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[HadhratKhadija]

Copyright 2005 The New Republic, LLC

The New Republic

December 12, 2005
SECTION: Pg. 18
LENGTH: 5621 words
HEADLINE: Religious Protection
BYLINE: by spencer ackerman


HIGHLIGHT:

Why American Muslims haven't turned to terrorism.


BODY:

In September, the world watched the ringleader of the July 7 London terrorist
attack, his voice inflected with a West Yorkshire accent, preach jihad in
English. Al Jazeera aired the communique of 30-year-old Mohammad Sidique Khan, which
Khan recorded to explain why he helped murder over 50 of his fellow Britons on
a bus and in the Underground. "Until you stop the bombing, gassing,
imprisonment, and torture of my people, we will not stop this fight," Khan declared. "We
are at war. I am a soldier. And now, you, too, will taste the reality of this
situation." When Khan spoke of "my people," he wasn't talking about his British
countrymen. Rather, he was referring to the members of a global Islamic
community, which he, like Osama bin Laden, believes is under siege by the rapacious
Western world. The tape was all the more shocking because Khan was known in his
Leeds hometown for mentoring neighborhood children at Hillside Primary School,
which caters to a large number of immigrants. In a nightmare scenario for Great
Britain--and for the West more generally--the man who helped foreign-born
children assimilate into the fabric of British society had also resolved to rip it
apart.

The significance of the London bombing is impossible to overstate. Although
debate still rages over the degree to which Al Qaeda's increasingly disassociated
leadership orchestrated the attack, the fact remains that the broader jihadist
movement was able to draw upon radicalized Muslim citizens of a Western
country, who then acted with relative autonomy. By contrast, the September 11 attacks
required the insertion into the United States of foreign operatives, traveling
on visas, whom bin Laden and his lieutenants directed and funded. If Al Qaeda
can increasingly rely on "self-activated" terrorists like the London bombers,
the implications for the West, and for Muslim citizens of Western countries, are
profound and foreboding. "The fact that these young men were British-born
Muslims creates a degree of a different kind of anxiety within the [U.S. Muslim]
community," Edina Lekovic of the Muslim Public Affairs Council told Agence
France-Presse. "If this could happen in the U.K., it is our worst nightmare that it
could happen here."

Around the same time that Khan's video aired, a potential harbinger of
Lekovic's nightmare surfaced. On September 11, 2005, the fourth anniversary of the
attacks on New York and Washington, ABC News broadcast a videotaped threat by an Al
Qaeda jihadist known as Azzam the American. With his head turbaned and his face
veiled, Azzam, like Khan, spoke in English. He vowed that, unless Westerners
"rid yourself of your current leaders and governments and their anti-Islam,
anti-Muslim policies," there would be a terrible reckoning: "Yesterday, London and
Madrid. Tomorrow, Los Angeles and Melbourne, God willing." Azzam's message is
not the only recent incident raising the specter of domestically produced
jihadist violence. Shortly before its broadcast, the Justice Department indicted three
American citizens and a Pakistani immigrant for hatching a plot in a California
prison to attack nearby U.S. military, Israeli, and Jewish community targets.
"We have a tendency to think of terrorism as something that is foreign," U.S.
Attorney Debra W. Yang told reporters. "This is a stark reminder that it can be
homegrown."

But the British and American cases are not the same. It's true that extremist
messages exist in American Muslim communities, and there have been a few
instances of American Muslims becoming terrorists. Those extremely rare cases,
however, are far better explained by individual pathology than by rising Islamic
militancy due to group disaffection. Europe's growing Muslim culture of alienation,
marginalization, and jihad isn't taking root here. As a result, one senior
administration official contends, "Al Qaeda finds greater support among European
Muslim communities than in the U.S."--meaning that the self-activated jihadists
that Europe is witnessing are less likely to appear in America. In part, the
United States is protected because it offers better social and economic
opportunities to its Muslim citizens, while Europe's inability to accommodate its growing
Muslim underclass led to rioting that spread from the Paris suburbs across
France. But economics alone can't explain the more fluid integration of Muslims
into American life. That, in large part, is a function of America's ability to
accommodate Islam itself.

French political theorist Olivier Roy argues that jihadism stems from a violent
identity crisis felt acutely among Muslims in the West. But, ironically, that
search for identity is far less of a crisis for Muslims in the United
States--the supposed oppressor of Muslims, in bin Laden's telling--because of a
fundamentally American attribute: the mutually reinforcing creeds of pluralism and
religiosity. "When I go out to Bush Country," says Eboo Patel of Chicago's
Interfaith Youth Core, "it is true that, for some people, the way I pray is peculiar.
But they don't think I'm hallucinating when I say, `It's prayer time.'" In other
words, if the United States is looking for a way to win the hearts and minds of
Muslims worldwide, it ought to first look at what it has accomplished at home.

