jennifer bryan
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contend with public scorn blaming them for the horrific violence. Indeed, the heightened FBI
investigations and media publicity into Jersey City opened up old wounds of 1993, when Jersey
City’s Muslim community came under intense suspicion after Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, who
spoke at Al Salam Masjid in Journal Square, was convicted of planning the 1993 World Trade
Center attack. As a result, Arab Muslims not only felt targeted by the FBI, INS, and local police,
but by their non-Muslim neighbors as well, who began monitoring their behaviors and reporting
them to the FBI as suspected terrorists. Needless to say, these factors made Jersey City a hostile
place for Muslims after 9/11.
Research Methods
Given the large concentration of Arab Muslims living in the Journal Square area, and the
heightened FBI investigations there, I decided to focus on understanding the experiences of Arab
Muslims who prayed at mosques and/or lived in neighborhoods near this area. The basic
question I set out to try to understand was what it meant to be Muslim in Jersey City after 9/11.
As a non Muslim American woman, conducting an ethnography of a community understandably
suspicious of outsiders, I was fortunate to be able to rely on my past experiences and reputation
growing up in Jersey City and working at an Arab Muslim-owned restaurant from 1990 to 1993,
while attending high school. Although many Arab Muslims I knew well had already left Jersey
City when I started this project, people still recognized me by face; in many cases this greatly
facilitated the establishment of trust.
During a two-year period, from September 2001 to September 2003, I conducted
extensive participant observation and informal interviews with over sixty Muslim women and
men. I also gathered in-depth life histories from twelve Muslim women and eight Muslim men.
In order to gain an understanding of how Arab Muslims were getting along with their neighbors,
I conducted participant observation, interviews and oral histories with dozens of non Muslims,
including Italian Americans, African American, Latinos, Egyptian Christians and others living in
the Journal Square area. Initially, I began as a casual participating observer of community
meetings, protests, prayers at mosques, family celebrations, neighborhood festivals, picnics,
weddings, and public spaces such as parks, malls and transportation centers. Over time, I
focused more closely on the experiences of three Muslim women and their families. This
involved accompanying women as they worked and shopped, wearing the hijab (Islamic
headscarf), eating meals at participants’ homes, learning Arabic, and tutoring children in English.
Convention