Summary
The shift, discernible in Palestinian Chicago since the 1990s and paralleling developments in Palestine, toward Islam — and, reactively, toward Christian sectarian identification — as a primary framework of solidarity and identity (Palestinian Chicago — Identity in Exile, PDF p.35).
Details
- Its homeland drivers include the rise since the late 1980s of Islamist competitors to the secular-nationalist PLO, principally the Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas, transmitted to Chicago through family networks; its diaspora drivers include religious institution-building in selective assimilation, the shuttering of secular nationalist centers, wealth accumulation and suburban transition, and the anti-Muslim backlash after September 11, 2001 (PDF p.28-29).
- Visible signs in Chicago included halal meat markets, closing nationalist cultural centers, and Mosque Foundation Friday attendance rising from an average of 75 in 1982 to nearly 2,000 a week in 1994 (Cainkar 2004, as cited) (PDF p.35).
- Lybarger holds the turn to be contingent and indeterminate — not an inexorable awakening, not in every case a response to racism — and to have generated hybrid identities rather than simply displacing Secularism (PDF p.37-38).
- One unanticipated consequence in Palestine was an incipient sectarianizing reaction among some Palestinian Christians, redefining belonging narrowly in Christian terms (PDF p.33-34).