Haitham "Danny" Bundakji had no idea who Azzam the American was until the
California Muslim community leader's phone started to ring late last year. Reporters
had tracked Bundakji to a hotel room in Jerusalem, where he was staying during
a trip to the Holy Land. Suddenly, he was being asked to explain the psyche of
a terrorist. His confusion quickly gave way to a horrible realization: Not only
did Bundakji know this man called Azzam, he had ministered to him, even
witnessing his conversion to Islam in the mid-'90s. "I'm so regretful," Bundakji says
from his Orange County home, "that I didn't get to him first." But some believe
that Bundakji, in some measure, did get to Azzam first. The questions put to
him in Jerusalem were a prelude to a more incendiary accusation: that Bundakji
was at least partially responsible for the creation of an American jihadist. The
broader implication is that American Muslim leaders might well be incubating
new terrorists, in the manner of London's notorious Finsbury Park Mosque or
Maaseik, a tiny Flemish town Belgian investigators believe has become a hotbed of
jihadism.

Azzam the American was born Adam Gadahn in 1978. He spent his childhood on a
goat ranch in Riverside County, raised by non-Muslim parents who were far more
influenced by the 1960s than by the Koran. By the mid-'90s, Gadahn was a pudgy,
long-haired, occasional community college student who found Islam after an
adolescent foray into the local death-metal music scene. Bundakji, the vice chairman
of the Islamic Society of Orange County, witnessed his conversion and hired him
as a mosque security guard. The two initially enjoyed a warm relationship. "But
then a change took place," Bundakji recalls. Gadahn started spending more and
more time with a group of Pakistani nationals who were "fundamentalists" and who
were "criticizing us all the time, especially my affiliation with the
interfaith community." A flyer circulated around the center giving Bundakji a noxious
nickname: Danny the Jew.

Bundakji subsequently banned the fundamentalists from his mosque. Gadahn was
infuriated. "Adam came charging into my office," Bundakji remembers. "I've never
experienced someone who got physical, but he slapped me across my face. I
didn't respond. He was very angry, saying we're not true Muslims [at the mosque]."
Gadahn returned to pray only once more. According to his aunt, Nancy Pearlman,
he traveled to Pakistan in 1998, only sporadically contacting his family
thereafter. He had become nothing more than a bad memory for Bundakji until the
reporters began calling last year, after the Justice Department announced its
interest in the man now known as Azzam the American.

Although the FBI is seeking information on Gadahn--who is still at large--it
has never shown any interest in Bundakji. Yet he recently found his mosque in a
report that reflects persistent fears among Americans that extremist tendencies
lurk within their Muslim neighbors. Earlier this year, Freedom House released a
study titled "Saudi Publications on Hate Ideology Invade American Mosques,"
documenting the appearance of Saudi-funded literature in the libraries and
textbooks of over a dozen major American mosques--including Bundakji's. The report
attracted considerable attention--its findings were presented to a Senate panel
last month--in large part because there haven't been many studies of what is
taught in American mosques. And what Freedom House found was striking: The Saudi texts instruct Muslims to maintain a "wall of resentment" between believers and
their Christian, Jewish, and even Shia compatriots. One booklet, distributed by
the Saudi Embassy in Washington, warns ominously that embracing non-Muslims
brings the specter of apostasy: "He who casts doubts about their infidelity leaves
no doubt about his own infidelity."

Freedom House's report doesn't draw any explicit conclusions about Muslim
extremism in the United States, and it emphasizes that it doesn't seek to stigmatize
law-abiding Muslim citizens. But, according to Nina Shea, the report's
director, imams in the mosques where the Saudi literature appears bear at least some
blame for its presence, and she clearly fears its effect. "These mosque leaders
have a responsibility to screen this literature and to set their congregants on
the right path," Shea says. "The imam was saying, `Gee, this kid [Gadahn]
became radicalized from a study group in my mosque, then he calls me Danny the Jew.'
I agree with the mosque leadership. We're not saying they're bad. They were
turned on by the radicals in the mosque. But they should get rid of this stuff and
replace it with materials teaching pluralism and toleration."

For Bundakji, who was physically assaulted by a future member of Al Qaeda, the
idea that he might be in some measure responsible for the creation of a
terrorist is perverse. "For many years, I've condemned terrorism and I say why it's
against Islam," he says, as most American imams do. Indeed, at least one
researcher doesn't think the Freedom House report illustrates trends within American
Muslim communities. "I don't know what the Freedom House thing proves," says
Peter Skerry, a Boston College political scientist currently studying American
Muslims for a forthcoming book. "You can find evidence for lots of things. I grew
up in Boston in the Catholic Church, and I'm sure that among the books in the
parish library were any number of things that were offensive to people." Gulam
Bakali of the Islamic Association of North Texas, one of the mosques cited in the
report, challenged Freedom House's inferences at a Senate Judiciary Committee
hearing last month. "Our mosque has neither been `filled' or `invaded' by the
literature alluded to in the referenced report," Bakali told the panel. "Our
library functions as a central storage and collection area for literature in the
Southwest U.S. for academic research."

