American Muslims - Muslim Americans

Can A Muslim Truly Be An American?

There are numerous ways to approach this question. From a legal standpoint, many Muslims are American, having been born in the United States. Many Muslim immigrants are in possession of a United States passport, an item that ideally would be the only criterion by which one is judged “American.” National identity is only partly informed by formal citizenship, however. In the United States today, as throughout its history, citizenship is invested with crucial symbolic features. Most of the symbolic features of proper American-ness involve race or religion (wherein, say, Jews or African Americans aren’t seen to be fully American ideologically or, in some cases, legally). Another, often related, feature is political belief: dissent from what politicians and corporate media deem the national interest isn’t traditionally a welcome feature of true American-ness (i.e., the normative American). In turn, the politically-mainstream white Christian is the truest American of all.

Current conceptions of the normative American can best be detected in the recent imbroglio over the “ground-zero mosque,” a histrionic misnomer popularized by right-wing media. The proposed Muslim community center two blocks from the northeastern tip of ground zero, actually called Cordoba House, has created a national frenzy that compels us to reassess the symbolic qualities of citizenship in the United States. By expressing such loud opposition to the community center, a significant portion of Americans has again reinforced a limited definition of American-ness, in this case one that excludes Muslims from the full rights of citizenship.

The debate over the community center in the United States is framed by troublesome assumptions and implications. Most commentators focus on moral questions about the purported insensitivity of constructing a mosque so close to the site of one of America’s deepest tragedies. Because Muslims perpetrated 9/11, the reasoning goes, their association with ground zero is absolute and irreparable. Otherwise, the conversation revolves around a rights-based discourse. Supporters of Cordoba House invoke constitutional rights as a reason that the community center ought to exist.

It would be useful to look beyond these morals- and rights-based discourses and instead examine the issue from the perspective of belonging and citizenship. If Cordoba House is simply a matter of constitutional rights, then its inability to function (whether by legal or popular decree) merely formalizes the reality that Muslims have constricted access to the rights of American citizenship. If the rights of the Cordoba House planners are upheld but those planners are impelled by widespread outrage to abandon the project, then Muslims are delimited in their moral and ontological rights.

These matters come down to the fact that most Americans (as polling suggests) are unwilling to perceive Muslims as normatively American. The categories of “American” and “Muslim” in the popular imagination are mutually exclusive. The normal privileges of citizenship for Muslim Americans, then, can be circumscribed without abandoning the ideals of democratic belonging. For this reason a cross can be mounted above the Oklahoma City memorial without controversy, even though the bombing of the Alfred Murrah Federal Building was an act of terrorism carried out by Christians. Unlike Christians, the embodiment of a Messianic America, Muslims can be readily associated with the behavior of extremists, while Christians are freed from the burden of their own fanatical ideologues.

Even the sporadic defense of Muslim Americans does little to clarify their restricted access to the ideals of citizenship. Trying to allay his readers’ fear of Muslims, Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times writes, “My hunch is that the violence in the Islamic world has less to do with the Koran or Islam than with culture, youth bulges in the population, and the marginalization of women. In Pakistan, I know a young woman whose brothers want to kill her for honor—but her family is Christian, not Muslim.” Kristof enters into dangerous territory here by indicating that the very culture of the East is indelibly different than that of his idealized America. (Kristof is also tendentious: many women in the United States are murdered by angry husbands or male family members who happen to be Christian without even a mention of culture or religion.)

In Kristof’s formulation, Muslims can be defended on legal and ideological grounds but nevertheless remain outside the boundaries of normative American-ness. This is made clear when he invokes the seemingly-requisite specter of Osama bin Laden: “Osama abhors the vision of interfaith harmony that the proposed Islamic center represents.” For Kristof, Cordoba House emblematizes only the proverbial “good Muslim”—the pro-American, moderate, assimilated, ecumenical fantasy of xenophobic reactionaries—and he does little to foster the acceptability of Islam itself.

