We thank Rachel Gillum for her thoughtful summary of our book and its contributions to current scholarship. We also appreciate her recommendations for future research, which we are happy to engage with here.

Gillum expresses concerns that our research design might have influenced our findings: a survey about head covering might prime more pious responses, and noncovered women’s responses might have been influenced by the presence of covered respondents in the focus groups. We are transparent about this bias in our introduction, highlighting how our convenience sample allowed us to unpack the intersection of Muslim American women’s religiosity and political engagement with a focus on the experiences of covered women. Although we observed that focus group composition influenced the conversation, the effects were attributable to preexisting relationships between participants, culture, race, age, and conversion experience, in addition to covering. These possible effects deserve future research.

Gillum mentions the need for a more systematic exploration of the difference in the religiosity and sociopolitical engagement of both uncovered and covered Muslim women. Although covered women constituted the majority of our survey participants (77%) and focus group participants (85.5%), we investigated the differences between the covered and noncovered women where the analysis was warranted. Both categories of participants were very politically engaged by the standards of the American public with 63–68% of covered and 71–78% of noncovered women voting in the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012. Similarly, 62% of covered and 74% of uncovered participants reported a party affiliation. It was the covered respondents who were closer to the mainstream American voter, 59% of whom voted and 65% of whom affiliated with a political party in 2012. Our research implies that further differences between covered and uncovered women could be discovered with a randomly selected sample and a survey instrument that does not explicitly focus on head covering.

Gillum questions the way socioeconomic factors influence religiosity and social and political behaviors. We offer some insights about socioeconomics in our statistical models, which controlled for marital status, education, and employment, and found that they affect political participation indirectly by influencing the diversity of women’s social networks. But our primary finding is that covering is a complex practice motivated by family, culture, and, above all, personal piety. Our respondents nearly universally describe their decision to cover as a free and informed personal choice within a liberal democratic political culture.

Gillum notes that her recent book, Muslims in a Post-9/11 America: A Survey of Attitudes and Beliefs and their Implications for U.S. National Security Policy, and ours are in conversation with each other around how race, migrant history, integration, and, in some cases, religious conversion interact with perceived discrimination and ties to the Muslim community, and so influence political perceptions and behaviors. One difference between our books is Gillum’s focus on more state-sanctioned discrimination and our exploration of social forms of discrimination. We encourage future work to deliberately and explicitly include and explore both forms of discrimination and to treat them as distinct phenomena that occur along a spectrum of severity. Our work suggests that the type and severity of discrimination experienced by individual Muslims are gendered and conditioned by other demographic factors, and especially by visible markers of differentiation such as race and head covering. We hope that these lines of future inquiry will build on the contributions of our respective books to substantially inform collective knowledge on the Muslim American experience.