Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority.  New York and London: New York University Press, 2014. 409pp. ISBN: 9781479800568. Adrianos Khalil National and Kapodistrian University of Athens In order to comprehend the importance of Zareena Grewal’s project, as it is analyzed in her work Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority, it is detrimental to explore the political, social and religious tensions en..

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European journal of American studies  
Reviews 2016-4
Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American
Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority
Adrianos Khalil
Electronic version
URL: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/11683
ISSN: 1991-9336
Publisher
European Association for American Studies
 
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Authority », European journal of American studies [Online], Reviews 2016-4, document 5, Online since 08
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Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign
Country: American Muslims and the
Global Crisis of Authority
Adrianos Khalil
1 Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American
Muslims and the Global Crisis of Authority. 
2 New York and London: New York University Press, 2014.
409pp. ISBN: 9781479800568.
3 Adrianos Khalil
4 National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
5
In  order  to  comprehend  the  importance  of  Zareena  Grewal’s  project,  as  it  is
analyzed in her work Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global Crisis of
Authority,  it  is  detrimental  to  explore  the  political,  social  and  religious  tensions
engendered to the American public by the 9/11 attacks. In the minds of the American
people the specific  event  was the unprecedented manifestation of  an evil  force with
which they had been in an embattled condition for decades. The American exceptionalist
ethos and the capitalist  and hegemonic aspirations which informed,  conditioned and
propelled the political decisions of American governments from the second half of the 20
th century onwards were always in the process of discursively reifying the threat they
wished to efface. After the dissolution of the U.S.S.R., and the “end of history”1 professed
by many liberal critics, a new enemy had to be invented in order for the United States to
maintain its position as the global sheriff regulating the political,  financial and social
itineraries  worldwide.  Ayatollah  Khomeini’s  rise  to  power  in  Iran,  Saddam Hussein’s
attack on Kuwait and the gradual empowerment of Al-Qaeda facilitated the progressive
Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global C...
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2016-4 | 2016
1
articulation and consolidation of a political and religious discourse by the Western media
and discourses that “orientalized”2 the Arabic people, culture, history and religion and
read the complexity and unevenness of their world by employing a simplistic and binary
discourse  which  augmented  the  distinction  between  East  and  West,  effaced  the
heterogeneity of Islam and misrepresented it as a religion that infuses violence to its
believers and can be pin-pointed in a clearly locatable region with distinct borders and
attributes.    
6
Apart from exploring the “orientalizing” strategy that has informed American and
Western  politics  for  years,  instigating  an  ontological  and  discursive  process  of
objectification,  reduction  and  naturalization  of  its  “other”  in  order  to  render  its
destabilizing heterogeneity assailable Grewal’s main concern in the specific work is to
observe what it means to be “Muslim and American in our global age? What ties Muslim
Americans to Muslims around the world?” and “Who speaks for the stunningly diverse
population of American Muslims?” (4). In other words, how can the Muslim Americans
balance between their religious loyalty and the dictates of their national citizenship? How
can  they  establish  a  narrative  that  blends  these  obligations  together  rendering  the
confrontation in which they had been thrown into inoperative? Grewal’s research aims at
exploring Islamic authority,  and more specifically,  how Islam is  defined today by its
official  representatives  and the  various  pedagogical  forms  employed in  the  mosques
world-wide in order to disseminate and research its culture and practices.  The critic
suggests that the majority of the believers and representatives of Islam detect a “crisis”
in their religion due to its inability to provide concrete answers and solutions to the
challenges Muslims face today.  Rising fundamentalism,  the militarization of  Islam by
groups with ambiguous motives, the “dignity revolutions” and the extensive profiling of
Muslims as potential threats in the United States and Europe are only some of these
“challenges”  believers  encounter  and  Islamic  knowledge  seems  “inaccessible  or
inadequate” to the task of providing convincing answers (39). The author adds to these
issues the gradual social unrest in the Arabic world due to “the political illegitimacy of
rulers,  the  difficulty  of  choosing  between  radically  different  political  ideologies,  the
chasm between rich and poor and the diminishing possibilities of social mobility” (58).In
order to resolve that “crisis” many young Muslim Americans travel to the Middle East
with the intention of retrieving traditional, authentic “tools” that will enable them to
balance between the dictates of their religion and the obligations of their citizenship;
conditions  which seem more  and more  irreconcilable  in  the  minds  of  many Muslim
youths. Their intention, as Grewal argues, is not to live abroad but return in the U.S. with
a narrative that will enable them to “imagine a future for Islam” in their country and
restore the lost dignity of being a Muslim (36). 
