Foreign
Policy Research Institute
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THE WEST
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ISLAM IN
AMERICA
By Philip
Jenkins
Volume
4, Number 4
July
2003
Philip
Jenkins is a professor of History and Religious
Studies
at Penn State University. Prof. Jenkins' books
include
The Next Christianity: the Rise of Global
Christianity
(Oxford, 2001) and Mystics and Messiahs: Cults
and
New Religions in American History (Oxford, 2000). This
essay
is based on his presentation at FPRI's History
Institute
for Teachers on "The American Encounter with
Islam,"
May 3-4, 2003. Based on the conference, we also
published
"Islam and the West," by Jeremy Black. The
remaining
papers will be published in Orbis, Winter 2004
(due
out January 2004).
ISLAM IN AMERICA
By Philip
Jenkins
Though
most of us think of the American relationship with
Islam
as a modern phenomenon, the encounter in fact goes
back
to the very first days of the nation. That encounter
was
from its first a troubled affair and involves the
origins
of U.S. military and diplomatic affairs. American
conflicts
with Muslim states in North Africa provide the
opening
to Max Boot's fine analysis of The Savage Wars of
Peace:
Small Wars and the Rise of American Power, and we all
probably
know a little about "The Shores of Tripoli." We may
not
know that these events occasioned the first draft of our
national
anthem. In response to these wars, around 1805,
Francis
Scott Key composed a patriotic song that described
how:
In the conflict resistless each toil they
endured,
'Till their foes fled dismayed from the
war's desolation;
And pale beamed the crescent, its splendor
obscured
By the light of the star-spangled flag
of our nation.
Where each radiant star gleamed a meteor
of war,
And the turbaned heads bowed to its terrible
glare,
Now mixed with the olive the laurel shall
wave,
And form a bright wreath for the brow of
the brave.
The
tune would become "The Star Spangled Banner."
In
short, there is a long record of antipathy between
America
and at least certain Muslim states, if not Islam
itself.
Muslims in America have been trying for a long time
to
make themselves recognized as fully American. Two years
ago,
they thought they had achieved their greatest victory
when
finally the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp with the
Arabic
words for Eid Mubarak, "blessed holiday." In a case
of
disastrous timing, the stamp came out on September 1,
2001.
But the achievement of that stamp showed that Muslims
had
the self-confidence to feel deserving of representation
as
an American community. Politicians now routinely speak of
church,
synagogue and mosque. It is ironic in light of
recent
events that one of the great criticisms of the Bush
administration
in its first few months was that it was too
closely
tied to Muslim causes in this country.
In
the last couple of years, as Islam has grown as a
presence
in this country, Muslims have tried to write
themselves
into the early history of America, in the way
that
every immigrant group does to some extent. (Think of
nineteenth
century Minnesota Swedes erecting bogus
runestones
as proof of Viking settlement.) If we look at a
modern
book about Muslims in America, we will read stories
about
Moriscos, crypto-Muslims, among the conquistadors, and
we
read claims about Islam among African slaves in this
country.
There is indeed some sort of Muslim presence, but
it
is far thinner than is often claimed. The slavers who
raided
Africa and brought captives to the American colonies
deliberately
avoided Muslim territories as much as possible.
And
colonial society was certainly inhospitable to Muslim
religious
practices, the Islam that was brought vanished
quickly,
it being difficult to keep up any sort of Muslim
identity.
So we have to be suspicious about some claims
that
are made about this part of the world. Things were
different
in South America, and in Brazil, where there were
Muslim
slave rebellions through the nineteenth century.