There's no doubt that, as Patel puts it, "extreme messages are out there."
Earlier this year, for example, Ali Al Timimi, who lectured at the Dar Al Arqam
Mosque in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Virginia, was sentenced to life
in prison for urging a group of congregants after September 11 to travel to
Afghanistan to fight U.S. forces alongside the Taliban. Though hard evidence is
difficult to come by, extremist-linked organizations, especially from Saudi
Arabia, have poured money into U.S. mosques and Islamic cultural centers for years.
Ever more virulent jihadist messages are accessible to any American Muslim with
an Internet connection. Yet, from Skerry's perspective, the appropriate--if
elusive--metric isn't the prevalence of such messages, but "the level of tolerance
Muslims at a given mosque have, even at this point in time, for extremist
statements." And Skerry's research indicates that there isn't much. "You don't see
much--though you do see some--evidence of a kind of second- and third-generation
Muslim Americans especially `reclaiming' Islam, becoming preoccupied with
issues in the Mideast, and criticizing America," he says. (The little evidence that
Skerry does see, he explains, is the occasional diatribe by college students
against American imperialism or Israel policy--the sort that left-wing students
of any ethnic or religious background typically make. "I wouldn't ignore it, but
I also wouldn't make too much of it," he says.)

Indeed, given the availability of extremist messages to American Muslims--who
live in the country that's supposedly the premier enemy of Islam--it's startling
how few American Muslim extremists there actually are. The Justice Department's
record on counterterrorism post-September 11 suggests little appetite among
American Muslims for the jihadist agenda. Though, in June, President Bush boasted
of investigating more than 400 terrorism suspects and winning convictions of
"more than half of those charged," an analysis by The Washington Post found that
only 39 of the convictions could be considered at all terrorism-related, and
only 14 of those prosecuted had links to Al Qaeda.

Some of the most publicized cases have been of questionable merit--or involve
non-Americans. A much-touted arrest and trial of a Detroit "cell" featured so
much prosecutorial misconduct that a grand jury may indict the U.S. attorney on
the case. Uzair Paracha, convicted last week in New York of trying to help an Al
Qaeda operative enter the country, isn't American, but Pakistani. Also last
week, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, of Virginia, was convicted of conspiring to kill Bush.
Yet the prosecution's case rested entirely on a confession--which Abu Ali claims
was coerced-- delivered during his 20 months in a Saudi prison, and he was
charged only after a judge ordered the government to disclose its involvement in
his extralegal overseas detention. And, even if Abu Ali is indeed a jihadist, a
senior Bush administration official cautions that such cases hardly indicate "a
trend" among a given American Muslim population.

What's more, despite intimations that Islamic preaching in the United States is
breeding terrorism, evidence suggests that the few Americans who picked up
jihadism in the United States were primed for violence by psychological disturbance
or past criminal activity--not the call of an imam. Far from being brainwashed
by anything at the Islamic Society of Orange County, Gadahn apparently harbored
significant personal demons. Jon Konrath, a friendly acquaintance of Gadahn's
from his metal years, considered him somewhat disgruntled. "He was into the
`sick' sort of horror-slasher death metal, like Cannibal Corpse," Konrath
remembers. "So he was anti-social in the sort of Evil Dead-fan way, but nothing specific about America." In 1995, Gadahn posted an account online of his conversion to Islam that drips with self-loathing: "I eschewed personal cleanliness and let my
room reach an unbelievable state of disarray. ... I am sorry even as I write
this." Jose Padilla--whom the government termed the "dirty bomber" during his
three years of extralegal detention (only to bring far less serious charges
against him and four foreign Muslims last week)--was a violent gang member in his
youth, and, like Gadahn, his adopted faith apparently provided him not comfort but
an excuse to channel his old tendencies in a new direction. John Walker Lindh,
the "American Taliban" captured in Afghanistan shortly after the 2001 invasion,
was an overprivileged teenager whose romantic view of militants led him to a
bin Laden training camp. And, while it remains unclear whether the recent
allegations against the California Muslim prison converts are substantial, convicted
felons are, by definition, far outside the social mainstream.

