni American girls, academic achievement was constrained by the conflicting social and cultural expectations of their families and their schools. Certain school practices (e.g., gym class) caused social anxieties for their families and led to increased surveillance of the girls by the boys from their community. Girls felt conflicted about these practices, even as they enjoyed school as a space for being with their peers and imagining college aspirations. Often married young, some girls struggled with the purposes of school given that they did not expect to go on to college. Sarroub argues that Yemeni values and practices often function in binary opposition to the goals and purposes of public schooling in the United States, hindering the possibilities for academic achievement for these girls in the immediate future. Sarroub (2005) writes,

The ambiguity with which the hijabat [girls who wear a head scarf] faced their futures conflicted with their school’s goal of producing educated citizens who will contribute to society . . . As long as the hijabat are constrained by the expectations of the Southend and Yemen, they are unlikely to benefit from or contribute to American society. (p. 117)

As we discussed above, Sarroub (2005) posits a fundamental cultural conflict—a conflict between the republican values of the United States and those of the Yemeni community—as the undergirding reason for the Yemeni girls’ failure to pursue higher education.

Drawing on more recent research with Iraqi refugee high school students conducted after September 11, 2001, Sarroub et al. (2007) maintain a similar theoretical framework. They examine the struggles that one Kurdish refugee teen, Haydar, faced in relation to literacy learning. Working to explain how this student, who was successful in work-related literacy practices, was failing in school, the authors point to the disjuncture Haydar experienced in relation to his identity as a male and a worker upon moving to the United States. They attribute Hadyar’s difficulty learning to read in school to his struggles to reimagine himself as a male and a worker in this new context that seemed worlds away from the forms of masculine identity as an independent farmer that he had forged in Kurdistan and refugee camps before his arrival in the United States. Determined to support his family financially, Haydar could not find the relevance of academic literacy to his work prospects. Sarroub et al. argue that Haydar is “representative of a new type of immigrant (a refugee) whose home life is incompatible with school expectations, and as such he and others like him are likely to fail and drop out of school” (p. 668), and they propose that teachers work to build bridges between school literacy and the multiple literacies that students practice out of school—a point with which we agree.

However, the argument that academic underachievement is an outcome of a disjuncture between home and school literacies is not a new one (see Heath, 1983), and the limitations of this framework have been widely discussed (see Erickson, 1987; Ogbu, 1987; Varenne & McDermott, 1998). For the purposes of our argument, this framework of cultural disjuncture has two primary limitations. First, as we discussed above, this perspective that youth are caught between two different cultural systems reinforces the notion that Muslim (in this case Yemeni and Kurdish) and “Western” cultural values and practices are inimical, rather than accounting for the dynamic ways that people shape and reshape cultural practices in everyday interactions. For example, Haydar’s struggles over masculinity revolved around the recurring themes of work, cars, and girls: Do these struggles reflect disjunctures between Kurdish forms of masculinity and “American” ones, as Sarroub and her colleagues (Sarroub et al., 2007) argue, or might they be read as ongoing struggles learned, at least in large part, here in the United States? As Appadurai (1996) has argued eloquently, in the context of globalization, “culture becomes less of Bourdieu’s habitus and more an arena for conscious choice, justification and representation” (p. 44). Young people, like Haydar, are not simply caught between cultures; they are drawing on multiple cultural forms to create new identities and cultural practices. In fact, Sarroub’s (2001, 2005) ethnography of the Yemeni American youth offers a thoughtful, nuanced portrait of the girls engaged in processes of cultural production—actively constructing the parameters and meaning of cultural practices through, for example, their consumption of pop music and their fantasies about romance and relationships. Interestingly, Sarroub (2005) also notes that some parents were strongly supportive of the girls’ education; and Sarroub was hopeful that this support might help the young women to realize their college aspirations in the future. These observations do not fit with the picture Sarroub paints of what, as we noted earlier, she calls “an inevitable clash” (p. 44) between U.S. republican values and Yemeni cultural norms. As we suggested earlier, the second limitation of a framework that explains academic achievement in terms of cultural disjunctures is that we cannot take people’s experiences of cultural conflict at face value but must analyze explicitly the cultural politics through which these accounts of cultural clash are developed. This means that to understand more fully the educational experiences of youth from Muslim communities, we must turn our attention to the ways that broader sociopolitical processes that regulate the boundaries of participation and inclusion in democratic societies are being actively negotiated in the everyday practices of U.S. schools.

