Anne Marie Baylouny, When Blame Backfires: Syrian Refugees and Citizen Grievances in Jordan and Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Anne Marie Baylouny, When Blame Backfires: Syrian Refugees and Citizen Grievances in Jordan and Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

Anne Marie Baylouny, When Blame Backfires: Syrian Refugees and Citizen Grievances in Jordan and Lebanon (New Texts Out Now)

By : Anne Marie Baylouny

Anne Marie Baylouny, When Blame Backfires: Syrian Refugees and Citizen Grievances in Jordan and Lebanon (Cornell University Press, 2020).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?

Anne Marie Baylouny (AMB): When massive numbers of Syrians fled to neighboring countries, remaining there since the beginning of 2011, I wondered what the effect would be, particularly on Jordan and Lebanon—countries with weak economies, scarce resources, little state welfare provision, and numerous internal divisions. The media and humanitarian institutions focused almost entirely on the Syrians themselves—and for good reason. But I wondered what effect this new demographic reality had, and was still having, on those countries receiving the refugees. After all, two of the major Syrian refugee-hosting countries, Jordan and Lebanon, now have the most refugees per capita in the world.  

How would they cope? How would the political dynamics change, understanding politics in the broad sense of encompassing social and economic life? Would senses of identity shift against the new foreign population? How would the neoliberal policies of these countries interact with new demands on public goods and infrastructure? Would the governments be able to deflect blame for economic pain? Both countries have a long history of using immigrants, minorities, and local identity divisions as political scapegoats. Divide and rule has kept citizens who disagree with their governments from uniting together here. 

Scapegoating is a powerful tool, one that usually works.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address? 

AMB: I used literature on scapegoating and blame from psychology and sociology, social movement literature, and refugee studies to explain changes in the host countries. One of Charles Tilly’s lesser known works, Credit and Blame, dealt with blame. Blame is intensely political and has often been used to deflect attention from real problems or to absolve elites from scrutiny. Inability to pinpoint blame can mean no protest at all, as there is no one to target to enact change. 

In the cases here, politicians and the media blamed the Syrian refugees for all sorts of problems, most predating their heightened influx into both countries. This is a regular practice in Jordan and Lebanon, as in many other countries: elites in both states have commonly blamed foreigners, Palestinians, and Islamists, and Ba’athists and Communists back in the day. These regimes maintain power by using divisions and distractions, including changes of government. Blaming and dismissing the prime minister is particularly common in Jordan, as has occurred with all the major opposition protests in the country. Scapegoating is a powerful tool, one that usually works.  

What I saw in Jordan and Lebanon was that while people accused the Syrians of creating the problems, they held the government as responsible for fixing those problems, and criticized them when no solution was given. The reaction was small, local protests in the first few years, asking the government for housing, electricity, water, and better medical care. I then watched those small protests get larger and their issues change: they were no longer centered simply on the lack of local service provisions but now specifically on the regimes that were causing these deficiencies. The relationship and expectations between citizen and state was changing. 

Specific grievances turned into systematic critiques. Unlikely groups joined together, as the movements gained strength in both countries. In almost all the protests, there was a clear avoidance of blaming the Syrians. Bringing in this aspect would distract from the ultimate goal of pushing for change in state institutions. 

This result is new and unlikely: increasingly larger movements remained focused on a systemic, difficult goal. Psychologically, people avoid conclusions that cause them to act or that implicitly involve self-blame or self-responsibility. Accusing their regime meant that ultimately, the citizens were responsible for changing it. Laying blame on a foreign group lets people off the hook in this sense.  

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

AMB: My work focuses on how people live, how they are able to make a living, and how they negotiate their world to create security for themselves and their families. As in this book, my previous work, Privatizing Welfare in the Middle East: Kin Mutual Aid Associations in Jordan and Lebanon (2010), examined how social insurance and the ability to live independently changes with economic circumstances, and how senses of identity are altered to cope with new circumstances. Both books begin with the premise that discourses and dynamics at the national political level result from grassroots changes, and both look beyond leaders and political oppositions to see what backs them or disputes them. Movements and parties derive their strength from participants—what drives people to join is key in understanding larger political trends.   