Too frequently ignored or overlooked in the great ground zero mosque debate is the attribution of irrational violence to Islam, which effectively subdues acknowledgment of the profound violence perpetrated by the American state (military intervention, police brutality, labor exploitation, torture, legislative racism). The debate is fundamentally incomplete: it begins with the assumption that all Muslims are subsumed in a religious violence that is somehow nonexistent in Christian modernity. Muslim Americans are thus endowed a historical burden that no community could ever possibly overcome.

As to the question of whether a Muslim can ever truly be American, the answer at present is no. The current perceptions of the normative American do not provide space in the national community to the Muslim who does not disavow the forms of Islam invented by his patriotic interrogators. For the Muslim truly to become American, it is not the Muslim who must change, but the restrictive and racialized ideals of American national identity.

Religion is an important factor of this racialized American identity: one of the primary arguments in opposition to Cordoba House either proclaims or intimates that white Christianity is the primary basis on which American normativity should be judged. In this schema, even secular logic is inherently religious. It is also a specious logic.

If America, in essence if not in law, is in fact a Christian nation, then no crosses should be allowed in Panama, Iraq, Palestine, Nicaragua, the Philippines, Grenada, Lebanon, Haiti, Hawaii, Puerto Rico, East Timor, Somalia, Afghanistan, Mexico, and Japan, for in these places American violence caused extraordinary destruction, and in that destruction all Christians are implicated. Indeed, given the countless atrocities committed against Indigenous peoples directly in the name of Christianity in the so-called New World, it is certainly insensitive to build churches anywhere in the United States.

This article was originally published at www.jadaliyya.com

Source : http://pulsemedia.org/2010/09/20/can-a-muslim-truly-be-an-american/#print

American Muslims Ask

Will We Ever Belong?

September 5, 2010

By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.

Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.

Dr. Ferhan Asghar at a Muslim center in West Chester, Ohio, with his wife, Pakeeza,
and daughters Zara, left, and Emaan.

“We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?” said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. “In no other country could we have such freedoms — that’s why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don’t want Muslims here anymore.”

Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, “I am more scared than I’ve ever been — more scared than I was after Sept. 11.”

That was a refrain echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on.

Some American Muslims said they were especially on edge as the anniversary of 9/11 approaches. The pastor of a small church in Florida has promised to burn a pile of Korans that day. Muslim leaders are telling their followers that the stunt has been widely condemned by Christian and other religious groups and should be ignored. But they said some young American Muslims were questioning how they could simply sit by and watch the promised desecration.

They liken their situation to that of other scapegoats in American history: Irish Roman Catholics before the nativist riots in the 1800s, the Japanese before they were put in internment camps during World War II.

Muslims sit in their living rooms, aghast as pundits assert over and over that Islam is not a religion at all but a political cult, that Muslims cannot be good Americans and that mosques are fronts for extremist jihadis. To address what it calls a “growing tide of fear and intolerance,” the Islamic Society of North America plans to convene a summit of Christian, Muslim and Jewish leaders in Washington on Tuesday.

Young American Muslims who are trying to figure out their place and their goals in life are particularly troubled, said Imam Abdullah T. Antepli, the Muslim chaplain at Duke University.

“People are discussing what is the alternative if we don’t belong here,” he said. “There are jokes: When are we moving to Canada, when are we moving to Sydney? Nobody will go anywhere, but there is hopelessness, there is helplessness, there is real grief.”

Mr. Antepli just returned from a trip last month with a rabbi and other American Muslim leaders to Poland and Germany, where they studied the Holocaust and the events that led up to it (the group issued a denunciation of Holocaust denial on its return).

“Some of what people are saying in this mosque controversy is very similar to what German media was saying about Jews in the 1920s and 1930s,” he said. “It’s really scary.”

American Muslims were anticipating a particularly joyful Ramadan this year. For the first time in decades, the monthlong holiday fell mostly during summer vacation, allowing children to stay up late each night for the celebratory iftar dinner, breaking the fast, with family and friends.

But the season turned sour.