This brings us to the second approach to research about the education of youth from Muslim transnational communities, which directly addresses the ways that globalization, imperialism, and particularly the cultural politics of the war on terror have shaped the experiences of these students inside their schools (Abu El-Haj, 2005, 2007, 2010; Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009; Maira, 2004, 2009). Ethnographic studies with Palestinian American (Abu El-Haj, 2005, 2007) and Pakistani American (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009) youth find remarkably similar patterns in how the cultural politics of the war on terror infuse the everyday practices in schools, with serious consequences for the education of these young people. In the wake of September 11, 2001, male students often found themselves confronted with teachers and peers who viewed them as terrorists, whereas female students were, more often, viewed as oppressed. Thus, these young people’s educational experiences, connections to school environments, and academic aspirations were shaped in relation to the politicized context of the war on terror. Within these contexts, young people fashioned responses in complex ways. Whereas some youth gave up on the promise of academic attainment, most continued to pursue educational achievement with the conscious understanding that it would open up economic possibilities for their families in the United States and abroad (Abu El-Haj, 2007; see also Maira, 2009). Youth responded in variable ways to the daily expressions of “banal nationalism” (Billig, 1995) inside schools. For example, Abu El-Haj (2007) shows that although, in response to the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, some Palestinian American youth refused to stand and recite the Pledge of Allegiance (risking disciplinary action), others felt that, particularly as visible Muslims, it was critical to stand and show others that they respected the United States. Some youth, especially boys, engaged in self-defeating strategies, taking up the roles they were offered and acting out in ways that reinforced images of Muslim violence (Ghaffar-Kucher, 2009). Some students responded to their status as inassimilable outsiders by educating their teachers and peers about the “truth” about Islam, carving out space for entry into a pluralist society. This strategy shows how the concept of a true or authentic Islam is developed in particular sociohistoric contexts and illustrates our point that we must explore the range of ways that young people take up cultural discourses and practices that make claims about identity in relation to broader political processes, such as the war on terror.

We suggest that, to understand the education of youth from Muslim transnational communities as related to processes of nation formation, we must move beyond analyses that focus on questions of achievement, acculturation, and assimilation. That is, research on the education of youth from Muslim transnational communities must analyze processes of nation formation—the ways that national belonging and inclusion are continually reshaped and reasserted in relation to these new communities (Abu El-Haj, 2007, 2010; Hall, 2004). Abu El-Haj (2010) pushes this paradigm further to illustrate that school is a site at which the cultural politics of U.S. imperial power play out in everyday practices that discipline youth from Muslim communities. In her research with Palestinian American youth, she shows that teachers and administrators drew on beliefs about Islam as oppressive to women or as advocating violence, and they imagined U.S. education as a site for “liberalizing” Muslim girls or curtailing the putative aggressive or violent beliefs and behaviors of Muslim boys. For example, shortly after September 11, 2001, two Palestinian American boys were suspended for drawing pictures of planes crashing into buildings. The teacher who reported them simply assumed the drawings indicated some kind of threat rather than exploring the meaning with the young men. (After 9/11, many children drew planes crashing into buildings, and we can assume this held various meanings for different children.) In fact, time and again, the Palestinian American boys in the school were suspended or expelled because of conflicts that resulted from the presumption that they were prone to violence and aggression. Interestingly, another response to the presumption of male violence was a belief that U.S. education could pacify this tendency. Returning to the example of the drawings of the planes, in an interview that occurred 2 years after the incident, the teacher who had reported the students continued to assume that the boys intended the drawings as either a threat or as support for the 9/11 attacks; however, she had decided that she should have reasoned with them rather than having had them suspended. This teacher argued for the power of U.S. education to turn the boys away from violent extremism. In this and other incidents, educators’ strongly held beliefs in the liberating nature of U.S. education directly affected the Palestinian American students’ experiences in school. Abu El-Haj’s study (2010) suggests an urgent need to understand better how the cultural politics of U.S. imperial power (as a putative democratizing, liberal force in the world) is affecting the daily experiences of youth from many different communities.

Our accounts of education for youth from Muslim transnational communities must go well beyond the questions of acculturation and assimilation that have traditionally dominated the literature on immigrant education. Research needs to focus on how belonging and citizenship—particularly as lived experiences—are being regulated through schooling and on the processes through which education positions young people for democratic participation or exclusion. Moreover, we need research that explores schools as institutions within which processes of globalization and imperialism are negotiated locally.

Examine Claims Around Culture and Identity in Relation to Cultural Politics That Regulate Inclusion and Exclusion

Since September 11, 2001, Muslims living in the United States have often found themselves drawn into a kind of banal multicultural discourse in which they are asked to speak as “good Muslims” (Mamdani, 2004) showing that Muslim religious beliefs and practices can be incorporated into the patchwork quilt of pluralist democracies. This move—a completely understandable one for communities under attack—often depends on a subtle reassertion of essentialized notions of a “good” Islamic culture that averts our attention away from cultural and governmental policies that render these communities “enemies within.”