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

AMB: The general public, students, and academics would all be comfortable reading this book. One key message—namely, why and when politicians can get away with deflecting blame—is quite relevant today in a number of contexts. We know that many countries have used xenophobia or blame against some powerless group to deflect attention and criticism from themselves or the problems of governance.  

I would like to see more research into when divisive tactics succeed and when they fail. We know that the people most likely to blame immigrants for their problems have had little contact with immigrants—this bears true in studies around the world. So are the people who fall for divisions, who willingly scapegoat another group, are they the ones who are not actually suffering? My research shows that in this case, that is what happened. Those experiencing real loss wanted to solve their problems and turned to the government, perceiving that blame of the Syrians, who were also suffering, was pointless. The result of such research could trigger changes in how activists target their messages and what those messages are.  

J: What other projects are you working on now?

AMB: I am exploring this dynamic of scapegoating and deflecting blame in general. This work made me look deeper into who people blame for their problems and how that matters to protest movements. Blame runs through our world today, often blame unconnected to real causes as the data shows. Still, people frequently believe that blame and prefer not to look at themselves. When the opposite occurs, people start to take responsibility.  

J: How can this book be used in teaching? Does it cover other aspects of the Syrian refugee crisis? 

AMB: I geared the chapters in this book to be useful in the classroom. I have a chapter on host perceptions, real and imagined, and how host citizens feel about the Syrians. It demonstrates how quickly the discourse turned against the refugees, attributing to them long-standing problems. Classes teaching about immigration effects, backlash against forced migrants, the use of refugees by politicians, and refugee-host dynamics would benefit from this. 

Another chapter examines how Syrian refugees have affected Jordan and Lebanon economically and in public services. I intended this chapter for use in refugee studies classes and classes on developing countries, many of which host refugees. I discuss the existing data on jobs, education, and infrastructure effects. Our data on these subjects is incomplete, but the direction of the impact of high refugee influxes is clear for countries with little state capacity or countries enacting neoliberalism. Demographic change pushes on existing fault lines of the states. This chapter also lays out the legal and institutional basis for refugee policy in these states.  

This book would aid the policies of non-governmental organization also. I show how some well-meaning practices have stirred up hatred toward the Syrians, like when an NGO gave water filtering technology to Syrians in a Lebanese town, but not to the Lebanese living next door to them. Both were drinking the same dirty water, both were poor. In these circumstances it is surprising that ultimate blame was directed at the Lebanese government, when you could easily imagine more resentment toward Syrians or the NGO community. 

The book is perfect for teaching on social movements, as it demonstrates the escalation of protest frames and the diverse types of protests that result, in addition to the role of blame. It shows the trend from individual quasi-spontaneous protest toward increasing organization and larger, more unified movements. 

With the trend toward increasing protest movements in the Middle East and the critical role of necessary goods in spurring those protests, this book would be useful in courses on the Middle East. The first chapter provides a short outline of Lebanon and Jordan’s histories, focusing on state provisioning and the history of protest. Subsequent chapters explain the importance of basic resources and services in citizens’ expectations of their states, and the consequences for breaking that social contract. Interestingly, the book also uncovers a common idea of the ideal state, what citizens want their state to furnish and how it should act. This ideal does not come from past provisioning so much as it does from comparison with Western Europe. This in itself is a topic that needs more study—what do people want from their states, and how does this change by country, region, economic class, and education? 

 

Excerpt from the book (from the Introduction)

Four-year-old Sanad stood waiting in court with his seven-year-old sister and their mother in Mafraq, northern Jordan. The widow Um Sanad and her small family had been evicted, a direct result of the influx of Syrian refugees in Jordan. Um Sanad had been paying 75 Jordanian dinars (JD) a month for their apartment, around USD 100, for the previous nine years. Her landlord increased the rent by close to 70%, and the new cost would leave her with only 10 JD (USD 14) to live on. Hundreds of families were similarly threatened with eviction across Mafraq, as their rent increased by as much as 300%. Syrians were flooding across the border looking for shelter at this time in 2013, a condition that landlords exploited to charge far more rent. The situation pit son against father, brother against brother, and ultimately, Jordanian against Syrian.  

