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little_details2024-01-26 09:57 am
moondragon8) wrote in little_details2024-01-26 09:57 am
questions about writing a muslim character!
[edit: thank you for all of the kind advice! i am...very embarrassed about my mistakes, and have turned off my notifications for this post so i can look at the comments on my own time. i won't be deleting this post, since several people have said i shouldn't, but i will definitely be taking a while away to work on myself and my characters before i post here again. sorry to anyone i may have offended-- please believe that this post was written in good faith and i'm not as stupid as i may have appeared.]
hello! pardon me if i make any mistakes, i haven't been a forumposter since...2015, maybe?? anyway. i'm writing this story, taking place in modern-day new york, and one of the primary characters is muslim. (i hope that's the correct way to use that?) their name is lillud (weird name, i know, it's left over from when they were a fancharacter for a different fandom and i just got really attached to it), and they're...arguably one of the more normal characters in the story, lol. they're generally a pretty fly-under-the-radar person, excellent at setting boundaries, and not one to start drama but they love hearing about it secondhand. they're also the producer for a one-man radio show by their best friend, who they have been harboring a crush on for YEARS without saying anything.
HOWEVER i did not come here just to talk about my character i also have QUESTIONS! obviously i've already done some research on the basics of writing muslim characters (and one wikipedia rabbithole on the similarities and differences between kosher and halal! it was fun). i suppose mostly what i'm curious about is:
1. where is it common for islamic people to emigrate to the us from? at what times? (for context: i'm jewish, and something around fourth or fifth-generation over here! my family emigrated from somewhere in eastern europe, although for a variety of reasons we don't really know which country specifically. i kind of assumed that most descendants of immigrants also didn't really know which country specifically their family came from, and was surprised (and a bit embarrassed) to find out that that wasn't true, so i'm asking! also, a lot of jewish people in the us's families came over either at the turn of the century (1890s-1910s) or around the 1930s or 1940s, and i'm curious if there were similar waves for other groups. not super relevant to the story (probably??) but i'm curious!)
2. how much do people generally know about their religion? that's gonna sound like a weird question, but, like. many jewish people are pretty secular, but also if you've had a b'nai mitzvah, you had to read the torah and write some commentary on it, so you probably know at least the basics of the story and some random fun facts for parties (also you know what you have to say "actually that's just christians who do that, not us" about, lol). by contrast, i know a couple christians who know a LOT about the bible (came from very religious families) and many who know very little. curious what the range is, or what you perceive as the things "everyone" knows!
3. just kind of anything else you want to throw out there! i'm very open! stuff you don't see often in representation, stuff you DO see but wish you didn't, stuff you wouldn't think to google, etc.
thank you in advance to anyone who replies!!! sorry for my chronic wordines ^^
hello! pardon me if i make any mistakes, i haven't been a forumposter since...2015, maybe?? anyway. i'm writing this story, taking place in modern-day new york, and one of the primary characters is muslim. (i hope that's the correct way to use that?) their name is lillud (weird name, i know, it's left over from when they were a fancharacter for a different fandom and i just got really attached to it), and they're...arguably one of the more normal characters in the story, lol. they're generally a pretty fly-under-the-radar person, excellent at setting boundaries, and not one to start drama but they love hearing about it secondhand. they're also the producer for a one-man radio show by their best friend, who they have been harboring a crush on for YEARS without saying anything.
HOWEVER i did not come here just to talk about my character i also have QUESTIONS! obviously i've already done some research on the basics of writing muslim characters (and one wikipedia rabbithole on the similarities and differences between kosher and halal! it was fun). i suppose mostly what i'm curious about is:
1. where is it common for islamic people to emigrate to the us from? at what times? (for context: i'm jewish, and something around fourth or fifth-generation over here! my family emigrated from somewhere in eastern europe, although for a variety of reasons we don't really know which country specifically. i kind of assumed that most descendants of immigrants also didn't really know which country specifically their family came from, and was surprised (and a bit embarrassed) to find out that that wasn't true, so i'm asking! also, a lot of jewish people in the us's families came over either at the turn of the century (1890s-1910s) or around the 1930s or 1940s, and i'm curious if there were similar waves for other groups. not super relevant to the story (probably??) but i'm curious!)
