Muslim Model Minorities and the Politics of Diasporic Piety

Wednesday, 12 March 2025 | 14:00 to 16:00 EST | Room 519, Fifth Floor, Kaneff Tower, Keele Campus, York University

With Nadia Z. Hasan, School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies, York University

In contemporary Islamophobic political climates in Canada, the interplay of gender and multicultural logics of citizenship and belonging have placed Muslim women in precarious positions as foils for democratic and neoliberal values. Grounded in an analysis of the lived experiences of Pakistani Muslim women in Canada, this presentation explores relationships between Islamic religiosity, discourses of multicultural citizenship, and the trope of the model minority, which sets in motion a powerful discourse that maps out terms of inclusion and a seductive promise of belonging. This presentation focuses on women who are committed to developing their piety through participation in Al-Huda International, a women’s Islamic education organization that had gained notoriety within the Pakistani community and in the mainstream as a particularly conservative form of Islam. This notoriety would in some ways suggest that these women are precluded from the category of the model minority because of the practices that emerge out of their engagements with Al-Huda’s teachings (such as defined domestic roles for women, patriarchal household structures, hijab and niqab). Drawing on interviews and participatory observations with a women’s Quran class in Mississauga, Canada, this presentation traces how, despite this notoriety and related preclusion, these women engage, transform, and reproduce the trope of the model minority through the way they develop their piety in diaspora. I argue that diasporic piety is articulated, practiced, and developed in relation to heteropatriarchal trajectories of migration and a diasporic sense of loss of nation, which is recuperated through multicultural categories of identity, enmeshed in the racialized politics of model minorities.

Nadia Z. Hasan is assistant professor in the School of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies. Her research and community work focus on systemic racism and Islamophobia in legal, administrative, and discursive regimes and their relation to Muslim life. Professor  Hasan is co-author of the WAGE-funded community-based study by the National Council of Canadian Muslims (NCCM), Social Discord and Second-class Citizenship: A Study of the Impact of Bill 21 on Quebec Muslim Women in Light of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

This event is part of the Demos, Democracy and Democratization: South Asia Lecture Series 2024–25.