Abu Mohammad joined the growing protests against this injustice. His rent had tripled because of the Syrians. Unable to pay, he bought a tent and, together with some twenty families, took part in one of the first tent protests. These Jordanians, made homeless in their own country due to refugees from neighboring Syria, set up their own camp, the Jordanian Displaced People’s Camp #1 (Mukhayyam an-Naziheen al-Urduniyyin, Raqm 1) in Mafraq. Their tents bore the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) logo, ironically having been purchased from Syrian refugees. The evicted families demanded that the authorities intervene and help them solve the problem of high rent. Local and national Jordanian government officials called on the protesters to disband. The protesters responded with a threat to escalate the open-ended protest to hunger strikes until their problem was fixed. “We protesters responded to them that there is no way to stop the protest unless our demands are met. If the police interfere [to force them to disband], we will go on a hunger strike, with no food or water, and Mafraq city will become a city of tents,” one organizer said. These protesting Jordanians were not historically part of opposition to the government. To the contrary, they formed the regime’s base of support. But they needed a solution: their situation could not continue as it was, they declared. 

Half an hour down the road from Mafraq, Hamda Masaeed sat in her self-made tent, timeworn and frayed. The seventy-year-old grandmother watched as aid trucks and charities alike passed her ten-member family by to deliver help across the road in Za’atari, the newly established Syrian refugee camp. A Jordanian citizen, Hamda envied the beautiful new tents of the Syrian refugees and lamented, “Don’t they realize that we need help too?”

Accounts of citizen suffering, presumably caused by the Syrian refugee influx, and the apparent neglect of local needs in favor of the refugees, caused immense resentment. By this time, two years into the Syrian war, there was no love lost on the Syrian refugees. Large swaths of society in Lebanon and Jordan had become overtly hostile to the Syrians after their initial welcome. The Syrian presence in these countries was overwhelming. Syrian refugee numbers far surpassed anything seen in the west. Syrians formed an average of 10% of the population in Jordan from 2014 to 2018, and in Lebanon the numbers were much higher: Syrians in Lebanon were at least one quarter of the population. The sheer demographic impact of the Syrians overwhelmed institutions, services, and infrastructure. People of all social classes in both countries questioned what national identity meant. “What does it mean to be Jordanian when twenty percent of your country is Syrian or Iraqi?”

As an unpopular minority group, Syrian refugees seemingly made the perfect scapegoats. Scapegoats displace grievances against the state to an unpopular minority or immigrant group. These states tried at every turn to blame the Syrians for national problems, no matter how long those issues preceded the Syrians’ arrival. In typical scapegoating fashion, state elites turned attention and hostility toward the Syrians: The state could have fixed electricity in Lebanon, but the Syrians took five hours of power a day from households. Similarly, authorities in Jordan stated that Syrians drained national water resources and used far more than nationals, who conserve this resource. These scapegoating discourses did not function as such tactics usually do. They did not distract attention from the state into anger at the minority or outsider group. 

Crucial daily needs were affected by the demographic stress of the Syrians, altering or threatening citizens’ lives. These needs called out for solutions, not merely blame against a group unable to fix their situation. It is this aspect that distinguishes Jordan and Lebanon from other cases of attempted scapegoating. Citizens were – and are – angry at Syrians, but such anger does nothing to provide water, waste removal, or electricity. Indeed, electricity, housing, water, and waste – which have been longstanding national problems – are some of the basic issues that spurred protests by Jordanians and Lebanese against their governments. In tent protests like the one above, Jordanian protesters blamed the Syrian refugees for their predicament, and many wanted the Syrian to leave. However, their demands focused on concrete redress from the state. Large signs in the tent protests declared the inhabitants’ patriotism and begged for housing from God and king. During the same period in Lebanon, Lebanese demonstrated, burned tires, and blocked roads protesting the prolonged lack of electricity in Baalbek, an area with one of the highest Syrian refugee populations. There was widespread popular agreement that the Syrian refugees were at fault in draining electricity from nationals. Officials accused the refugees of stealing electricity and of simply overwhelming the electrical grid’s capacity due to their large numbers. But instead of protests aimed at the Syrian refugees, the Lebanese attacked and targeted the Energy Ministry and other arms of the state, demanding more electricity. 

