Scholarly activist research
The first study to directly ask American female converts to Islam what it means to feel Muslim, not just being/becoming Muslim. 459 women entrusted their stories to a researcher who was one of them.
An IRB-approved mixed-methods research initiative examining the distinction between being/becoming Muslim and feeling Muslim among American female converts to Islam · University of Georgia · 459 women
Being Muslim is a fact. Feeling Muslim is a weather.
We are not our feelings. But the greater the degree to which our feelings of Muslimness are nurtured, the stronger the foundational building blocks of our Muslim identities. And just as nurturing strengthens, hindering weakens...but never forget... what can be weakened can also be strengthened.
Four Pathways
The Project
The Feeling Muslim Project grows from a single, powerful question first posed by Karla N. Kovacik (then Evans) in her 2015 University of Georgia thesis: for American female converts to Islam, is there a difference between being/becoming Muslim, the formal act of taking the shahada, and feeling Muslim, the interior, lived experience of Muslim identity?
In 2014, 459 women answered. Among the 257 American female converts who completed both the quantitative and qualitative strands in full, 73.15% affirmed yes: there is a difference. Many gave rich, detailed descriptions of the subtle nuances between being, becoming, and feeling Muslim. One major theme that emerged across responses is that feeling Muslim is a gradual process, a transition, marked by the ebb and flow of positive and negative experiences.
This study provides American female converts to Islam a platform on which to tell their own stories of conversion and experiences of Islam through a uniquely American lens, and to build communities that actively nurture their feelings of Muslimness.
Key Findings
459 participants · 400 complete quantitative responses · IRB-approved · University of Georgia · 2014
Only half currently feel that way, a gap that calls Muslim communities to action.
The Study's Most Urgent Finding
42.8% of the 257 women had, at some point, thought about leaving Islam. The qualitative strand revealed what the checkbox concealed. First published in Project Lina: Bringing Our Whole Selves to Islam (2020).
Understand the findingParticipant Voices
I feel Muslim because I have a community where we all actively try our best to help each other out and bring each other up... having people that we have so many things in common with, not feeling alone.
They are not the same. One is an external formulation (the shahada) and the other an internal state.
Just a state of being, an acceptance of how things are in the world metaphysically and physically. It's been an evolving process though... it progressed over time.
Explore the Project
"I look not at the tongue and the speech; I look at the inward (spirit) and the state of feeling."
Rumi · Masnavi, Book II (Moses and the Shepherd) · trans. Reynold A. Nicholson