During the fall of 2019, I traveled to Reston, VA, a suburb of Washington D.C., to conduct fieldwork at Al-Fatih Academy, a predominantly women-run Islamic K–8 school. Afeefa Syeed, the principal, welcomed me and introduced the school’s mission. I listened carefully for what made it “religious.” But the integrated curriculum she described diverged from my assumptions. Rather than appending Islamic Studies to the core subjects, it invited students to discover Islam in the interconnection between them. To drive her point home, Afeefa shared the news of a student at another Islamic school who committed suicide after exposure to harmful content on social media and added “At Al-Fatih, we measure student learning by how well they develop emotional cognition to use technology mindfully.”

I had expected to hear words like the Quran, Hadith, or Sunna. But my field notes featured terms like mental health, screen time, and social media. If religion wasn’t just another subject, what was it and how had its practice become central to the ethical dilemmas Muslim mothers face in raising digital-native children became the overarching question I sought an answer for in my research at this institution

The idea that mothers manage consumption has recurred with each wave of new technology. The Industrial Revolution moved production to factories, transforming the home into a site of consumption for the rising middle class.¹ Mothers were expected to purchase time-saving goods and apply factory-style time management to child-rearing.² When the Great Depression hit, many blamed working wives for abandoning the home and disrupting the gendered economic order.³

Postwar suburbia brought a new era of consumer motherhood. Medical advances like penicillin and the polio vaccine, combined with mass-produced baby food, modern appliances, and television, positioned mothers as custodians of a suburban ideal—clean, comfortable, and insulated from race riots at home and communism abroad.⁴ But by the 1970s, this ideal was unraveling as the global economy that had been financing it reached a gridlock. Civil Rights activists condemned suburban comfort as built on racial exclusion.⁵ Feminists revealed the isolation and unpaid labor behind the image of domestic bliss.⁶ And suburban mothers, too, resisted public school curricula they saw as morally relativistic and corrosive to religious values.⁷

My research brings together two puzzle pieces that challenge prevailing ideas about motherhood, consumption, and community after the 1970s. The first is a group of Muslim mothers who actively embrace emerging theories of childhood development, especially those addressing digital technology. The second is the town of Reston, intentionally designed to disrupt suburban sprawl. Through walkable villages and mixed housing, Reston sought to foster an inclusive, globally mobile community learning to move with the machine.⁸ To understand how these pieces fit together, I turn to Kathryn Lofton’s argument that religion reemerges as a way of consuming technology to heal the emotional crises it helped produce.⁹ My informants, raised under the specter of Islam’s alleged incompatibility with American life, are reshaping adolescent education to help the next generation be fully both. Their innovation is an integrated curriculum that uses technology to reveal connections across disciplines—one that equips all educators to nurture an engaged and responsible digital citizenry.

This vision of education as a civic antidote resonated far beyond the Muslim community. In 2002, Al-Fatih co-founders Afeefa Syeed and Pervin Divleli were urgently looking for a new school site when they came across a newspaper notice: Barbara Harding, a retired homeschooler, was closing the daycare she had run for 51 years out of her home in Herndon, Virginia—just a block away.Harding agreed to a visit but made it clear she wasn’t interested in renting. During the tour, she asked Afeefa what she believed students needed most. Afeefa described her integrated curriculum, one that linked math, science, language, and spirituality. Harding offered no response. But the next morning, she called Afeefa: “My children grew up in segregated Herndon. I don’t want to see that again. I’d like to have you Muslims in my house. What you’re teaching is what all people need to learn.”¹⁰ That house became Al-Fatih’s first long-term home.

In its early years, the school’s integrated curriculum spoke powerfully to those who had lived through segregation. Today, it draws Muslim mothers seeking to transcend the divide between machine and human in order to help their digitally native children forge community. These include Mahwish, a tech executive and Al-Fatih parent. “We can’t unplug the kids from tech,” she told me. “But we can teach them to be intentional.” At Al-Fatih, coding wasn’t taught in a vacuum, it was grounded in ethics and spirituality. Tools like Google Maps became opportunities for reflection: Why am I learning this? Who am I becoming?“Even something like Hour of Code can be sacred,” Mahwish explained, “if it teaches your child to slow down, think methodically, and be patient.” Programming and prayer, for her, were not opposites but complementary disciplines, both requiring stillness, structure, and intention.

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Al-Fatih’s integrated curriculum shone brightly while so many other schools found it difficult to keep students engaged online. Each afternoon, Afeefa would host an online dhikr (an act of remembrance of God) for students and their family members. The session would open with Afeefa holding up a pinecone and asking, “What might this be used for?” Each student held the pinecone they had received before the transition to remote learning, describing how it reminded them of the outdoors and its importance for mental well-being. One parent later told me their child emerged from these sessions calmer, lauding a spiritual ritual that was equally a civic lesson in digital resilience.

Al-Fatih educators  stand as  modern heirs to America’s tradition of ethical response to technological disruption. In the 19th century, women in upstate New York turned photography into a portal for civic intimacy, gathering in séance circles and forging soulmate marriages to challenge the racial and gender hierarchies of antebellum America.¹¹ Their Muslim mothers carry forward this legacy. In an age where algorithms stoke division, their integrated curriculum points to a new era of maternal politics that nurtures a civically engaged, spiritually grounded republic for the digital age.