THE
FIRST STRAND
There
were three distinct waves of Muslim immigration. The
earliest
phase was a substantial immigration of Muslim
traders-merchants,
shopkeepers, peddlers-throughout the
United
States, and these have left traces in all sorts of
odd
places. The oldest known Muslim group for organized
prayer
in America dates to 1900 in Ross, North Dakota. Over
the
first twenty or thirty years of the twentieth century,
little
Muslim groups show up around the country, especially
a
major concentration around Detroit, where the Ford works
provided
a major magnet for workers and traders. The first
permanent
designated mosque as a mosque in the United States
dates
to 1934, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
American
Islam is distinctive. These Muslims tend to be from
today's
Syria and Lebanon. Thus, it is disproportionately
drawn
from Islam's Shiite traditions, and its offshoots, the
Druzes
and the Alawites, which Sunni Muslims find suspect,
and
even doubt their Muslim credentials. Most questionable
from
a strict Muslim perspective is the Druze idea of
incarnationism,
the idea that human beings can be
manifestations
of the divine-that God became incarnate as a
particular
figure.
By
the 1940s, Muslims were quite widespread across the
United
States, and by 1952, an organization was established
which
a couple years later changed its name to The
Federation
of Islamic Associations, which originally had 52
mosques
across the United States. It was also then that for
the
first time American servicemen were allowed to list
their
religion as Muslim. In addition to those 50 FIA
mosques,
there were African-American mosques, which
represent
an especially interesting part of the story.
African-American
Islam emerged in the early part of the
twentieth
century, originating on what might be called the
far
fringes of Islam. Over the century, it became more
orthodox
and mainstream. The first Muslim organization among
black
Americans, the Moorish Science Temple (MST), was
founded
in New Jersey in 1913 by Noble Drew Ali. It had a
lot
of strange ideas, including secret scriptures, very new
age-y
ideas, and in fact, when the FBI in the 1940s obtained
a
copy of the MST's Holy Quran, it was an adapted version of
a
new-age, channeled scripture called the Aquarian Gospel of
Jesus
the Christ, adapted to become an Islamic document.
Noble
Drew Ali vanished in 1929. The MST was a strange body,
but
it introduced the idea of Islam among black Americans,
and
brought Islam home as a possible alternative.
NATION
OF ISLAM
In
1930, a man named Wallace Ford or Wali Farad appeared in
Detroit,
who claimed to be Hawaiian or Polynesian. He
created
a new religion, the Lost-found Nation of Islam. This
won
enormous support in the Detroit area during the 1930s
and
was the root of the modern black tradition of Islam. But
it
was a strange kind of Islam. Wallace Ford taught a
doctrine
that appalled Muslims-sheer blasphemy-which is that
he
was God. (During the recent sniper shootings in the D.C.
area,
one sniper letter to the police seems to be quoting
Ford
by declaring "I am God.") Almost certainly, Wallace
Ford
was a Druz or Alawite from Lebanon, and thus
represented
an ancient tradition that went back at least a
thousand
years-a stream flowing from Lebanon to Detroit.
Ford
taught strange doctrines like incarnationism. He taught
a
non-Muslim doctrine of massive racial difference-blacks
were
the chosen people, and whites evil products of a mad
scientist,
a genetic experiment gone wrong. After his
disappearance,
Ford was followed by Elijah Mohammed, who was
one
of the great religious entrepreneurs in modern America.
The
Nation of Islam was important because it took these
bizarre,
heretical ideas and introduced the presence of
Islam
into African-American communities. Americans became
familiar
with Islam, albeit in this strange form.
By
the 1960s, the Nation of Islam was in deep crisis. First,
it
had a long tradition of internal violence and civil
strife.
Also, more and more of its members were drawn to
orthodox
Islam. In 1975, when Elijah Muhammad died, his son
Warith
Din, "heir of the faith," began a massive move of the
Nation
of Islam toward orthodox Islam. Today, the Nation of
Islam
represents a tiny part of this much larger body. (The
term
"Black Muslim," the term by which the Nation of Islam
was
originally known, creates confusion between the Black
Muslim
movement--the NOI--and Black Americans who are
Muslim.
The vast majority of Black Americans who are Muslim
are
orthodox, not NOI followers, an important distinction.)
