Mapping A Diaspora

I was at first reluctant to review Paul Eid’s Book Being Arab: Ethnic and Religious Identity Building among Second Generation Youth in Montreal because the book is a study of second-generation Arab Canadians (or more precisely, Arab Québécois) and of this group’s ethnic and religious identity. I am a first-generation Arab Canadian or Québécois, among other things, and one of the few secular, heretic non-believers among this group. In short, I am an anomaly in a community where even members of the second generation consider religion to be an important factor in their lives. (According to the statistics in the book, 52 percent say that religion is “very important” and 30.5 percent that it is “important”). I am always slipping and twisting not to be confined within a single identity box with the label “A.” But then, somehow, reading through the book, and perhaps because I have been living in the West for a long time, I found myself feeling a certain communality with the...