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little_details[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 ^^
(no subject)
Date: 2024-01-26 06:09 pm (UTC)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?