The arrival of the Syrian refugees stressed domestic fault lines, both calling attention to endemic problems and triggering protests against the states for remedies. Many of these fault lines were basic, daily needs, some crucial to survival. Citizens responded with dual blame. They faulted the Syrians for causing the problems, but accused the states of responsibility for fixing those issues. Active protest, with a few exceptions, was focused on national and local state institutions and demanded solutions. When one Jordanian town ran out of water, they blamed Syrians taking from Jordan’s scarce national water supply. International aid organizations were providing water to the Syrian refugees, sometimes drawing from domestic supply. No one seemed to consider Jordanian needs. Citizens’ priorities for water were dramatically clear. The Jordanian protesters confronted their government – and, quite surprisingly, the king himself – with guns. “I have nothing to lose. If I don’t drink water, I will die,” a lead protester said. 

“It’s the Syrians’ fault,” one man in Jordan of Palestinian heritage told me. “But the government has to do something about it.” Aid money received on behalf of the Syrians only exacerbated the criticisms. Before the Syrians, “People said the problem was Lebanese. Then the politicians blamed the Syrians for all the waste and using infrastructure. But the politicians were getting all this money for these problems. So people turned against the politicians. You say you are getting all this money and nothing is happening,” a Lebanese man said. “There are just too many Syrians for the population of Lebanon. We have to be humanitarian toward them – but the state and the UN do not help enough,” another Lebanese said. A Jordanian city council member described, “We had tent protests here [northern Jordan, with a large refugee population] but not much anymore. They demanded help from the government, which is their right [as Jordanians] in the constitution, [the right] to work, to a house, and to health care.” A Lebanese UNICEF employee added, “In the back of their [Lebanese] minds they realize their government is failing. Sometimes they blame the Syrians, but more and more they realize this blame is used by the politicians for their own benefit.” 

Scapegoating historically has worked as intended, displacing anger away from the state. In Jordan and Lebanon with the Syrian refugees, the tactic failed. The distinction here is that grievances concern resources fundamental to life. In such cases, solutions can outweigh scapegoating. Scapegoats are rarely in a position to provide water, electricity, or housing, nor can they restructure a national waste system. In these cases, Jordanians and Lebanese ranked their basic needs over the psychological benefit of blame toward a presumed guilty group. The states’ use of scapegoating to exempt themselves from scrutiny and fault for deep structural problems arguably backfired. Citizens in these refugee-hosting countries agreed that the Syrians were to blame, but levied responsibility to alleviate their grievances on the states. 

Loren D. Lybarger, Palestinian Chicago: Identity in Exile (New Texts Out Now)

Loren D. Lybarger, Palestinian Chicago: Identity in ExileSeries: New Directions in Palestinian Studies (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2020).

Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book? 

Loren D. Lybarger (LL): I began to reflect on my experiences with the Palestinian community in Chicago during the 1990s as I was finishing my first book, Identity and Religion in Palestine (Princeton, 2007). That book examined the identity effects of the struggle between Islamism and secular-nationalism in the Occupied Territories between the 1980s and the early 2000s. Similar secular-religious dynamics had developed in Chicago, but the specific social and political circumstances differed from Palestine in important ways. The Chicago context gave me an opportunity to document and analyze that difference and its implications for Palestinian identities in exile. 

I arrived in Chicago in 1993, right before the unveiling of the Oslo Memorandum of Understanding. I had just finished a seven-year stint in the Middle East. I served as a volunteer English teacher in Beit Jala during the first intifada (1986-1989); studied linguistics at the American University in Cairo (1989-1991); and directed an English language program in Gaza City (1991-1993). I moved to Chicago to begin graduate study in religion and sociology. A month after I arrived, the Oslo memorandum hit the news. A friend immediately invited me to a citywide meeting of activists at the Random Worlds Café, a place co-owned by Samir Odeh, a longtime leader in the Southwest-Side Arab Community Center. More than fifty people showed up that evening to discuss what the announcement meant. The mood was somber as attendees dissected the weaknesses of the memorandum and expressed grave misgiving for its possible negative impact on the Palestinian struggle. One could feel the confusion and sense of loss, even betrayal. 