7
Zareena Grewal, who is an American Studies and Religious Studies professor at
Yale University, focuses on mapping the “transnational circuits of Islamic intellectuals
and  ideals”  and  captures  the  “shared  debates  and  shared  religious  imaginaries  of  a
diverse  set  of  Muslims  in  the  Middle  east  and  in  the  US  without  collapsing  their
important  differences”  (50).  Yet,  she  acknowledges  that  these  journeys  of  religious
revelation, as they are conceived by many Muslim Americans, are “pre-eminently acts of
the religious imagination” due to the fact that many student-travellers do not find the
Islamic  utopia  they  were  hoping  for.  The  critic  also  detects  and  explores  the
misconceptions  shared  by  many  Muslim Americans,  who understand  tradition  as  an
Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global C...
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2016-4 | 2016
2
“object  to  be  found  and  brought  home”  indicating  the  occasionally  ostensible
understanding of the Islamic culture by the student-travellers as a site where specific
methodological tools can be sought, retrieved, “applied” and, hence, resolve the religious
crisis  governing  their  debates  (36).  This  disillusionment  is  partly  explained  by  the
ontological restrictions incumbent on Western thinking that engages concepts only as
tasks to be accomplished,  rules to be applied and conclusions to be deducted.  These
student-travellers fail to comprehend that Islam is also a culture mediated by everyday-
performances,  multiple,  alternative  and,  at  times,  conflicting  world-views  and
approaches as far as its transmission and research is considered. As Grewal suggests, the
confusion  related  to  the  understanding  of  Islam  as  a  diverse  and  complex  religion
becomes manifest in the confessions of many student-travellers who comprehend their
journey as a “return” to a “home,” a “land” or a “space with borders” where the secret of
being  a  Muslim  remains  hidden  and  has  to  be  excavated  and  re-imported  in  their
respective homelands (255). Thus, in their endeavour to study Islamic religion abroad and
return to the U.S. with a set of discursive apparatuses and methodologies that will make
the “debates in U.S mosques more coherent” (53) student-travellers seem to be “driven
by  a  desire  for  Islamic  authenticity,  for  a  connection  to  a  rich  albeit  too  often
romanticised past” (57).
8
The  student-travellers’  project,  therefore,  is  to  “extract”  and  “deterritorialize
sacred knowledge” in order to import in the U.S. a coherent vocabulary able to dissolve
the Islamic crisis (275). In their endeavour to “root Islam” in their homeland, student-
travellers, according to Grewal, commit two serious mistakes. First, they fail to take into
account  the singularity  of  the American tradition and,  by extension,  of  the Western
philosophical tradition. Instead of conceiving tradition as an opportunity to question,
engage, critique and if necessary alter specific Islamic dictates, they perceive it as a non-
reflexive discourse that must be safe-guarded from western influences at all costs (275).
The  failure  to  establish  a  reflective  and  adaptable  discourse  that  maintains  its  core
principles  only  leads  to  the  implementation  of  an  obsolete  vocabulary  that  deepens
rather than resolves the crisis. That is why Grewal suggests that student-travellers should
conceive their role not as “carriers” but as “mediators” of tradition (296). This leads to
her second point in which she avers that         
9 If  the student travellers are going to be able to
have more than just a good story to tell, if they are
going to be able to shape the future of Islam in the
US, then their travels abroad must be empowering
in  ways  that  translate  beyond  the  individual
religious experience. (291)
10 Thus, the task of student-travellers is not merely to study Islamic tradition abroad but
also to evaluate and reconceptualize the existing pedagogical forms in order to envision
and establish  an  Islamic  debating  global  community  that  makes  and  re-makes  itself
without relinquishing its core values. The emergency of “crisis” should not prevent and
suppress  debate  but  instigate  the  examination  of  alternative  pedagogical  forms  of
studying and disseminating Islamic tradition. 
11
 The need for Islamic tradition to become more inclusive and question religious
restrictions intensifying and proliferating the effects of “crisis” instead of ameliorating
Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global C...