Indeed, counterterrorism experts are taking notice of the relative absence of
American Muslims in the global jihadist movement. In a September talk, former
White House counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke observed, "Al Qaeda's usual
strategy is ... to rely on indigenous populations, and maybe bring in a few
operatives, but that indigenous population may not be here in the numbers necessary."
(Considering that September 11 was executed by only 19 men, that's quite a
statement about millions of American Muslims.) Some in the Bush administration
concur. "An Al Qaeda-like attack--well-coordinated, in sequence, causing
significant casualties--is less likely to come from a native American Muslim population,"
says the senior official. "Countervailing factors make it less likely for
sleeper cells to germinate among the native American Muslim population." Those
factors, according to the official, are fundamental: "It's the American dream.
American Muslims are living that dream." Even that may be an understatement. For a
variety of reasons, the United States has successfully created the model for a
Western Muslim identity.

The most obvious reasons for that success are social and economic. As the riots
in France highlighted, Muslims in Europe face severe levels of unemployment,
few professional prospects, and social isolation. When Eboo Patel studied at
Oxford University in the late '90s, his American youth had left him thoroughly
unprepared for what Muslims like himself had to endure in Britain. The economic
options for his co-religionists were largely limited to working at "the fish and
chips store, where racist insults were thrown at them by drunks on Friday
nights." It was an alien experience: "In America, my dad would go off to a corporate
office for his job, and my mom was in advertising." Patel's shock is as
illuminating as it should be unsurprising. Since Muslims began coming to the United
States in appreciable numbers after the immigration reforms of 1965--around the
same time that an African American Muslim community began to flourish--they have
found a socially and economically hospitable environment.

It's difficult to document trends among American Muslims, since census data do
not track religion. Yet, in 2003, John R. Logan, a sociologist now affiliated
with Brown University's American Communities Project, used ancestry and
place-of-birth information to conduct perhaps the most comprehensive demographic study
to date of the American Muslim population. (Accordingly, Logan couldn't track
African American Muslims, believed to comprise one-third of all American
Muslims.) That population increased by about 85 percent since 1990 and now totals
nearly 3 million Americans, though some Muslim organizations claim the figure is
too low. Even accepting the blurred edges of his report, Logan found several
surprising facts about the American Muslim population: Unlike other recent
immigrant groups, and distinctly unlike Muslims in Europe, American Muslims are solidly middle-class and solidly integrated with their non-Muslim neighbors.

American Muslims tend to live in a few population centers, along the coasts and
around Midwestern and Southern cities like Detroit, Chicago, and Houston. But,
inside those metropolitan areas, enclaves--homogenous population clusters
historically favored by recent immigrant groups--are surprisingly few. The ten
metropolitan regions with the greatest concentration of Muslims tend to be
ethnically integrated. With Detroit as the only exception, in both 1990 and 2000, every neighborhood with notable concentrations of Muslims was at least 60 percent
white and only around 5 percent Muslim.

Within those neighborhoods, American Muslims display healthy indications of
upward social mobility. The median household income of American Muslims in 2000
was over $52,000, nearly the $53,000 reported by the median white household. Even
the poorest households among American Muslim groups, North Africans, earned
$40,000 on average in 2000--$6,000 more than blacks. The typical American Muslim
in 2000 possessed 14 years of education (more than whites, Latinos, blacks, and
Asians); and American Muslims of Middle Eastern descent, who possess the lowest
levels of education, still record higher levels of education than whites,
blacks, and Latinos. American Muslims are presently living in census tracts where
nearly 60 percent of residents own their homes and over 35 percent of residents
have college educations. "Overall," writes Logan, "the Muslim-origin population
is characterized by high education and income with low unemployment."

An important contribution to Muslims' comfort with the United States comes not
only from the diversity of the neighborhoods they live in, but from the
diversity of the Muslims themselves within those neighborhoods. While Middle
Easterners still constitute a plurality of foreign origin American Muslims--at 49
percent of the American Muslim population--South Asians represent nearly 23 percent
of the total American Muslim population, North Africans nearly 15 percent, and
Iranians 13 percent. For Patel, the high levels of internal diversity within
Muslim communities coupled with high levels of integration and have allowed
American Muslims to avoid the theological and ethnic rigidities that often
characterize Muslim discourse in the Middle East and South Asia. "There are no Muslim `apostates' here," he says. "That's a huge thing."