When
talking about Islam, we must recall that the various
fragments
of Islam are all Islam, rather than separate
creeds.
The 150 millions Shiite Muslims represent 15% of
total
Muslims worldwide. If the Shiites were a separate
religion,
they would be the world's fifth largest in their
own
right. They are a very important part of the religion,
though
much underestimated in the West.
THE
THIRD STRAND
In 1965,
the Immigration Act was passed. Contrary to
expectations,
it led to a huge influx of people from Africa,
Asia,
and Latin America, and it transformed the nation's
population.
Islam was one of the great beneficiaries. The
estimated
size of the American Muslim population ranges from
2
million to 15 million. A consensus estimate would be about
4.5
million. Of those, roughly 42 percent would be African
Americans,
25 percent would be people from India and
Pakistan,
and about 12 percent would be Arab.
Of
course, "Muslim" and "Arab" are not synonymous terms. The
vast
majority of Muslims worldwide are not Arab, and in the
United
States, 75 percent of Arabs are Christian. There is a
whole
history to be written on Christian-Arab radicalism in
the
Middle East in the twentieth century, a phase which is
now
passing but has had an impact in this country. Back in
the
1970s, the Palestinians who hijacked airliners had
Orthodox
Christian chaplains who would bless the teams going
out.
Palestinian radical groups operating in this country,
such
as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine,
are
Christian Arab as well as Muslim.
What
are some of the new issues affecting these communities
to
date? One is their sheer newness. There has been a
remarkable
growth in the number of mosques in religious
communities.
In the 1950s, there were, counting African-
American
mosques, probably 150. Today, there are about 1250,
most
of them set up in the past 20 or 25 years. These
mosques
are trying to operate as they would in the Middle
East.
For example, they have to import talented religious
experts,
importing a hafiz who can recite the whole Quran.
American
Islam still doesn't have many who can do this, so
we
find American mosques talent-spotting in Egypt and Saudi
Arabia.
What
are some of the political issues facing American
Muslims
today? One is Islamic schools, which have mushroomed
in
the last twenty years. They have attracted controversy
because
of the suggestion that they often teach radicalism,
separatism,
and terrorism. Local newspapers have observed
the
Muslim schools and reported the singing of dangerous
songs
and use of subversive materials. The problem is that
the
easiest way for a mosque to get such materials is from
the
well-funded Islamic foundations and bodies, which are
happy
to provide materials, books, free Qurans. The problem
is
that the money behind these is often associated with a
very
narrow, intolerant kind of Islam, and that brings me
back
to the idea of what is Islam.
As
an analogy, imagine that back in the 1920s, it turned out
that
all the oil in the world was found in Tennessee and it
was
entirely run by a few families of fundamental Baptists.
And
over the next few years, they made it their mission to
spread
the message of Christianity, but it was going to be
their
version of Christianity: This is Christianity, accept
no
substitute. That's rather what happened in terms of the
enormous
wealth of Saudi Arabia and the kind of Islam it
represents.
Online, massive amounts of information about
Islam
are available from Saudi-funded organizations. In
practice,
this means Wahhabi Islam: a narrow, strict,
puritanical
Islam that sets itself apart from other equally
authentic
kinds of Islam. Like most fundamentalist faiths,
this
particular variant is modern, an eighteenth-century
movement.
It has no more monopoly on Islamic truth than the
hypothetical
Tennessee Baptists would have on authentic
Christians.
This
division raises problems for Shiite Muslims in
particular.
Many Shiite Islam ideas (shrines, saints,
pilgrimages)
sound attractive from a Catholic Christian
perspective.
Wahhabi Muslims believe these are pagan ideas
but
Shiism is nonetheless important worldwide. In Pakistan,
for
instance, there is a very strong Shiite influence.
Equally
vulnerable to Wahhabi attack is the Sufi tradition,
which
has produced some of the greatest glories in Islam.