2. how much do people generally know about their religion? that's gonna sound like a weird question, but, like. many jewish people are pretty secular, but also if you've had a b'nai mitzvah, you had to read the torah and write some commentary on it, so you probably know at least the basics of the story and some random fun facts for parties (also you know what you have to say "actually that's just christians who do that, not us" about, lol). by contrast, i know a couple christians who know a LOT about the bible (came from very religious families) and many who know very little. curious what the range is, or what you perceive as the things "everyone" knows!
3. just kind of anything else you want to throw out there! i'm very open! stuff you don't see often in representation, stuff you DO see but wish you didn't, stuff you wouldn't think to google, etc.
thank you in advance to anyone who replies!!! sorry for my chronic wordines ^^
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All Muslims don't even have the same religious traditions. There are two huge branches - Sunni and Shi'ite, and a whole lot of minor ones. I suppose you could think of that as very roughly equivalent to the difference between Eastern and Roman churches in Christianity or, idk, between Ashkenazi and Ethiopian Jews?
You are asking an extremely complex question, and I'm not sure you understand how impossible it's going to be to simplify into an answer in a comment in this community.
I think you're going to have to start by narrowing this down first. Figure out where your character comes from and when his family immigrated or converted, and then ask your questions.
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I don't think you should delete, the clarifying questions people are asking may be thought provoking or informative themselves.
ObDisclaimer: I'm another American Jew, not Muslim.
Islam absolutely has semi-secular people who still consider themselves Muslim, just like Judaism. There are also 100% secular, purely cultural Muslims in the same way Jewish bacon-eating, Christmas-celebrating atheists are still Jews, but that secular-Islam-identity is likely to be more culturally-specific for a lot of Muslims than it is for Jews. (There are 15-20 million Jews and 2 billion Muslims, so it's a lot easier for our teeny tiny population to have something you could at least vaguely call a single identity than it is for, you know, 25% of the population of the planet.)
But I agree with Conuly that the most important thing is knowing more about your character. There have been Muslims in the US since the sixteenth century. To be clear, the length of time there were Muslims in the US before the American Revolution is at least as long as the time between the American Revolution and today. Muslims have been here for a long time! So you have many, many options.
If you know where your character is from, why don't you look up the mosques/masjids and Islamic community centers in that area? That may help you get more a sense of that community. You'll find relatively different communities in Dearborn, MI; Detroit, MI; Murfreesboro, TN; and Cambridge, MA. Just like the Jewish community around one part of Manhattan might be Chassidic Galitzianer Ashkenazim, a corner of Boston might be Litvak Ashkenazim, a neighborhood of Seattle might be Greek and Sephardic, and one in Queens might be Bukharan.
Some obvious ones to think about (with the caveat that families can easily be a mix of many of these, or something else):
and then
Demographics of Islam in the US and Muslim population by country might be helpful here. If your character is from a family of recent immigrant, then they have a high likelihood of having lived in an ethnic enclave of some kind, just like your own great grandparents. (And possibly grandparents and parents.) Immigrants often do. And there a ton of close-knit communities in the US from countries that don't match the most common US stereotypes of "Muslim country" (the stereotypes being usually Arab and South Asian countries). Don't forget about communities of Somali immigrants, people from central Asian countries and Russian republics, or even people with Indonesian descent. (I don't understand why Americans don't tend to think of Southeast Asian people as Muslim. Indonesia is the 4th most populous country, after the US, and 12% of the world's Muslims live there. Our stereotypes are so odd.)
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It's technically more like the split between Orthodox, Reform, Conservative, Reconstructionist and other chunks of Judaism, in that they consider each other fellow co-religionists but have doctrinal differences.
Judaism is weird because it has a large ethnic/cultural component and a very low desire for conversion -- the largest Jewish proselytization effort is entirely internal, with Chabad trying to encourage other Jews to join their flavor of Orthodox.
By way of contrast, Islam, like Christianity, is not associated with a particular ethnicity across borders, but may be associated with an ethnicity inside some particular country. In the US, there's a prejudice that Muslims are Arabs, but it's not particularly true, so much as Arab-Americans in the US are often Muslim.
For whatever you're writing, getting the cultural details right will be most important -- and that depends strongly on your character's family and upbringing. Did they emigrate together? Are they fourth-generation New Yorkers? Are they observant?
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Important note: “Black Muslims” (as distinct from Muslims who happen to be Afro-diasporic) usually denotes the Nation of Islam, which originated in the U.S. in 1930, is very much its own thing, and isn’t regarded as “real” Islam by more mainstream Islamic denominations.
