Islamic Studies Commons^™

Steve & Anita, Steve, Anita, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Steve and Anita Canfield helped the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Turkey. They helped send blankets, coats, and washing machines to Syrian refugees. They were assigned to Frankfurt to assess refugee camps, soup kitchens, warehouses, and immigrant communities. The couple visited refugee camps and soup kitchens all over Europe to determine what was needed most by refugees.

The Canfields established the Friendship Center in Rome. The center offers classes in Italian, English, Italian, and a Red Cross course. It also has a gospel choir, a popular activity for primarily African refugees. The LDS Church has plans to …

“Unwanted In My Own Country”: Testimonies Of Identity And Belonging-Negotiations In A Post-Trump America, Nadia Naghedi Baradaran Hajjar

Master's Theses

This research investigates the impact of Donald Trump’s campaign during the 2016 presidential elections and the so-called, “Muslim” Travel Ban presidential executive orders, on communities of first and second-generation Middle Eastern, Muslim immigrant women in the Los Angeles area, and it is framed within the context of post 9/11-biases and racial discrimination. The ethnographic-like methodology for this research has been conducted with the use of 11 semi-structured in-depth interviews from 2017 that have been transcribed and coded. Findings from the interview data shows that there is a varied amount of responses from the 2016 Presidential Elections and travel ban, however, …

Rita, Rita, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Rita Alkhaledy grew up in Sadr City, a poor suburb of Baghdad. Her father is an Iraqi Arab and her mother was Kurdish Iranian. Her mother lived in fear that she would be cast out of Baghdad as being an outsider in Iraq was frowned upon. Her father served in the Iraqi army in the 80s and was gone a great deal, leading to a strained relationship. Their relationship was mended when her mother died from cancer.

After the Iraq war, Rita and her brothers realized that their lives were in danger. They had to move from house to house …

Jeanusnat, Jeanusnat, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Jeanusnat’s father, who was chief of a Nigerian community, was murdered by an enemy community. The murderer intended to kill Jeanusnat and his mother as well, but they fled to neighboring Niger. There, Jeanusnat parted ways with his mother, who stayed at the church with a family, and Jeanusnat crossed into Libya in the back of a truck. But once in Libya, danger persisted. He was confronted by some robbers who stabbed him with a knife and beat him, leaving injuries on his legs and shoulder. In Tripoli, a man offered him temporary refuge, where Jeanusnat stayed until he decided …

Ali, Ali, Twila Bird

TSOS Interview Gallery

At eighteen fate placed Ali and his family in the center of hostilities in northern Afghanistan. Warring militant factions killed hundreds of people in his village. Ali helped identify and bury dozens of his friends and neighbors in a mass grave.

We spent days and nights in the mountains and blocked on the borders. I crossed the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan walking with my handicap. Then it took us another sixteen hours to cross the border between Pakistan and Iran, also in very high mountains of more than 2500 meters. The Iranian police were killing people on the …