The contrast with Europe couldn't be sharper. There, Muslim populations are
heavily ghettoized, as becomes quickly apparent during a walk through Brussels or
Amsterdam. Muslim immigration to Europe, like Mexican immigration to the
American Southwest, is motivated chiefly by the pursuit of jobs--often any job, which
frequently means menial employment with little prospect for advancement. A
recent State Department study found that, in the most Muslim-populous European
countries--Great Britain, France, Germany, Spain, and the Netherlands--the vast
majority of Muslims have no access to higher education. Unemployment is
disproportionately high: British Pakistani men have almost a 15 percent jobless rate,
compared with 5 percent for white men; some French Muslim ghettos record 40
percent unemployment, compared with a national 10 percent. Muslim populations in
Europe tend to be as homogenous as American Muslim communities are diverse: In the United Kingdom, most Muslims are South Asian; French and Spanish Muslims are
overwhelmingly North African; German Muslims are predominantly Turkish. (Only in
the Netherlands is there regional Muslim diversity, with relatively equal
numbers of Turks and Moroccans.) Not surprisingly, most respondents told the State
Department that they identify more as Muslim than with their European country of
residence.

These parlous social and economic conditions persist after several generations
of Muslim immigration to Europe and may assist those seeking to foment
extremism: Mohammad Sidique Khan, for one, came from a working-class and socially stagnant background--making it significant that economic and social opportunities for American Muslims are vastly greater than those available to their European counterparts. But prosperity, or the lack thereof, can't fully explain
receptivity to jihad: Indeed, Marc Sageman, a CIA case officer turned forensic
psychiatrist, meticulously documented how most Al Qaeda adherents from Muslim countries come from privileged backgrounds in his groundbreaking book, Understanding Terror Networks. Clearly, the United States is doing something right beyond providing its Muslim citizens with jobs and good neighborhoods. And that something is the uniquely American interplay of religiosity and pluralism.

Most Americans would be horrified by the notion that they live in a country
that abides by Islamic law. But some American Muslim leaders contend that U.S.
society is harmonious with Koranic injunctions without even trying. "America is
positively, unabashedly religious," enthuses Feisal Abdul Rauf, a New York-based
imam. In his important 2004 book, titled What's Right With Islam, Abdul Rauf
contends that space for religiosity is essentially inseparable from American
liberalism, codified in both the U.S. political system and the broader U.S. social
compact: "Fully in keeping with the principles of the Abrahamic ethic, American
religious pluralism was not merely a historical or political fact; it became,
in the mind of the American, the primordial condition of things, a self-evident
and essential aspect of the American way of life and therefore in itself an
aspect of the American creed." Drawing on hundreds of years of Islamic writings,
Abdul Rauf makes the case that, by upholding the five conditions understood by
Muslim legal scholars to constitute the good society--life, mental well-being,
religion, property, and family--"the American political structure is Shariah
compliant."

By contrast, strident secularism and a monocultural definition of integration
have characterized cosmopolitan Europe for decades. Europe's weighty history of
fratricidal wars, religious conflict, and colonialism have contributed
tremendously to its deepening secularism, as has the historical conflict that European
rationalism and liberalism experienced with the continent's religious
institutions. As a result, European governing classes frequently view public expressions of religion, no matter how subtle or individualized, as subversive political
statements. Both France and Turkey have made wearing a headscarf to a public
school a punishable offense, to the consternation and confusion of their Muslim
populations. One Parisian Muslim interviewed by The New York Times during the
riots explained his frustration: "They say integrate, but I don't understand: I'm
already French. What more do they want? They want me to drink alcohol?" That
sentiment ensures that Ayman Al Zawahiri, bin Laden's lieutenant and chief
ideologue, has at least some audience when he tells British Muslims that "British
freedom is, in fact, the freedom to be hostile to Islam." For Mohammad Sidique
Khan, that message was murderously compelling.

But it doesn't appear compelling to American Muslims. And that's largely
because U.S. freedom, even after September 11, is the freedom to be inviting to
Islam. For American Muslims, the opportunity for a publicly visible--and, more
importantly, normative--expression of religion removes a tremendous source of
frustration that exists in both European and Middle Eastern countries. Indeed,
according to a recent poll, 96 percent of American Muslims consider Islam an
important factor in their daily lives--something that, in a real success for the
American social fabric, appears to be a nonissue to their non-Muslim neighbors.
"Where's the heart of isna?" Patel asks, referring to the Islamic Society of North
America. "Plainfield, Indiana! That place hasn't been bombed. It's not in the
heart of cosmopolitan America. It's in rural Indiana!"

America's blend of liberalism and religiosity, in other words, has created
perhaps the most potent weapon against Al Qaeda conceivable: a resolution to the
identity crisis of Western Muslim life that bin Laden preys upon. When Abdul Rauf
came to the United States from Egypt 40 years ago, Muslims were a curious
unfamiliarity to most Americans, and the impact on his mental health was real.
"Myself, I suffered for eight years from an identity crisis--not knowing who I was,"
he recalls. Back then, "when Muhammad Ali became a Muslim, he was seen as
rejecting America." Yet, as Abdul Rauf explored both his faith and his new country,
he recognized that reconciliation was not just possible, it was natural. His
project now, like that of many other U.S. Muslim organizations, is
straightforward: "We're looking to expedite the creation of an American Muslim identity in order to resolve the issues between the U.S. and the Muslim world." What Abdul Rauf means is a public identity seamlessly blending Islam and Americanism and
reinforcing both. For Patel, this is the most important front in the war on
terrorism. "The battlefield is identity, and the players are young people," he says.
"When I first tell people about the Interfaith Youth Core, people say, `Aw,
what a sweet organization.' But there's another guy running a youth organization,
and his name is Osama bin Laden."