The great mosque debate seems to have unleashed a flurry of vandalism and harassment directed at mosques: construction equipment set afire at a mosque site in Murfreesboro, Tenn; a plastic pig with graffiti thrown into a mosque in Madera, Calif.; teenagers shooting outside a mosque in upstate New York during Ramadan prayers. It is too soon to tell whether hate crimes against Muslims are rising or are on pace with previous years, experts said. But it is possible that other episodes are going unreported right now.

“Victims are reluctant to go public with these kinds of hate incidents because they fear further harassment or attack,” said Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “They’re hoping all this will just blow over.”

Some Muslims said their situation felt more precarious now — under a president who is perceived as not only friendly to Muslims but is wrongly believed by many Americans to be Muslim himself — than it was under President George W. Bush.

Mr. Patel explained, “After Sept. 11, we had a Republican president who had the confidence and trust of red America, who went to a mosque and said, ‘Islam means peace,’ and who said ‘Muslims are our neighbors and friends,’ and who distinguished between terrorism and Islam.”

Now, unlike Mr. Bush then, the politicians with sway in red state America are the ones whipping up fear and hatred of Muslims, Mr. Patel said.

“There is simply the desire to paint an entire religion as the enemy,” he said. Referring to Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the founder of the proposed Muslim center near ground zero, “What they did to Imam Feisal was highly strategic. The signal was, we can Swift Boat your most moderate leaders.”

Several American Muslims said in interviews that they were stunned that what provoked the anti-Muslim backlash was not even another terrorist attack but a plan by an imam known for his work with leaders of other faiths to build a Muslim community center.

This year, Sept. 11 coincides with the celebration of Eid, the finale to Ramadan, which usually lasts three days (most Muslims will begin observing Eid this year on Sept. 10). But Muslim leaders, in this climate, said they wanted to avoid appearing to be celebrating on the anniversary of 9/11. Several major Muslim organizations have urged mosques to use the day to participate in commemoration events and community service.

Ingrid Mattson, the president of the Islamic Society of North America, said many American Muslims were still hoping to salvage the spirit of Ramadan.

“In Ramadan, you’re really not supposed to be focused on yourself,” she said. “It’s about looking out for the suffering of other people. Somehow it feels bad to be so worried about our own situation and our own security, when it should be about empathy towards others.”

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/06/us/06muslims.html?sq=&st=nyt&scp=10&pagewanted=print

AMERICAN MUSLIMS

Message to Muslims: I’m Sorry

September 18, 2010

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

Many Americans have suggested that more moderate Muslims should stand up to extremists, speak out for tolerance, and apologize for sins committed by their brethren.

That’s reasonable advice, and as a moderate myself, I’m going to take it. (Throat clearing.) I hereby apologize to Muslims for the wave of bigotry and simple nuttiness that has lately been directed at you. The venom on the airwaves, equating Muslims with terrorists, should embarrass us more than you. Muslims are one of the last minorities in the United States that it is still possible to demean openly, and I apologize for the slurs.

I’m inspired by another journalistic apology. The Portland Press Herald in Maine published an innocuous front-page article and photo a week ago about 3,000 local Muslims praying together to mark the end of Ramadan. Readers were upset, because publication coincided with the ninth anniversary of 9/11, and they deluged the paper with protests.

So the newspaper published a groveling front-page apology for being too respectful of Muslims. “We sincerely apologize,” wrote the editor and publisher, Richard Connor, and he added: “we erred by at least not offering balance to the story and its prominent position on the front page.” As a blog by James Poniewozik of Time paraphrased it: “Sorry for Portraying Muslims as Human.”

I called Mr. Connor, and he seems like a nice guy. Surely his front page isn’t reserved for stories about Bad Muslims, with articles about Good Muslims going inside. Must coverage of law-abiding Muslims be “balanced” by a discussion of Muslim terrorists?

Ah, balance — who can be against that? But should reporting of Pope Benedict’s trip to Britain be “balanced” by a discussion of Catholic terrorists in Ireland? And what about journalism itself?

