important to note that they have also had a signifi-
cant impact on the street. Islamicist and revivalist
trends have heightened conflicting positions. The
use of the ™ijàbamong women is a rising feature
within Muslim enclaves in major cities, signaling
an awareness of the distinctiveness of American
Muslim culture; arguments for specifically Muslim
social services, based on “Muslim values” or “mul-
ticulturalism” can regularly be heard, and just as
regularly contested; voices against a distinctive
Muslim dress code have been raised within Amer-
ican institutions, based on the visibility prejudices
attending the attacks of 11 September 2001; sepa-
rate schools for Muslim boys and girls are now
found throughout the United States, along with the
implied rejection of American public educational
culture; males are insisting on their position as the
public representative of the family, even while
mosque organizations struggle to articulate an
“official” role for women; the hegemony of males
over religious and social institutions is being chal-
lenged within the local communities by effective
women leaders; veiled women have once again
been singled out as in need of liberation, even as
Islamic feminists carry new Qur±ànic interpreta-
tions into the nation’s television and media outlets.
The very violence of the Islamist agenda has
upset other Muslim women, who urge that their
image of nurturing and shaping the next generation
is being hijacked by an Islam over which they have
little control, and to which there is only limited
commitment within the community at large. Many
Muslim women have pointed out that the United
States has sustained their families, promoted their
well-being and allowed them to grow, all values
consistent with the Islam they embrace. Those
women who self-identify with radical Islam have
little in common with the ordinary Muslim woman170 family: modern islamic discourses
in the United States, who finds the foregrounding of
killing in the name of Islam antithetical to her treas-
ured role as mother and community builder.
All four constellations interact with varying in-
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