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The biggest group is people from South Asia, so Pakistan, Bangladesh, India (due to the nature of the partition of India, the majority of South Asian muslims were either already living in the territories that would become Pakistan/Bangladesh, or were forced by violence to cross the new border into Pakistan/Bangladesh; TL;DR the former two are much more likely countries of origin).
The next largest grouping of Muslim US Americans is people from the Middle East and North Africa. In my quick research I haven't been able to find a good further breakdown by country, but the strategy I would use is to think historically. When did your character or your character's family come to the US, and what was going on then in different countries of the region that might prompt somebody to leave for the US?
Other parts of the world with significant Muslim populations are Central Asia, Malaysia and Indonesia (the latter is the most populous majority Muslim country in the world), West African countries such as Senegal or Niger, and coastal East Africa like Tanzania and Somalia. People from these countries aren't as likely to end up in the US whether from poverty (moving a long way is expensive), or because of differing colonial histories (most countries in West Africa with significant Muslim populations were colonized by France, so people there are more likely to speak French already and choose to emigrate to France over other European/Western countries). Of course, that doesn't rule out any of these countries. As little examples, my small university city secondary hometown has an Afghan restaurant run by a family that came here from Afghanistan, my Calc II professor's husband was Malay, there are plenty of Somali Americans.
It'll be a lot easier to answer your other questions once you have an idea of where your character is from!
ETA: you can also approach this from the other direction. Where in the US do they live, and what immigrant communities are found there? Look up different neighborhoods in whatever city you can think of, see what stores and restaurants and places of worship you find on maps.
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I think it packs a lot of what you want/need into a fairly short time.
Bonus: It's not set in NYC, but it is in Jersey City, just across the river, so there's a similar "feel" in that sense.
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If you're unsure about writing a character of that religion, reading autobiographies of people who are Muslim in America might help a lot in seeing how people of that religion write and talk about their experiences. Aside from that, watching "day in the life" or muslim-americans vloggers may help in that aspect as well. This might help with the "How much of their religion should they know" question.
If your not sure about where or when their family immigrated, these statistics from 2017 may help you find a place to start?
Anyways, best of luck with writing! :D
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And yes, there's an entire breath of understanding about Islam and its divisions as there are people who are Muslims. Some people choose the park of scholarship and deep dives into exegesis, and others may treat it more as a cultural, secularish thing.
So it's going to depend a lot about the other aspects of your character as to what kind of Islam they might practice, and how zealous they are about it, and what the society around them thinks about it.
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First, narrowing down what country your character is from would help a lot. Think about why you want your character to have that specific religious/cultural background and how it would serve your story/world/plot. The resources everyone else has suggested should help. I'd even say this should be your first priority.
I second the suggestion to read -- I would recommend reading books by Muslim authors, from the country you end up going with, that feature Muslim characters.
(This might be a slightly controversial suggestion for this comm, since it's essentially "touch grass", but I hope you won't be offended -- it really really helps to talk to Muslim people in the real world. Might not be accessible or actionable for you, but if you can, then go for it.)
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https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/tagged/islam
https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/tagged/muslim
https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/tagged/magic-muslim
https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/Recommendations
A guide to researching: https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/researchguideintro
Posts about various stereotypes and tropes: https://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/Navigation2
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If you know one, you know ONE.
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- The most important thing you have to figure out about your character is where they are from -- the practice of Islam is widely variant depending on both sect and region, and what sect you're likely to be from is influenced by where in the world you are from.
- How familiar strangers are with Islam varies widely, but in my experience, unless you live in a very diverse area or an area with a big population of Muslims, your average American knows very little. In my experience having to constantly educate other people about your religion is part of the American Muslim experience. I think NYC is probably better about this than other places, but I wouldn't know for sure.
I have had to explain:
What the words "Muslim" and "Islam" mean because the person I was talking to didn't know that Muslim refers to a person who practices Islam
What halal is
Hijab discourse ad nauseaum
What Ramadan is
What Eid is
That Eid is not the equivalent of Christmas
Etc, etc.
- I will also add that many Muslims have traditional names in the same way Christians have names of Biblical origin, so it's worth thinking about your character's name and its origin. In the community I grew up it was really common to have three Faridas, three Fatimas, three Zahras, etc.
If you still have specific questions you can feel free to reach out to me.