In the decade that followed, a profound shift in the community occurred. As they moved to the suburbs in large numbers, Palestinians drifted away from the secular-nationalist community centers in the old urban enclaves. At the same time, they began embracing a new Islamic orthopraxy as the framework of individual and collective identity in the community. Central to this process was the emergence of organizations like the Mosque Foundation in Bridgeview and, in a very different way, the Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) on Chicago’s South Side. At a fundraiser for a new social service organization, the Arab American Action Network, which formed at the same time as IMAN, I remember college-aged activists delaying Edward Said’s keynote by making a very public display of performing the maghrib prayer together. I recount this incident in Palestinian Chicago, describing it as a moment that caused me to wonder why this religious shift had happened, what it meant for Palestinian secularism, which had grounded nationalist activism in the community, and what its long-term impact would be. As I completed work on Identity and Religion in Palestine, I began to reflect back on these experiences in Chicago and, as I did so, started to conceive this second book that would trace similar issues in the diaspora.

... Palestinian identity unfolds in exceedingly complex ways that may or may not track with dominant nationalist and religious narratives.

J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?

LL: Palestinian Chicago, the first book to appear in the New Directions in Palestinian Studies Series, ranges across several topics: religion, nationalism, identity, generational change, gender and class tensions, and the contested space of exile. The book opens with a description of a mass demonstration in The Loop, Chicago’s downtown, to protest Israel’s bombardment of the Gaza Strip in July 2014. At the demonstration, I noticed traditional Palestinian flags but also flags with Islamic symbols such as the Dome of the Rock and the shahada—the statement that there is no god save the one God and that Muhammad is God’s messenger—inscribed on them. I go on to show in the book that the seeming overlap and integration of the religious and the secular point to a complex and relatively recent history of tension and shift.  

The chapters that follow unpack this history, beginning with the arrival of the first Palestinian immigrants to the city in the early-twentieth century. I describe generational changes that track with similar processes in the Middle East and show, as well, how identities hybridize, making strict distinctions between secular and religious hard to sustain. The secular and religious interact in a mutually fragilizing relation, an insight that Charles Taylor develops in his book, A Secular Age. The Palestinian experience in Chicago provides important insight into this phenomenon, which marks modernity, generally. Gender, race, class, and space are also important considerations in this discussion, since they condition the secular-religious dynamic in multiple ways, producing a range of diverging trajectories. If there is a single conclusion to be drawn from my book it is that Palestinian identity unfolds in exceedingly complex ways that may or may not track with dominant nationalist and religious narratives. My objective in the book was to utilize extensive ethnographic observations and interview data, the result of more than five years of field work between 2010 and 2015, to map this complexity. 

J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work? 

LL: I think of Palestinian Chicago as a companion volume to Identity and Religion in Palestine. The two books address religion and identity questions in the exact same time frame—the 1980s through the post-millennium period—but do so in very different national, political, and cultural contexts. They also reflect my different points of contact with Palestinian life and struggle. The books span the homeland-diaspora divide, providing contrasting, bi-focal perspective on the parallel phenomenon of identity reorientation in relation to what I term the religious shift and the corresponding post-Intifada, post-Oslo division in the Palestinian national movement. 

J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?

LL: I hope, first of all, that Palestinians in Chicago will read this book and engage with it as a beginning point for an ongoing conversation about the changes that have occurred in their community during the past century and especially since the 1980s. I hope, too, that Palestinians in Palestine will read it to gain understanding of the particularities of the diaspora—albeit from my quite specific standpoint as a non-Palestinian outsider. Much binds Palestinians across the globe—the shared traumatic memory of dispossession, the ongoing occupation and colonization of Palestine itself, the intergenerational resistance efforts, and the ties of family. But there are also critical differences stemming from the unique conditions of exilic conditions. The exile is not Palestine; Palestine is not the diaspora. Palestinian Chicago speaks both to the continuities and the divergences between these spacesIt does so, too, in dialogue with its earlier companion volume, Identity and Religion in Palestine. Finally, I hope that a wide range of non-Palestinian readers engage this text. Anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism remain deeply embedded within US and European societies. My book speaks directly to this racism, challenging it by resisting the simplistic reduction of Arabs and Muslims to “Islam” as a marker of the irrational and the violent. My book does this by bringing the secular back in and in doing so rendering “Palestinian” and “Arab” and “Muslim” and “Christian,” for that matter, into highly variable and dynamic categories. 

J: What other projects are you working on now?