I interrupt this discussion of peaceful journalism in Maine to provide some “balance.” Journalists can also be terrorists, murderers and rapists. For example, radio journalists in Rwanda promoted genocide.

I apologize to Muslims for another reason. This isn’t about them, but about us. I want to defend Muslims from intolerance, but I also want to defend America against extremists engineering a spasm of religious hatred.

Granted, the reason for the nastiness isn’t hard to understand. Extremist Muslims have led to fear and repugnance toward Islam as a whole. Threats by Muslim crazies just in the last few days forced a Seattle cartoonist, Molly Norris, to go into hiding after she drew a cartoon about Muhammad that went viral.

And then there’s 9/11. When I recently compared today’s prejudice toward Muslims to the historical bigotry toward Catholics, Mormons, Jews and Asian-Americans, many readers protested that it was a false parallel. As one, Carla, put it on my blog: “Catholics and Jews did not come here and kill thousands of people.”

That’s true, but Japanese did attack Pearl Harbor and in the end killed far more Americans than Al Qaeda ever did. Consumed by our fears, we lumped together anyone of Japanese ancestry and rounded them up in internment camps. The threat was real, but so were the hysteria and the overreaction.

Radicals tend to empower radicals, creating a gulf of mutual misunderstanding and anger. Many Americans believe that Osama bin Laden is representative of Muslims, and many Afghans believe that the Rev. Terry Jones (who talked about burning Korans) is representative of Christians.

Many Americans honestly believe that Muslims are prone to violence, but humans are too complicated and diverse to lump into groups that we form invidious conclusions about. We’ve mostly learned that about blacks, Jews and other groups that suffered historic discrimination, but it’s still O.K. to make sweeping statements about “Muslims” as an undifferentiated mass.

In my travels, I’ve seen some of the worst of Islam: theocratic mullahs oppressing people in Iran; girls kept out of school in Afghanistan in the name of religion; girls subjected to genital mutilation in Africa in the name of Islam; warlords in Yemen and Sudan who wield AK-47s and claim to be doing God’s bidding.

But I’ve also seen the exact opposite: Muslim aid workers in Afghanistan who risk their lives to educate girls; a Pakistani imam who shelters rape victims; Muslim leaders who campaign against female genital mutilation and note that it is not really an Islamic practice; Pakistani Muslims who stand up for oppressed Christians and Hindus; and above all, the innumerable Muslim aid workers in Congo, Darfur, Bangladesh and so many other parts of the world who are inspired by the Koran to risk their lives to help others. Those Muslims have helped keep me alive, and they set a standard of compassion, peacefulness and altruism that we should all emulate.

I’m sickened when I hear such gentle souls lumped in with Qaeda terrorists, and when I hear the faith they hold sacred excoriated and mocked. To them and to others smeared, I apologize.

Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/19/opinion/19kristof.html?_r=1&ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print

Islamic Radicalization

Lessons from Both Sides of the Atlantic on Tackling Islamic Radicalization

Azeem Ibrahim 

I recently had the honor of being invited to the Pentagon to meet the US Assistant Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Deputy National Security Adviser from the White House.

Although I have been to Congress and met a sitting President, I had never, until now, visited the Pentagon. I have to confess that my first impressions of it were that it was just like it is portrayed in the movies! You walk past guys looking at big screens with maps of who-knows-where, huddled round multiple computer screens in rooms with ominous-sounding names like 'Central Operations Command.'

But whereas the Pentagon of the movies is always about massive military force, we were there to talk about the less glamorous threat of homegrown radicalization in the Muslim American community, and specifically the South Asian diaspora.

I had given a briefing to Congress on the topic, because of my experience here in Scotland. Because the reality is that the challenge of Islamic radicalization is one which Europe and the US both face in common. There are important differences, of which more later, but the dynamics of radicalization are the same on both sides of the Atlantic.

What is more, over the past few years, scholars have built up an impressive array of research into how radicalization works in practice on the streets. We now know a lot more than we used to about how kids come to be radicalized.

