During the last two weeks of March, the Center for American Studies and Research (CASAR) hosted two lecturers, who gave their enthusiastic audiences vivid pictures of the cultural panorama of the United States. On March 24, Moustapha Bayoumi, professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY), focused on African-American Islam in a talk entitled “East of the Sun (West of the Moon): The Harmonic History of African American Islam.” Embedded in African-American jazz (the title is from a Billy Holiday song), his talk explored America’s encounter with Islam. The following week, Murray Milner of the University of Virginia (UVA) exposed the anxiety-fraught world of American high schoolers in his lecture, “American Teenagers, Consumerism, and World Culture.” Pointing out that the standard narrative of African-American Islam is dominated by “ideas of separation and exclusion,” Professor Bayoumi emphasized the opposing view of the “faith as a religion of universal belonging.” He sketched early evidence of Islam in African-American history: Muslims among early African slaves, the establishment of the Moorish Science Temple in 1913, and the role of the Ahmadis—who believed in “the unity of all religions as manifested in Islam” and viewed it as “a religion in which Blacks had an alternative universal history to which to pledge allegiance.” Bayoumi related Malcolm X’s move from the Nation of Islam’s belief in “an Islam for black people” to the Ahmadi view of a particular universal vision of Islam. Professor Bayoumi wrapped up his lecture with a description of jazz converts to Islam (Yusef Lateef, Sahib Shihab, McCoy Tyner) and those influenced by the spirit of Islam (Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane). He underscored, with musical illustrations, Coltrane’s desire for “a new kind of community, one based on a new universalism that has a base in Islam.” Murray Milner, associate director of UVA’s Center for South Asian studies, noted the relative newness of the notion of “the teenager.” It was not until after World War II, when pupils were no longer able to leave school after Grade 8 and join the work force that “teenager” became a recognizable category and thus the target of sociological research. Professor Milner dismissed the usual reasons given to explain teen behavior: poor parenting, social class and ethnicity, bad schools, hanging out with “good” or “bad” crowds, hormones, sex, and psychology. According to Milner, peer status is all-important in predicting and explaining teen behavior. Since teenagers have no power in economic and political matters, no say in being in school or in the choice of school, other students, and teachers or curriculum, status power assumes major importance in their lives. They can approve or disapprove of their peers and choose their own friends; “these young people are extremely preoccupied with peer status relations. In order to achieve acceptable status they have to conform to the norms of the group.” They are concerned with fashion, language, lunchroom companions, and who is seen with whom. Status power explains bullying, ostracism, and acceptance in certain sports teams and clubs. Given the importance to teens of fashion and life style, the effect of teen behavior on the economy is paramount. Murray sees “teen status systems as ideal training for taken-for-granted high consumption.” He believes “it is adults who have created the structures that lead to these outcomes.” Possible ways to change teen dependence on the demands of status include expanding the availability of varied extracurricular activities and such innovations as the wearing of school uniforms. In terms of “world” culture, Professor Milner sees teens “as the carriers of homogeneity and pluralism” worldwide.
|
|||||||
|