LL: I am finishing a co-authored book on how memory of the period of state terror in Argentina (1976-1983) affects Argentine conceptions of justice in the present. I am also beginning work on a third book that will address Palestinian experience and identity questions in the European context. I think of this next book as possibly completing a trilogy that would include Identity and Religion in Palestine and Palestinian Chicago. 

 

Excerpt from the book

Introduction

Protesting “Protective Edge,” Chicago, July 26, 2014

In July 2014, as I was finishing the research in Chicago for this book, Israel bombarded the Gaza Strip in yet another attempt—the third since 2008—to destroy the military and governing capacities of the Islamic Resistance Movement, known commonly as Hamas. Labeled “Operation Protective Edge,” the attack, which killed more than 2,000 civilians and injured an additional 11,000, sparked global condemnation, including a massive public response from Chicago’s Palestinians (Dearden 2014; Waldroup 2014). In a well-rehearsed procedure—this was not the first time they had mobilized—the Chicago Coalition for Justice in Palestine, an ad hoc group comprising the city’s major organizations active on the Palestinian cause, called for a demonstration in the Loop, Chicago’s downtown area. Dramatizing their dominant role in the community, the mosques bussed hundreds of their constituents from the southwest suburbs. Event organizers claimed 15,000 demonstrators; the local NBC affiliate put the figure at 8,000 (Waldroup 2014).

Slogans at the rally and during the subsequent march down Michigan Avenue demanded “free Palestine” and declared “God is greater.” The traditional flag featuring a plain triangle of red and three bars each of black, white, and green mingled with other versions of the national banner. There were two Islamized variations. The first inscribed the shahada declaration (creedal statement) of la ilaha illa llah / muhammadun rasulu llah—“There is no deity save the one God/Muhammad is God’s messenger”—on the white middle field of the banner.

The second superimposed an image of the Dome of the Rock—the site from which, according to tradition, Muhammad ascended through the heavens to the throne of God—and the words “filastin kulluha qudsun.” The words, which translate as “Palestine, All of It [is] Sanctified [or, Sacred, Holy],” played on the traditional name for Jerusalem in Arabic, “al-Quds,” the Sanctified (Sacred, Holy). Both flags appeared alongside the US flag. The juxtaposition signaled a specifically Palestinian claim to American political citizenship and national affiliation. Religious and nationalist symbolic displays also appeared in the clothing choices of some women demonstrators. Women wearing hijabscarves in a checkered black-and-white kufiya (colloq: kaffiyeh or hatta) design or in the colors of the Palestinian national flag walked alongside women wearing kufiya-patterned scarves around their necks but nothing on their heads. 

[…]

Religious and secular symbols appeared to blend seamlessly in this mass demonstration against Israel’s violence. The secular, in the sense of the priority given to the crisis and question of Palestine, had seemingly assimilated Islamic signifiers as part of a nonsectarian space that included Jewish solidarity groups. But Islam, too, had embraced the nation, centering its cause as an article of faith: devotion to the One God entailed devotion to the liberation of the national patrimony, which God had made sacred […] Nevertheless, behind the integrated display lay a longer history of tension and shift.

The Project 

This book documents and analyzes the history of this shift and its present-day impact in one of the world’s most important Palestinian diaspora communities, Palestinian Chicago. At approximately 85,000 strong, this community constitutes the single largest concentration of Palestinians in North America. Its sheer size has made it a target of scrutiny. Chicago’s main newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, has periodically published exposés claiming to have uncovered connections to radical Islamic and leftist groups that the US government has listed as “foreign terrorist organizations.” And, since the 1970s, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Department of Justice have launched probes against activists suspected of supporting proscribed movements (Ahmed-Ullah, et al. 2004; Ahmed-Ullah, Roe, and Cohen 2004; Cainkar 2009, 110-152). Chicago’s Palestinians have, as a consequence, become linked directly to the putative Global War on Terror; and, in response, they have fought back against interventions made against them. Since the election of President Donald J. Trump, for example, activists in the community have led protests against the “Muslim Ban,” the final version of which severely limits travel to the United States from five Muslim-majority countries (Iran, Libya, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia) as well as from North Korea and Venezuela.

