Nationalism and the Contingency of the Religious Return among Second-Generation Palestinian Immigrants in the United States: A Chicago Case Study.

NATIONALISM; PALESTINIANS; NATIONAL character; IDENTITY (Philosophical concept); ETHNICITY; IMMIGRANTS

CHICAGO (Ill.); UNITED StatesReport Available

Drawing on dozens of in-depth life-history interviews and extensive participant observation in mosques and community centers, this article probes the interaction of religion and nationalism in the formation of individual identities within the Palestinian immigrant community in Chicago, Illinois since the late 1980s. The analysis focuses on three individuals who represent distinct approaches to negotiating the relationship of religion and nation. The first approach is context-adaptive, responding and accommodating to the diverging moral assumptions that underlie the ethos of religious and secular spaces. The second approach entails a transition from secular-nationalism to a type of Islamic nationalism or even Islamic secularism. The third approach resists both forms of nationalism, seeking a transcendent Islam in which ethnicity and nation recede within a new religious humanism. The core argument throughout is that processes of religious return, often analyzed in relation to transnational trends, take diverse and indeterminate forms. This fact results from the shaping effects of a range of 'secular' factors - gender, generation, class, family dynamics, intercommunal interactions, traumatic events - which register within the specific local settings of ordinary life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]