It is, we suggest, within this political context that we must consider how our research paradigms reinforce or resist these frameworks for defining culture. Research that investigates the cultural practices of Muslim communities—even while acknowledging the changing nature of these practices—runs the risk of reifying cultures and cultural practices if the research is not framed to investigate the discourses and practices through which culture gets invoked, in particular places at particular times. The insight is not new (Eisenhart, 2001; Gonzalez, 2005; Hall, 2002; Pollock, 2008; Varenne & McDermott, 1998); and yet, as we have shown in this chapter, much of the research on youth from Muslim transnational communities has not fully explored its implications. We need more research that examines how and under what circumstances youth are making claims about culture and what resources they draw on to fashion cultural forms. And we need to explore the range of forms these cultural practices are taking among youth from various Muslim transnational communities.

Moreover, the primary research focus on identity—and how young people negotiate multiple identities—also contributes to this analytic problem. Investigations that explore young people’s experiences through the lens of identity—even as they may acknowledge these are fluid, hybrid, and multiple—often do not pay enough attention to understanding the everyday work through which local, national, and global processes shape youth identifications, discourses, and actions in particular, unpredictable ways at specific historical moments. This means that we need to theorize how and why certain forms of identification have become salient in relation to processes of globalization and imperialism. For example, much of the research with youth from Muslim transnational communities has shown that religion is becoming a more salient form of affiliation in the post-9/11 environment. However, the reasons for this increased salience and the ways that young Muslims organize and engage in citizenship practices are different, for example, in the United States and Britain; and we need more comparative and nuanced accounts of the contexts within which youth are organizing around religious affiliation (see, e.g., Kibria, 2007). Moreover, especially in the post-9/11 environment in which we are primed by the cultural politics of the war on terror to see Islam as the most salient dimension for investigation, we must not lose sight of other forms of affiliation that are highly significant to the youth—for example, the national aspirations of Palestinian American youth (Abu El-Haj, 2007, 2010) or the working-class consciousness of the South Asian youth in Maira’s (2009) research. The processes of globalization and imperialism yield complex and multifaceted fields within which young people forge identities and a sense of belonging, which must be fully explored. Importantly, the post-9/11 environment creates a new context in which we cannot afford to investigate culture or identity outside of a careful, grounded account of how these notions are constituted in relation to the cultural politics of the war on terror. This is precisely because culture is being explicitly invoked as a rationale for the putative inassimilable nature of Muslim communities.

Investigate How Youth Participate in Local, National, and Global Contexts

Whereas in recent years, much discussion about youth from transnational Muslim communities has focused on the question of integration or lack of integration into the nation-states in which they reside, this question itself implicates national identification and assimilation as normative and the failure to feel this primary sense of belonging to one nation-state as problematic. This assumption does not reflect the realities of how many youth from these (and other) communities fashion a sense of belonging in today’s world. As this chapter has shown, youth from Muslim transnational communities are enacting a much more complex and multifaceted sense of belonging that encompasses, for example, their affiliations with the country in which they reside; with the global community of Muslims—the ummah; and with other imagined national communities.

This new reality means that we must shift the questions we ask in educational research, particularly in relation to transnational communities. Research on immigrant education often focuses on questions of social incorporation, which, important as those are, need to be accompanied by a deeper understanding of the ways that education is involved in ongoing processes of nation building and citizenship formation (Abu El-Haj, 2007; Hall, 2002; Levinson, 2005). More important, we also need to pay attention to how youth position themselves, produce cultural forms, engage in civic action, and so on, within and across the borders of nation-states. For young people from transnational communities, their sense of belonging to multiple communities suggests that citizenship is a more complicated affair than we often assume. Although citizenship, taken at face value, suggests commitment to and action within the boundaries of one nation-state, many young people are actually finding themselves acting in relation to multiple nation-states and imagined communities (Anderson, 1983/1991). We need more research that pays careful attention to how young people are engaged in everyday practices through which they interact with local, national, and global forces (Abu El-Haj, 2007; Hall, 2002; Lukose, 2007, 2009; Suaréz-Orozco, 2000).

Conduct Ethnographies in Schools and Communities

We also need more studies that document the actual everyday experiences of youth from Muslim transnational communities in their schools, families, and communities to understand how their experiences, discourses, and practices are shaped by, and in turn respond to, processes of globalization, nationalism, and imperialism. Moreover, we need research that pays particular attention to the ways that schools are involved in the processes of nation formation and imperialism. That is, we need to see how these processes actually unfold within educational discourses and practices and how young people actively take up the challenges of inclusion and citizenship within these contexts. This means that we need more multisite and comparative ethnographies that explore young people’s lives across a range of settings and track how globalization and imperialism are at work at the local level.