questions about writing a muslim character!

[moondragon8]

[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 ^^

Comments

[moondragon8]

good points all round, thank you very much for your quick reply! what's the procedure here— should i delete the post?

[conuly]

I wouldn't. Other people might have lots more to say that's more useful. You can always edit it once you've figured out more about your character, or make a new post at that time.

[moondragon8]

well, from what you said, none of my questions seem very... answerable? and i don't want to make such a bad first impression (though i fear it may be too late for that)

[conuly]

Yeah, but we don't get that much traffic nowadays so any conversational jumping-off point is a good one. And you can always edit your post. If you tell us a little more about this character, where he's from and all, then we will have something to answer. (And we can always always always talk about NYC, by which I mean I can talk about NYC.)

[jadelennox]

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):

• Immigrant themselves
• First gen American born
• American-born from a family that's been here for a few generations
• American-born from a family that's been here much longer (a group that's primarily but certainly not entirely African-American)
• Something else

and then

• converted themselves
• family that converted
• Muslim way back

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.)

[full_metal_ox]

Another reason not to delete your post: other readers in the future might have similar questions and find the answers you’ve received to be of use. Your query shows every sign of having been in good faith, and you have nothing to be ashamed of.