Free A Quiet Revolution by Leila Ahmed Page B

who are most visibly in the lead as activists and who are most distinc- tively assimilating into the American tradition of protest and activism in the cause of justice, others of Muslim heritage who are secular or sim- ply non-Islamist are clearly also contributing in other and no less time- honored American ways to their society. The route of hard work and professional achievement is obviously one such route. And sometimes, and quite possibly frequently (this is a matter yet to be studied), such work involves, as the example of Alibhai-Brown suggests, taking up is- sues of rights of minorities, including Muslims, in varieties of ways. Thus the defining differences between this reportedly larger proportion of the American Muslim population on the one hand and the Islamist-influ- enced American Muslims we have been focusing on in these last chap- ters on the other, may in fact prove to be above all that often the former, in distinct contrast to the latter, do not explicitly ground themselves and their life goals and actions in Islam as religious commitment and as pro- claimed and visible ground of action and identity.
    Being Muslim by heritage, secular or not, seems to have a place in this larger group’s professional and public lives that is perhaps compa- rable to the place which, as Drew Faust’s above-quoted words suggest, being woman has in Faust’s public and professional life. 57 Following out
    how non-Islamist people of Muslim heritage are relating to their Islamic heritage as they become part of the fabric of North America is a whole other field of enquiry and one that awaits exploration. In this book I set out to understand the significance of the appearance of Islamism and the veiling trend in the United States and how these currents would evolve in the context of a Western democratic nation.
    Following out this story and focusing in particular in the last chap- ters on American Muslim women’s activism in relation to gender and women’s rights has brought me to the astonishing conclusion that it is after all Islamists and the children of Islamists—the very people whose presence in this country had initially alarmed me—who were now in the vanguard of those who were most fully and rapidly assimilating into the distinctively American tradition of activism in pursuit of justice and who now essentially made up the vanguard of those who are struggling for women’s rights in Islam.
    The conclusion that I find myself arriving at is clearly a far happier and more optimistic one than I had ever imagined I would find myself arriving at. Still, optimistic though my overall conclusion is, as I just sug- gested it would be a mistake to imagine that Islamists and Muslim Amer- icans who are staunch believers in God-given gender hierarchy are now perhaps a vanishing species. Just as it would be a mistake for researchers focused, for example, on following out the story of American feminism
    in the 1960 s and 1970 s to conclude, as they chronicle the extraordinary
    successes and liveliness of that movement in that era, that American women and men who believed in or practiced notions of male domi- nance must now be a vanishing species.
    As it turned out, this first decade of the twenty-first century has proved to be one of tremendous liveliness and activism among Ameri- can Muslim women in relation to issues of women and gender. It is this
    activism that occupies the foreground of the last chapters of this book, just as, were this a book about American feminism in the 1960 s, it would be the ideas and activism of those feminists that the book would be fol- lowing out—and not the positions and perspectives of members of the
    broader society whose views the feminists were challenging and resisting. It would be quite untrue, for example, if I were to claim that I never heard androcentric and patriarchal views expressed, say, at ISNA. Such
    elements were certainly present in the background to the women’s ac- tivism and the