Growing Up Muslim

"While 9/11 and its aftermath created a traumatic turning point for most of the writers in this book, it is telling that none of their essays begin with that moment. These young people were living, probing, and shifting their Muslim identities long before 9/11.... I’ve heard it said that the second generation never asks the first about its story, but nearly all the essays in this book include long, intimate portrayals of Muslim family life, often going back generations. These young Muslims are constantly negotiating the differences between families for whom faith and culture were matters of honor and North America’s youth culture, with its emphasis on questioning, exploring, and inventing one’s own destiny."—from the Introduction by Eboo Patel

In Growing Up Muslim, Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny present fourteen personal essays by college students of the Muslim faith who are themselves immigrants or are the children of immigrants to the United States. In their essays, the students grapple with matters of ethnicity, religious prejudice and misunderstanding, and what is termed Islamophobia. The fact of 9/11 and subsequent surveillance and suspicion of Islamic Americans (particularly those hailing from the Middle East and the Asian Subcontinent) have had a profound effect on these students, their families, and their communities of origin. 

Andrew Garrod is Professor Emeritus of Education at Dartmouth College. He is coeditor of First Person, First Peoples: Native American College Graduates Tell Their Life Stories, Balancing Two Worlds: Asian American College Students Tell Their Life Stories, Mi Voz, Mi Vida: Latino College Students Tell Their Life Stories, and Mixed: Multiracial College Students Tell Their Life Stories, all from Cornell. Robert Kilkenny is Executive Director of the Alliance for Inclusion and Prevention and a Clinical Associate in the School of Social Work at Simmons College. He is coeditor of Mi Voz, Mi Vida, Balancing Two Worlds, and Mixed. Eboo Patel, a leading public figure in the Muslim American community, is the author of Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, in the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation and Sacred Ground: Pluralism, Prejudice, and the Promise of America. He is also a regular contributor to the Washington Post, National Public Radio, and CNN, and he was a member of President Obama’s Advisory Council of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

In this beautifully edited collection, veteran scholars of youth autobiography Andrew Garrod and Robert Kilkenny empower young American Muslims to narrate their own lives in the midst of the cacophonous discourse surrounding Islam in America today. They introduce readers to the diverse experiences and religious understandings of immigrant Muslims and invite us to look at American multiculturalism anew through their struggles, hopes, and accomplishments.

Louise Cainkar, Marquette University, author of Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience after 9/11:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading Growing Up Muslim. The essays are well written, deeply reflective, and complementary to each other. Their consistency of quality, subject matter, and flow allows the reader to easily observe the salient variations across each person, resulting in a highly humanistic collection of portraits of young adult Muslims living, some only for a time, in North America.

Geneive Abdo, author of Mecca and Main Street:

Growing Up Muslim is a candid portrayal that goes beyond abstract cliches of the 'good' educated and secular Muslims versus the undereducated, 'bad' religious believers. The stories offer insight into the challenges Muslims face as well as the comfort they derive from their religion. Muslims and non-Muslims alike will benefit greatly from this work.