Book Review: Keeping It Halal, The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys

Abstract

The study of Muslims in the West, particularly in the United States, over the past two decades has been dominated by perspectives of security, integration, and radicalism. Since the events of September 11, 2001, Muslims have often been positioned as problematic subjects in public and academic discourse, often reduced to objects of state surveillance, targets for deradicalization policies, or symbols of tensions between Islam and Western modernity. As a result, the daily life dimension of Muslims—especially the younger generation—is often marginalized in the scientific literature. This article summarizes and analyzes John O'Brien's book Keeping It Halal: The Everyday Lives of Muslim American Teenage Boys (2017), an ethnographic study of the daily lives of Muslim teenage boys in the United States. Based on more than three years of field research in an urban mosque, O'Brien shows that American Muslim youth live a "culturally contested" life, having to negotiate the demands of religious Islam with the norms of modern American adolescence. The book's main findings challenge the dominant narrative that associates Muslims with radicalism, and instead present young Muslims as reflective, creative, and adaptive social actors. This article confirms the book's contribution to the sociology of religion, youth studies, and Islamic studies in the West.