This
includes the mysticism, poetry, art, music-concepts
that
infuriate the Wahhabis.
We
can see these religious conflicts erupting on American
soil,
for instance in the New York state prison system.
Islam
is a major presence in American prisons, and many
would
say that this is a good thing because the Muslim
influence
can encourage people to get their lives together,
to
get off drink or drugs, to learn self discipline. In the
New
York prison system today, about 15% of inmates are
Muslim.
Recently, there was a lot of criticism of Warith Din
Omar,
the senior chaplain of the New York system, after his
statements
describing the 9/11 attackers as martyrs and the
attacks
as something that America had brought on itself.
This
provoked a systematic investigation of the chaplains in
the
New York system, all of whom were appointed under Omar's
auspices,
which investigation found a great deal of
extremist,
Wahhabi sentiment. For example, Omar would not
minister
to Shiite prisoners because he did not view them as
real
Muslims. In response, Shiite Muslim groups offered to
provide
chaplains who would teach real Islamic tolerance.
Issues
concerning Muslim chaplains and the kind of religion
they
teach also appear in the armed forces and in
universities.
As in the prisons, there can be a lot of
tensions,
not just between Islam and U.S. policy, but
between
particular kinds of Islam.
Another
recent issue has involved charity, one of the five
pillars
of Islam. Recently, though, there have been
publicized
allegations of specific Muslim charities such as the
Holy
Land Foundation for Relief and Development being
terrorist
conduits. Reportedly, some American Muslims now
know
that they have an obligation to give to charity, but
they
are afraid to give because they don't know what happens
to
these gifts. Muslims also complain of a double standard.
Irish
Americans have no qualms about giving to groups that
are going
to support nationalist causes in Ireland.
Different
people from different ethnic groups are quite
happy
to give to different causes in their homeland or
wherever
they feel a historic link to, so why are Muslims
blamed
for supporting Palestinian causes? Their view is, we
are
not giving to anti-American causes, we just support our
kith
and kin overseas. That is a sensitive topic and leads
Muslims
to believe that they are not properly trusted or
acknowledged
as patriotic Americans.
There
is one analogy from American history: a large
religious
group that was regarded as being violent,
brainwashing
its children in schools, and using its places
of
worship to stockpile weapons to overthrow the government.
It
was the Roman Catholic Church in the mid-late nineteenth
century.
Catholics, too, were accused of setting their
religion
above the state. The charge was that a real
Catholic
could not be a real American, though ultimately
those
ideas faded in the second and third generations, as
Americanization
progressed. Absolutely nothing that has been
said
about Muslim schools in the last five years was not
said
about Catholic schools a hundred years ago. Then a good
Protestant
audience would be regaled about the bloodthirsty
secret
oath of the Knights of Columbus to destroy the United
States.
This fear of immigrant religions is a potent
American
inheritance. In the 1920s, the Ku Klux Klan had 5
million
members in the United States, and it was primarily
an anti-Catholic
movement. Without trivializing genuine
fears
about Islamist terrorism or subversion, one would hope
that,
ultimately, Islam will Americanize, just as
Catholicism
Americanized during the twentieth century.
In
summary, Islam may not be as strong numerically as many
people
may believe, but it is an important presence. We are
moving
towards a phase when Americans will have to consider
three
religious symbols: the church, the synagogue, and the
mosque.
Nabeel Abraham and Andrew
Shryock, editors, Arab Detroit: From Margin to Mainstream Wayne State
Univ Press (Great Lakes Books), 2000
Sameer Y. Abraham, editor, Arabs in
the New World: Studies on Arab-American Communities Wayne State Univ 1983.
*This may be an obvious comment, but please note that like other books about
“Arab-Americans”, this covers Christians at least as much as
Muslims.
Robert J. Allison, The
Crescent Obscured : The United States and the Muslim world, 1776-1815 New
York : