The thing I found most interesting when reading “The Muslim World Day Parade” by Susan Slyomovics was the importance of parades for a cultural group establishing a presence in New York City. I also found the hierarchy that exists in parades to be quite interesting. There seems to be a direct relationship between the power of an ethnic group and the route of the parade. While the Irish, Jews, Italians, Germans, Poles, Greeks, and Hispanics reserve the coveted Fifth Avenue route, “latecomers, such as the Koreans, Pakistanis, Sikhs, Indians, Dominicans, Cubans, and Muslims are relegated” to less desirable locations (161).
Although parades in the city usually serve as a celebration of a particular ethnic culture, the Muslim World Day Parade is one of the few parades that focus on a religion. Slyomovics writes, “It is possible to conjecture that Muslims in New York City, in order to gain political and economic power, are reconfiguring religion into ethnicity to take advantage of the discourse of ethnicity” (160). And a festive parade, usually perceived as a “manifestation of ethnic culture” by New Yorkers, is the perfect way to accomplish this. By defining their ethnicity, immigrant Muslims are solidifying their place in New York City.
I was surprised to learn that, while trying to construct an ethnic presence in NYC, immigrant Muslims also struggle to distance themselves from “the stigmatized race of African Americans,” by differentiating themselves from African American Muslims (160). That’s to be expected, considering how differently these two groups are received by New Yorkers: “a white, middle-class New York section of the Bronx readily accepted immigrant Muslim mosques in their neighborhood but rejected the presence of African American Muslim place of worship” (160). It is interesting that immigrant Muslims are trying to distance themselves from native Muslims just because they do not want to be associated with African Americans. This shows that racism and prejudice are not only present in the general population, as we read in chapter 5 of Foner’s From Ellis Island to JFK, but are also strong influencing factors in religious communities of New York City.