America has a durable prophylactic to American Muslim radicalization. But the
protections of American liberalism and American religiosity are not
impenetrable. Obviously, Al Qaeda could once again place operatives in the U.S. homeland.
But, more substantially, the greatest danger to the present U.S.-Muslim compact
is the increasing suspicion of American Muslims. This suspicion has been fanned
by opportunistic politicians like Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney--a 2008
presidential hopeful who, in a September speech, suggested widespread
surveillance of U.S. mosques--and by hysterical pop culture offerings like "Sleeper Cell,"
a Showtime TV thriller premiering this week about a Muslim enemy within. An
October 2004 Zogby poll found that a plurality of American Muslims believe
"constitutional issues"--a proxy for the Patriot Act and immigration enforcement--are
the most important challenge facing their community, with "bias/racism" coming
a very close second. (The third, tellingly, was "becoming mainstream.")
Post-September 11 suspicion of American Muslims may have been inevitable, but it's
also "remarkably insulting and a moral disappointment," says Khaled Abou El Fadl, a law professor at ucla and a prominent liberal voice among American Muslims.
Abou El Fadl is an excellent case in point: He has endured death threats for his
supposed Islamic heterodoxies and has helped the FBI create profiles of
terrorist cells. But even an unapologetically American and pious Muslim like himself
is unable to escape innuendo about his membership in a fifth column: He was
termed a "stealth Islamist" by a 2004 Middle East Quarterly article. For some,
"it's not enough to prove once or twice your loyalties as an American," he wearily
recounts. "There's this constant placement under the microscope that often
produces a very distorted image. Someone with a hardly working knowledge of Arabic picks up a few buzzwords in a speech or a text, and then it's, `Aha! I've got
you!'"

Abdul Rauf is as blunt. "If I read something like [Harvard Professor Samuel]
Huntington, who posits a clash between the West and Islam, it's very easy for a
certain number of individuals to start internalizing that identity." Indeed, at
least some already are. Zogby found an astonishingly high proportion--a
plurality of 38 percent--of American Muslims believe that Washington is waging a war
on Islam, not terrorism. U.S. foreign policy can't be held hostage to threats of
domestic terrorism, but policymakers ignore such dissatisfaction at their
peril. Indeed, this resentment is especially dangerous given that Logan found that,
despite current high levels of integration among American Muslims,
segregationist trends are beginning to emerge. "[Muslim] groups are clustering more over time and becoming more separated from whites," he writes. Coupled with the
marginal disillusionment observed by Skerry among second- and thirdgeneration
American Muslims, the current lack of sensitivity to Islamic concerns could prove
disastrous for U.S. national security and American liberalism.

Patel is more optimistic. Given the deportations, the Patriot Act, and the
general suspicion that has followed American Muslims in the wake of September 11,
it's hard to believe that a Shia Iraqi in Dearborn or a Sunni Pakistani in
Brooklyn gained anything from the aftermath of the attacks. But Patel sees a silver
lining. "The way most religious communities begin in America is by playing the
insulation game, and Muslims were doing the same thing," he says. "But 9/11
killed that. Now, Muslims have to embrace a Muslim-American identity. And it came
as a relief to American Muslim leaders." As Patel sees it, before the attacks,
Muslims in the United States weren't vocal about either side of their identity
in public, content to arouse as little attention as possible. "Now we have to
say we're fully part of the American project, declaring ourselves American
citizens. ... If you notice, with isna, their last several conventions have been
about how Muslims can contribute to the broader theme of America; 9/11 allowed
these elements integration with no apology." In essence, Patel's post-September 11
vision is about Muslims making a virtue out of a climate of fear.

There's nothing predetermined about the contours of an emerging, public
American Muslim identity. But, to the great credit and for the mutual benefit of both
American Muslims and the United States itself, there exist powerful structural
forces, rooted deeply in both U.S. and Islamic history, that portend well. In
the wake of the London bombings and the French riots, a great irony of the
post-September 11 world is that one of the most urgent requirements of European
stability is the emulation of the United States: a place where liberalism and
religiosity support a viable and beneficial Western Muslim identity. And perhaps the
greatest post- September 11 irony of all is that the comfort many American
Muslims feel American life provides for them is best embodied by none other than
the hated George W. Bush, for whom basic comfort with deeply held religious
beliefs is perhaps the most reliable guide to a person's character. With these
ironies in the background, Abdul Rauf promises, "An American Muslim identity is
going to happen. No doubt." To which American Christians, Jews, Hindus, Buddhists,
and atheists should say: inshallah.

