Yemeni Culture

In the last few decades, Muslims have come to constitute a significant immigrant group in the United States. As a result of this relatively recent arrival, the second generation, defined as children born in the United States to immigrant-origin parents, are the first generation being raised in America and are starting to reach maturity. Their unique perspective on the United States, thoroughly unlike that of their parents, forces the second generation to confront issues that their parents and other minority groups in the United States do not have to face. Ideally, they need to strike a balance between the practices and religion of their parents’ country of origin and the strikingly dissimilar culture of contemporary America, particularly as …show more content…
Layla, one of the girls on whom Sarroub focuses, summarizes her cultural conundrum with the following statement: “I want to be able to do what my parents want because I want to please my parents, you know. But at the same time, I can’t, because that’s not something that’s in my heart.” To Layla and the other Yemeni girls, Yemen and the United States, drawn loosely, are often irreconcilable. Even the Islam practiced in Yemen is different than that in the United States; here, the girls learn to read the Quran and learn Arabic. While these girls may have every intent to assimilate into mainstream American culture, particularly in its emphasis on free will and choice, the constraints of their parents’ and community’s expectations of them impede them from doing so.
Sabana Mir discusses the alienation of Muslim Americans on college campuses, specifically Muslim women, as a result of the prevailing cultures embedded in American university life existing in opposition to Muslim values. Mir discusses the notion of pluralism as universities’ attempts to foster an atmosphere of laissez faire multiculturalism, in that one group’s way of life is theoretically as good as another, within …show more content…
As she depicts it, these college students are caught between two radically different types of Islam: their parents’ ethnically orientated, traditional, very much apolitical Islam and what she describes as internationalist identity Islam. This latter type, towards which she observes a tendency, is marked by a negation of “interpretation and diversity altogether, one that rejects historical development and cultural context.” This “identity” Islam breeds an antipathy towards the United States by individuals who have almost universally benefitted from an upbringing here. This reinforces the idea that assimilation is not as simple as measuring the income levels of a particular immigrant group; it has political, economic, religious, social, cultural, and religious dimensions, all of which may not move in tandem. Muslim Americans, in particular, tend to be economically well-integrated, as they are predominantly middle/upper middle class, but are more insular in terms of living in and marrying within primarily Muslim