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2016-4 | 2016
3
them becomes quite apparent when the consolidation of female subjectivity is examined
within the male-dominated spaces of Islamic authority. Grewal avers that “the gendered
crisis  of  Islam  discourse  is  simultaneously  a  defensive  and  creative  reaction  to  the
construction of Islam as an excessively patriarchal tradition” (246). Revising foundational
tenets of the Islamic tradition presupposes the critique of the systematic exclusion of
women  both  from  the  pedagogical  organisations  and  the  higher  strata  of  religious
authority. Yet, this revision is postponed in the name of “crisis” as it is considered to be
conducive to its intensification and, hence, the moment the issue of female subjectivity is
raised  it  is  immediately  withdrawn.  Grewal  diagnoses  the  precarious  “double-bind”
female student-travellers face in their endeavours to access Islamic knowledge since they
are forced to deny 
12 their  exclusion  in  the  name  of  tradition  while
simultaneously struggling to be included in male-
dominated  intellectual  circles,  ultimately  muting
the reality of their actual pedagogical experiences
in defence of the Islamic ideal of learned female
authorities. (224)
13 The critic complicates the question concerning female authority in Islamic religion even
further by arguing that feminist critics should interrogate events of female resistance
more consistently. The Qubaysiyat movement, a female-led religious community which
provides  access  to  Islamic  knowledge to  thousands  of  women in  Syria,  Lebanon and
Jordan, or the Women-Led Prayer Initiative on March 18, 2005 organised by Asra Nomani
in  the  U.S.  with  the  intention  of  reshaping  “American  mosques  from  a  feminist
perspective” (316) are only some of the documented events that highlight the necessity to
reform Islamic tradition in order to be more gendered inclusive but also demonstrate the
obligation of feminist critique to “complicate its analysis” so as to “capture the larger
constellations of  patriarchal  power that structure” and undermine feminist  discourse
(242). Grewal’s invocation of Lila Abu-Loghold’s urgent call towards feminist critique to
“complicate”  its  questioning  when  it  comes  to  understanding  “resistance”  aims  at
exposing the patriarchal structures that remain unscathed in religious debates. Although
the ascendancy of women in the higher strata of Islamic authority is indeed “proof that
the tradition is being reformed” it also attests to the fact that many women are forced to
find recourse to the same discourse that subordinated them in order to gain access to
“male-dominate  spheres”  (246).  Hence,  the  occupation of  higher  positions  of  Islamic
clergy by women seems to be an ostensible “masking” of the ongoing exclusion of female
subjects from tradition (251).   
14
After  the  9/11  attacks  the  “intense  external  scrutiny”  Islamic  debates  have
undergone by the media,  the government and the public  has  been conducive to the
intensification of the Islamic crisis (296). As Grewal avers, “debates about reform within
U.S.  mosques are now regular  objects  of  consumption,  investigation and analysis  for
American audiences.” Muslim American spokespeople who participated in these debates
had to face a “double bind.” On the one hand they had to “demonstrate their willingness
to work with the state to combat terror” and, on the other, they had to “downplay those
relationships  in  their  own  mosque  communities  in  order  to  preserve  their  political
legitimacy  and  religious  authority”  (298).  Hamza  Yusuf,  one  of  the  most  prominent
Muslim American spokespeople, correctly diagnosed that “Islam itself had been ‘hijacked’
Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global C...
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2016-4 | 2016
4
on  September  11th in  the  mainstream  media”  (306).  Unfortunately,  Yusuf  achieved
nothing less than contributing to an ongoing misconstruation of Islamic religion and to
its  appropriation  via  a  superficial  binary  discourse  that  fails  to  correspond  to  the
complexity  and  multidimensionality  of  the  Islamic  culture  by  assuming  a  defensive
posture during religious debates and communicating to the American public the message
that Islam is a “good religion that confirms dominant Western, Enlightened values, and
can, therefore, be rehabilitated” (307). Muslim American spokespeople, in their attempt
to mediate the Islamic principles and culture to the wider public,  are led to adopt a
“digestible”  discourse  and  through  the  process  of  “identifying  themselves  as
commensurable,  good  Muslim citizens  against  an  incommensurable  (anti-intellectual,
sexist, backward) bad Muslim immigrant they reinscribe the exclusion of (some) Muslims
from American social citizenship” (340). 
15
 In a historical moment haunted by the thousands of refugees forced to abandon
their homelands due to civil and international wars, political and religious persecutions,
corrupted  nation-states  and  increasing  unemployment,  Zareena  Grewal’s  book
constitutes a valuable contribution to the academic field since it highlights the necessity
of both the Western and the Islamic world to partake in a global debate concerning the
ideological  tenets  composing  their  respective  cultures.  This  can  be  achieved  only  if
European nations and the U.S. perform a political and philosophical interrogation of the
concepts  of  the  nation,  the  “human,”  and  reconceptualize  their  understanding  of
“hospitality.” I am referring to an idea of “unconditional hospitality”3 as Jacques Derrida
discusses  it  in  his  work  and  gestures  to  a  welcoming  that  exceeds  and  annuls  the
bureaucratic laws and conventions of the modern nation-state (25). The present historical
conditions also demand that the Islamic world revise fundamental laws of its religion not
with a view to alter them or erase them but unconceal the democratic and humanistic
potentiality  inherent  in  these  values  in  the  name  of  a  transnational  co-inhabitancy
capable of reversing the politics of rage and violence that have engulfed our world.  
16
  
17 Works Cited
18 Deridda,  Jacques.  Dufourmantelle,  Anne.  Of  Hospitality:  Anne  Dufourmantelle  Invites
Jacques Derrida to Respond. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000.
19 Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.
20 Grewal,  Zareena.  Islam is  a Foreign Country:  American Muslims and the Global  Crisis  of
Authority. New York and London: New York University Press, 2014.
21 Said, Edward. Orientalism. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.
Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global C...
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2016-4 | 2016
5
AUTHOR
ADRIANOS KHALIL
National and Kapodistrian University of Athens
Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country: American Muslims and the Global C...
European journal of American studies , Reviews 2016-4 | 2016
6