[Lester]

We are a nation of immigrants and one that is more or less hostile to the federal government. controlled anarchy essentially, with minimun state involvement in economy and morals. Much as possible is left to the individual.

I don't agree with the saudi wahabi propaganda that comes to the US, but it's not all that differnet from some of the far right christians in terms of moral views and anti-modernity.

A problem a jihadi might have here is what do they rebel against? also if they try and start a sleeper cell, someone from the cell will probably make t shirts and sell them! and mixed cd's.

I've read some of paul Skerry's stuff and it's pretty good. he is a republican like Pat buchanan or reagan. Old school. anti iraq war. His writings are at antiwar.com sometime.

but in the end, I wouldn't get a big ego about how well our muslims behave. particularly since this article indicates it is inspite of rather than because of our various reactions to islam

[MercyOfIslam]

John Walker Lindh.

[HadhratKhadija]

^ has been addressed in the article. i take it you didnt read the article...

[Rezz]

Katayon, on Dec 6 2005, 03:20 PM, said:

Why American Muslims haven't turned to terrorism.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Could it be that they do not make up a high enough proportion of the population to establish separate communities as they've done in Europe?

[ShahLatif]

Rezz, on Dec 14 2005, 07:55 AM, said:

Could it be that they do not make up a high enough proportion of the population to establish separate communities as they've done in Europe?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It could be , but why are you ignoring the other significant demographic factors?

[Rezz]

ShahLatif, on Dec 14 2005, 04:31 AM, said:

It could be , but why are you ignoring the other significant demographic factors?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I'm not ignoring the other significant demographic factors.

But my first question is, I think, relevant. The Muslim population in the US is around 2%, spread throughout a huge land-mass.

In Western European countries these proportions are twice to five times as high concenrated in small countries.

I think that if there were far higher number of Muslims in the US then those Muslims (as they have in Europe) would herd together into separate communities, becoming increasingly emboldened, hostile and extremist.

I remember Muslims in Britain being far better at integrating before the unprecedented and unchecked influx of Muslim immigrants in the last ten years.

Admit it. If there were enough of you in your town, then how long would it take before you saw that one day, you might actually be able to impose your rules, your laws and your way of life in that area. Forced wearing of Hejabs! Ban on music! Ban on Billboards featuring Women! Shutting down Liquor Stores and Pork Butchers! Whether through local politics or by intimidation as practised by French, Dutch and Danish Muslims, you would have Sharia Utopia in Utah!

Admit THIS is what you really desire.

And that's exactly what many Muslims in Europe are seeking to achieve!

Edited by Rezz, 14 December 2005 - 07:33 AM.

[Abdulhujjah]

Katayon, on Dec 8 2005, 12:30 AM, said:

^ has been addressed in the article.  i take it you didnt read the article...

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thats obvious, I mean who would've read that 50,000 word essay.

[jalal27]

In this Nation of immgrants There have been many riots and rebellions against government . As early as roit in 60's-thur 90's Muslim in US are new to islam they may soon have to go against government too if it continue to attack muslims.

[HadhratKhadija]

Rezz, on Dec 14 2005, 03:55 AM, said:

Could it be that they do not make up a high enough proportion of the population to establish separate communities as they've done in Europe?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Dearborn, Michigen.

[Rezz]

Katayon, on Dec 14 2005, 11:01 AM, said:

Dearborn, Michigen.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Interesting & good point. I think however that numbers of Muslims is still a contributor.

Also, Dearborn, with a 100,000 population is pretty small.

On the demographics side of things, I do accept that the types of Muslims we get here in Europe, do tend to be from the particularly backward end of the Muslim world. ie Pakistan, Bangladesh, Morocco, Algeria, Somalia, Afghanistan, etc... with some vile customs which I would readily accept have nothing to do with Islam.

[Curious Infidel]

Rezz, on Dec 14 2005, 02:55 AM, said:

Could it be that they do not make up a high enough proportion of the population to establish separate communities as they've done in Europe?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ever been to Dearborn? It's the largest concentration of Arabs in one place outside of the Middle East.

Edited by Curious Infidel, 14 December 2005 - 01:03 PM.

[Rezz]

Curious Infidel, on Dec 14 2005, 12:00 PM, said:

Ever been to Dearborn?   It's the largest concentration of Arabs in one place outside of the Middle East.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

^^^^

I addressed this in the previous post.

