Islam is a Foreign Country American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority By Zareena Grewal (New York: New York University Press, 2014. 409 pages.)

Abstract

Zareena Grewal’s book traces the hopes, debates, accomplishments, and disappointments
of American Muslim students who travel to the Middle East in
pursuit of Islamic knowledge. As Grewal discovers through her interviews
with over 100 students and teachers, the impetus behind many of their journeys
is a desire to find a solution to the “crisis” of Islamic authority in the
United States. But once they spend some time immersed in a predominantly
Muslim society, many discover that this crisis extends to the Muslim world
as well. More recently, some American Muslim scholars have shifted their attention away from the Middle East and toward an “indigenization” of American
Islam, which, the author points out, also faces many challenges.
In chapter 1 Grewal explains that her project is focused on student-travelers
who view the Islamic East as an “Archive of Tradition” (p. 36) that they hope
will provide a more authentic and authoritative form of Islamic knowledge
than what they could learn in the United States. Her fieldwork took her to
Amman, Damascus, and Cairo during the early 2000s, where she interviewed
students of such figures as Shaykh Nuh Ha Mim Keller, Qubaysiya Ansa
Tamara Gray, and Shaykh Ali Goma‘a, among others. The students she met
came from diverse ethnic, geographic, and socio-economic backgrounds. Grewal
does a good job of highlighting how these factors shaped their journeys ...