To be a Muslim in contemporary American society is a complex existence, no doubt further complicated in the post-9/11 era. They face discrimination and prejudices that are often based on misinformation, stereotypes and general misunderstandings about Islam.

For the Muslim youth in particular, coming of age in the 21st century here presents an additional challenge: the cultural pressures of Americanization and assimilation. For some young Muslims I met, these forces cause them to turn inward and draw closer to their faith. Others, meanwhile, bask in the opportunities presented by American culture and feel less qualms about some of its indulgences, yet still strive to maintain at least a fair balance with their traditions and religion.

So what I’ve tried to do in this project is visually address the paradox of Muslim youth in America today, by documenting a small group of Muslim men and women in terms of both the banality of their daily lives in the featureless landscape of the Midwest, as well as their devout adherence to the principles and practices of their collective faith.

The main way I began meeting people on the project was kinda the typical snowball effect: one person introduces you to two people, those two introduce you to four people, etc., and it eventually branches out along multiple paths. For one I had met a Muslim student in a college photography class where I lectured; she led me to a male friend of hers who organized weekly pickup soccer games with a revolving cast of other Muslim men. So I showed up at the first game to meet the one guy and just talk awhile without even bringing out the camera, and before we even got down to any of that they were graciously inviting me to play soccer with them (no matter that I had only played once or twice since I was an elementary-aged kid). Soon enough I was playing soccer with them nearly every weekend, and more and more each time we would talk about my project, about their lives, and about other people they knew who I should be introduced to.

Another route of contact for me was through the local masjid where I was introduced to the imam’s secretary, who eventually gave me her blessing to photograph there and also to photograph and interview her teenage daughter — which was particularly helpful because at times it was difficult to gain access to some female subjects.

Something that I’ve hoped to maintain (successful or not, you be the judge) while working on the project is to let the Muslim voice speak for itself, to let my subjects talk about themselves and their lives in their own words. Being a non-Muslim myself, obviously there are certain limitations to how representative my photography could be (which is to say nothing about the reality too that this small group of Muslims I met and photographed could never be held as representative of the millions of other Muslims in the U.S. and around the world). However, there is an up side to being the outsider too: as someone who’s essentially among the ranks of the secular crowd, I think helps me confront my subjects from a neutral position, unbound by any agendas or pre-conceptions. Also, I didn’t want to personally be too heavy-handed in controlling the dialogue of the images.

What I started to notice as I got further into the project was that the emerging link between all my subjects was a rather moderate Muslim voice: they all expressed belief in a very plain and simple interpretation of the Qur’an and its applications for daily living. While we all can hopefully recognize that Islam, like any religion, is a diverse and complex system with a cacophony of ideologies and subset beliefs, it often seems like the more extremist interpretations are what we tend to see most, via potentially sensationalized media reporting. The more moderate Islamic voice, by contrast, is much less represented — and the truth between the lines is that there are countless families and communities of Muslims who lead humble lives, who keep their heads down and work hard in pursuit of modest dreams very similar to the rest of society. They don’t identify themselves with the hyperbolized, fundamentalist versions of Islam, and they don’t want their lives and their religion to be associated with jihad or terrorism, just like some Christians in America probably don’t want to be wholly represented by the likes of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson or Jeremiah Wright.

Another thing I kept coming back to, that kept me in constant fascination, as I photographed and interviewed more and more people, was the question of personal identity — its central to the paradox of young Muslims in the U.S., and something that almost all of them said they struggle with.

For themselves personally, how do Muslims define their religion? And how do they define themselves?

For the Muslim youth in America, do they see themselves as more Muslim than American, more American than Muslim, or is the answer somewhere in the middle? Are these identities competing? Are they mutually exclusive? Can they co-exist, and if so, how? And ultimately, what are the major influences upon each identity? And finally, what happens to these questions when they are placed against the backdrop of post-9/11 America, or the influences of Americanization? For example consider the interplay between Americanization and terrorism: on the one hand, can Americanization act as a positive agent of socialization that helps to mitigate the spread of terrorist ideologies — or, on the other hand, is terrorism in some forms actually a direct backlash against the forces of Americanization? Either way, this requires the individual to make a clear decision involving identity.

I dunno, maybe my project (or photography in general) doesn’t provide (or shouldn’t be looked at to provide) concrete answers to any of those nagging questions. Maybe that’s because the individuals I photographed have not yet discovered those answers for themselves either. Maybe that’s because in their youth, they are still exploring and molding their sense of self. Or maybe that’s because these are questions that take much longer than six months or a year — probably closer to a lifetime — to figure out.

The notion of Muslim identity or American identity (or neither, or something in between), and how they are acted upon by larger phenomena, is one small aspect of what I think will partly define everyone — Muslim, Christian, secular or otherwise — in the post-9/11 youth generation of America.

These are all reasons why I definitely want to continue this project beyond the book. And besides, I can’t wait to get back to playing soccer with those guys this summer…I’ve got a lot left to learn on the pitch.

– Greg Ruffing, March 2009