Muslim American women on campus: Undergraduate social life and identity

Abstract

I met Intisar at one of the informal Muslim gatherings on the fourth fl oor of the student union at the George Washington University campus. Affectionate and dryly witty, Intisar quickly became a good friend despite the fourteen-year age difference between us. She had a ready reserve of self-deprecating immigrant jokes, as did I, but we had arrived in this country under very different circumstances. I traveled from Pakistan to the United States in the early 1990s as a cash-strapped doctoral student. Intisar, along with her large family headed by a widowed mother, had fl ed war-torn Somalia as a young child.