[…]

Questions and Data

Four main questions orient this project. First, what historical, social, and political factors have shaped Palestinian identities in Chicago? How, specifically, did secular nationalism and religion—principally Islam in various forms but also Christianity—become primary identity frameworks at individual and community levels? Second, what explains the ascendancy of Islam, in particular, since the 1990s, and what has happened to secularism in relation to this process? Third, what forms of identity have emerged through the ensuing intersections of the religious and the secular in Palestinian Chicago? Finally, what critical perspectives does this case study provide for understanding Palestinian identity in diaspora contexts in the current moment?

I answer these questions through the description and analysis of fieldwork data. These data derive from summer research trips to Chicago occurring between 2010 and 2013 and from a two-year research residency in the city from 2013–15. The data include multiple site observations at mosques, churches, community centers, downtown protests, and community events as well as more than eighty recorded life-story interviews. Each of the interviews lasted two or more hours and in some cases included extended follow-up conversations. Analysis of the data has entailed identification and interpretation of themes within and across the transcribed interviews and my field notes. 

Main Assertions

I make several interrelated assertions about what these fieldwork data show. My first claim is that the religious turn in Chicago results from a complex interaction of homeland and diaspora-specific processes. The primary homeland factor is the development, since the late 1980s, of powerful Islamist competitors to the secular-nationalist Palestine Liberation Organization […]. I show how the Islamic shift, in its broad sense, in Palestine and in the wider Middle East has influenced the religious turn in Chicago through family networks spanning the United States and Palestine. But the book also demonstrates the impact of other factors specific to the Palestinian experience in Chicago. These factors include the development of religious institutional structures as part of an ongoing selective assimilation process; the shuttering of secular nationalist community centers; wealth accumulation and the demographic transition to a new suburban enclave; and the anti-Muslim backlash in the long aftermath of the September 11, 2001 attacks.

My second main assertion is that the religious shift and the tensions it produces with secularism have generated a range of hybrid identities in the present. These identities defy simplistic narratives about the “Islamization” of immigrant communities or about the “decline” of secularism in the face of a global religious resurgence. This finding pushes back against prevailing scholarship on these matters [that] has tended [either] to raise alarm about the effect of Muslim immigration on Western democracy and secular culture (Brookes and Sciolino 1995; Levitt 2006; Roy 2007; Amghar, Boubekeur, and Emerson, 2007; Sniderman and Hagendoorn 2007; Nasaw 2008; Westrop 2017) [or, conversely,] focused positively on the formation of a Western umma (Islamic community), internally dynamic and contested, auguring a new, transcultural Western Islam (Ramadan 2004; Karim 2009; Grewal 2014; Khabeer 2016). This contradictory discussion parallels a public discourse in which racist and xenophobic portrayals of Muslim immigrants vie with counterclaims about Islam being a religion of peace compatible with a secular democratic order.

Obscured in these contending discourses is the complexity of secular-religious dynamics in the actual lives of individuals and communities. I call attention to this fact, showing how the religious turn has had multiple effects in Palestinian Chicago. As I show, secularism has not disappeared but rather transmuted, taking new forms in interaction with the religious turn. Similarly, the new religious orientations bear the imprint of secularism and in doing so develop in multiple indeterminate directions. Significantly, these transformations have analogs in the experience of Palestinian Christians, whom I also highlight in the chapters ahead. Adding to the complexities of these secular-religious interactions is the impact of a range of other mitigating factors, especially race, class, gender, generation, and space. This book analyzes these factors, showing how they shape the religious-secular dynamics in the narrative accounts of my interlocutors.

My third set of arguments pertains to the broader implications of my findings for Palestinians and non-Palestinian others in the current moment. I make two observations. First, Palestinian identity in the diaspora is likely to continue to develop in multiple directions as the religious shift deepens and as that same shift generates secular-religious hybrid responses. Second, the experiences of Palestinians in Chicago shed light on secular-religious tensions and transformations that manifest in diverse societies globally. These Palestinian accounts contribute empirical depth to arguments that Taylor (2007), Martin (2014), and Riesebrodt (2014), among others, have separately made about how the religious and the secular enter into a mutually “fragilizing” relation, each destabilizing but also conditioning the other in a dialectic that produces new syntheses. The Palestinian voices that register in this book provide crucial insight into these processes and into the possibilities they create for forging new, contrapuntal conceptions of self and other across multiple lines of difference, including the religious and the secular.