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All American Yemeni Girls: Being Muslim in a Public School. Loukia K. Sarroub. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005. 151 pp.
In All American Yemeni Girls, Loukia Sarroub illuminates the experiences of six Yemeni American girls in high school regarding how they navigate among their religious, home, and school lives. The ethnography is based on 26 months of fieldwork in a Yemeni community in the Southend of Dearborn, Michigan, from 1997 to 1999, where in the local school district about half of the student population is Arab speaking and 15 percent are of Yemeni origin.
Sarroub provides the perspective of an insider and outsider and explains how she was mainly able to include females in her study because of the fact that her "presence as a woman in their schools and home lives constituted a social embarrassment" (p. 16) for the males. She was considered to be "white" and an outsider because although she could read and write in Arabic, but she was neither Yemeni nor Muslim. In the final chapter written as a reflection piece after September 11, 2001 (9/11), Sarroub further clarifies her outsider perspective by stating that she is of mixed heritage (Algerian and Greek) and is nonreligious.
Sarroub describes...