Endnotes

1. Nancy Cott, The Bonds of Womanhood: “Separate Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); Linda Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Mary Beth Norton, Liberty’s Daughters: The Revolutionary Experience of American Women, 1750-1800 (New York: HarperCollins, 1980); Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976); Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790-1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) & “The Empire of the Mother: American Writings about Domesticity, 1830-1860,” Women and History, no. 2-3 (Summer-Fall 1982); Bernard Wishy, The Child and the Republic: The Dawn of Modern American Child Nurture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1968); Joseph Kett, The Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America, 1790 to the Present (New York: Basic Books, 1977); Steven Mintz and Susan Kellogg, Domestic Revolutions: A Social History of American Family Life (New York: The Free Press, 1989); Philip J. Greven, Jr., The Protestant Temperament: Patterns of Childrearing, Religious Experience, and the Self in Early America (New York: Knopf, 1977); N. Ray Hiner and Joseph M. Hawes, eds., Growing up in America: Children in Historical Perspective (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1985); Mary Lynn Stevens Heininger et al., A Century of Childhood, 1820-1920 (Rochester, N.Y.: Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum, 1984); Carl Degler, At Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).
2. Sharon Hays, The Cultural Contradictions of Motherhood (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996); Smith-Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City; Rima D. Apple, Mothers and Medicine: A Social History of Infant Feeding, 1890-1950 (Madison, Wis,: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Mother-Work: Women, Child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994); Lori D. Ginzburg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-century United States (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Don Cavallo, “From Perfection to Habit: Moral Training in the American Kindergarten, 1860-1920,” History of Education Quarterly 16, no. 22 (1976): 147-161; Dolores Hayden, The Grant Domestic Revolution: A History of Feminist Designs for American Homes, Neighborhoods, and Cities (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); Sheila M. Rothman, Mother’s Proper Place: A History of Changing Ideals and Practices, 1870 to the Present (New York, 1978); Elizabeth J. Clapp, Mothers of All Children: Women Reformers and the Rise of Juvenile Courts in Progressive Era America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998); Theda Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); Colleen McDannell, Sister Saints: Mormon Women Since the End of Polygamy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019); Maxine L. Margolis, Women and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984); Carolyn M. Goldstein, Creating Consumers: Home Economists in Twentieth-century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Viviana A. Zelizer, Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children (New York: Basic Books, 1985); Ruby Takanishi, “Childhood as a Social Issue: Historical Roots of Contemporary Child Advocacy Movements,” Journal of Social Issues 34, no. 2 (1978): 8-28.
3. Laura Hapke, Women, Work, and Fiction in the American 1930s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995); Victoria W. Wolcott, Remaking Respectability: African American Women in Interwar Detroit (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013); Gwendolyn Mink, The Wages of Motherhood: Inequality in the Welfare State, 1917-1942 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2018); Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn, Black Neighbors: Race and the Limits of Reform in the American Settlement House Movement, 1890-1945 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993); Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta; Ula Yvette Taylor, The Promise of Patriarchy: Women and the Nation of Islam (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017).
4. Janet Golden, Babies Made Us Modern: How Infants Brought America Into the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018); Jessica Martucci, Back to the Breast: Natural Motherhood and Breastfeeding in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015); Molly Ladd-Taylor, Raising a Baby the Government Way: Mothers’ Letters to the Children’s Bureau, 1915-1932 (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 1986); Rima D. Apple, Perfect Motherhood: Science and Childrearing in America (New Brunswick, Rutgers University Press, 2006); Andrea Tone, “Making Room for Rubbers: Gender, Technology, and Birth Control Before the Pill,” History and Technology 18, no.1 (2002): 51-76; Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, Inc., 2003); Shelley Nickles, “More is Better: Mass Consumption, Gender, and Class Identity in Postwar America,” American Quarterly 54 (December 2002): 581-622; Gwendolyn Wright, Building the American Dream: A Social History of Housing in America (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1981); Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Kenneth T. Jackson, Crabgrass Frontier: The Suburbanization of the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987); Cynthia Lee Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939-1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006); Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart: The Making of Christian Free Enterprise (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010).
5. Mary C. Brennan, Wives, Mothers, and the Red Menace (Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2008); David L. Chappell, A Stone of Hope: Prophetic Religion and the Death of Jim Crow (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Thomas J. Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996).
6. Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (New York: Dell, 1963); Joanne Meyerowitz ed., Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945-1960 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994); Lisa Eisenmann, Higher Education for Women in Postwar America, 1945-1965 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 2006); R. Schwartz Cowan, More Work For Mother (New York: Basic Books, 1983).
7. Michelle M. Nickerson, Mothers of Conservatism: Women and the Postwar Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012); Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Matthew D. Lassiter, The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).
8. “Reston, Virginia.” In Encyclopedia of American Urban History, edited by Goldfield, David R., 679-679. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc., 2007. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781412952620.n369.
9. Kathryn Lofton, Consuming Religion (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2017).
10. Afeefa Syeed, “‘Muslims in my house’: A tribute to a beloved centenarian,” Religion News Service, January 8th, 2020, https://religionnews.com/2020/01/08/muslims-in-my-house-a-tribute-to-a-beloved-centenarian/.
11. Molly McGarry, Ghosts of Futures Past: Spiritualism and the Cultural Politics of Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).

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Sher Afgan Tareen is a PhD ABD in Religious Studies at Florida State University, Tallahassee FL and currently serves as the Digital Systems Administrator at Refugee Assistance Alliance, Miami FL. His research interests lie at the intersection of religion, gender, and technology with a particular focus on the history of Islam in America. Passionate about leveraging technology for a socially just and sustainable future, he specializes in LMS and CMS tools that enhance outreach and drive experiential learning outcomes.

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