For example, a former CIA operations officer called Marc Sageman conducted the largest ever survey of radical Muslims to date, in order to understand why kids radicalize. In a groundbreaking study, he analyzed over 500 profiles of Islamic terrorists. He concluded that radicalization normally happens in four distinct stages.

It is sparked when the individual reacts with moral outrage to stories of Muslims suffering around the world. Some move on from that to the second stage, in which that spark is inflamed by a radical Manichaean interpretation which explains such suffering in the context of a wider war between Islam and the West. A few move on to the third stage, in which that resentment is fueled by negative personal experiences in western countries (e.g., discrimination, inequality, or just an inability to get on despite good qualifications). And of those, some make it into the fourth stage, in which the individual joins a terrorist network which becomes like a second family, albeit one closed to the outside world. This situation stokes the radical worldview and prepares the initiate for action and, in some cases, martyrdom. The crucial stage is reached when a young Muslim begins to believe that Islam justifies violence and closes his or her mind to other viewpoints.

Remember, this explanation - the four stages - are not a product of speculation. They are the patterns detected in the hundreds of cases of radicalization which Sageman studied.

Another trend which has been noticed by those who study Islamic radicalization is the correlation between radical extremism and lack of Islamic education. Researchers estimate that almost 90% of violent Islamists have had no authentic religious education at all. For example, none of those who carried out the 9/11 attack on the United States or the 7/7 attack on London had received such education. Even al-Qaeda's leadership lacks credibility. Osama Bin Laden never attended a religious seminary and has no formal religious training. Most of its leaders have backgrounds in medicine, engineering, or business.

The fact that the vast majority of radicals have received no such education makes it look very much like authentic Islamic education prevents violence. So the best way to prevent such violence is to teach young Muslims what real, authentic Islam actually says.

I am pleased to say that this is the approach that the US is beginning to take. They are planning the Presidential Summit on Entrepreneurship, which, by encouraging both economic and social entrepreneurship, will both bypass the disenfranchisement which Sageman identified as being the third step on the path to radicalization, and use social entrepreneurship as a mechanism to build capacity within Muslim communities.

But on this topic we can learn from each other. The US still has much to learn from the UK. For example, any Islamic education programs in the US will need to understand how centrally important it is to find teachers who are knowledgeable in both secular and Islamic law and who can synthesize their knowledge of both. The teachers also need to be personally credible to potential young radicals.

The best people for this are often young teachers who are a few years older than their students, who have at one time been tempted towards radicalization themselves, and so who can empathize with the pull their charges may feel, whilst also being able to explain why it is wrong. Lastly, they need to understand the inadequacy of relying solely on Mosque-based education programs.

But there is also much that we in Europe can learn from the US.

Despite a lack of formal education programs, the demographics of Muslims in the US tend to be different from European Muslims. Compared to the Muslim minorities in Europe, those in the States tend to be more educated, and to work in the professions. That means they tend to be more integrated into US society, which prevents them reaching the third stage of the process Sageman identified.

US Muslims also tend to see themselves as much more American than European Muslims see themselves as European. I think this is because, more than Europe, many see the US as less of a nation and more of a set of ideals, like freedom, equality, and democracy. If you subscribe to them, you can have a stake in society. We, unfortunately, do not have an equivalent in Europe. Perhaps that is why many European Muslims still find themselves being treated as immigrants. In many, particularly continental European countries, the Islamic minority is treated essentially as a problem and an object of suspicion and disdain. We should perhaps not be so surprised that so many have serious identity crises.

I came away from the meeting inspired by the way that the US sought to solve its societal problems. The US, like the UK, is willing to listen and learn, make an effort to understand the problem of Islamic radicalization, and work out how to solve them. On this front, the work has begun.

Azeem Ibrahim is a Research Scholar at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, Member of the Board of Directors at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding and Chairman and CEO of Ibrahim Associates.

Source : http://www.huffingtonpost.com/azeem-ibrahim/lessons-from-both-sides-o_b_682278.html