[Ali Zaki]

Curious Infidel, on Dec 14 2005, 12:00 PM, said:

Ever been to Dearborn?   It's the largest concentration of Arabs in one place outside of the Middle East.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

My family all live there, and I have been there many times....Interesting example.

Any known terrorist cells in Dearborn? NO.

Any mosques preaching the capture and killing of "infidels" in Dearborn? NO.

Any attacks on non-Muslim people or businesses. NO.

etc, etc,...WHY?

In fact, I go to the Muslim areas of town, and get breakfast from a Muslim bakery and I see lots of Caucasian non-Muslims in line next to me. This is what those who hate Muslims and Islam are truly afraid of, not terrorism.

The message of Islam is so powerful and true that it is not neccessary to force anyone to believe it, and if they reject it, then they should be left alone. The most powerful force to spread Islam in the world is when Muslims behave themselves based on the manners of the Prophet (a.s.) and the Ahly Al'Bayt. The Muslim community in Dearborn, MI. is very well behaved.

Would I like to see alchohol made illegal? YES! (and so would many non-Muslims I know)..am I willing to resort to unlawful means to see that happen? NO! Would I like to see pornography, gambling, "Adult" bookstores, "Gentlemens" clubs, etc. made illegal. YES! (along with many other non-Muslims I know). I (as a Muslim) will certainly work (to the best of my ability) to see the laws of Islam meant to protect the dignity and purity of human beings implemented in my country? YES! Will I turn to terrorism to do it? NO!

When Muslims are able to change the laws in their communities using the legal mechanisms avilable to them, then they will change (inshahAllah). Until then, we will teach our children that just because something is LEGAL doesn't mean it is O.K.

[Dhulfiqar]

^
Good point Dj... As I've said before... Melting pot vs. Multinational Societies...

[Rezz]

Curious Infidel, on Dec 14 2005, 12:00 PM, said:

Ever been to Dearborn?   It's the largest concentration of Arabs in one place outside of the Middle East.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Wondering, do many women there wear burkas, cover their faces, or guys wear Taleban-style pyjamas, beards and flip-flops?

[HadhratKhadija]

In Europe it is very hard for immigrants to find economic success, in fact its hard for Europeans to find economic success.
People live in sad conditions, and crammed housing - now imagine what u do when u cant even find a job.
People are just lacking basic sustenance, forget about integration.


America is quite different of course....

[Ali Zaki]

Katayon, on Dec 14 2005, 03:14 PM, said:

In Europe it is very hard for immigrants to find economic success, in fact its hard for Europeans to find economic success.
People live in sad conditions, and crammed housing - now imagine what u do when u cant even find a job. 
People are just lacking basic sustenance, forget about integration.
America is quite different of course....

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

And what about Toronto..?? I've heard alot of good things about that community? (except that the mosques are empty now since hockey is back ) Just kidding!

[Kurt]

America and Canada doesn't have the social safety net that some of the so called progressive European liberal welfare states have. You either work or you live on $6.87 ( a typical welfare payment per day ).

Immigrants become part of society cause they have no other choice and thats the way it should be.

[ShahLatif]

Rezz, on Dec 14 2005, 07:27 PM, said:

Wondering, do many women there wear burkas, cover their faces, or guys wear Taleban-style pyjamas, beards and flip-flops?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Muslims in Dearborn run some of the finest business in the area. It's no ghetto AFAIK. I lived there for a couple of years - none of what you are trying to conjure up happens here.. In fact you will be hard-pressed to find a single muslim dominated ghetto in all of North america. That's not to deny that they have sizable population clusters in many cities, e.g. in new york, chicago, LA, etc.

Edited by ShahLatif, 14 December 2005 - 09:06 PM.

[yesI'moriginallyamerican]

Rezz, on Dec 14 2005, 02:55 AM, said:

Could it be that they do not make up a high enough proportion of the population to establish separate communities as they've done in Europe?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

We do have sepearate communities in some places so tha'ts not it.

[Rezz]

ShahLatif, on Dec 14 2005, 08:03 PM, said:

Muslims in Dearborn run some of the finest business in the area.  It's no ghetto AFAIK. I lived there for a couple of years - none of what you are trying to conjure up happens here.. In fact you will be hard-pressed to find a single muslim dominated ghetto in all of North america. That's not to deny that they have sizable population clusters in many cities, e.g. in new york, chicago, LA, etc.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I wasn't trying to make a point or to have a dig. I'm genuinely interested.

In high-Muslim areas of Britain, we see lots of women in Burkas and beardy guys wearing Taleban pyjamas and flip-flops.

Does this happen in areas of high-Muslim areas in the US?

[HadhratKhadija]

^ yeah the high-water pyjamas gots to go

[Rezz]

Katayon, on Dec 15 2005, 10:33 AM, said:

^ yeah the high-water pyjamas gots to go

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Huh?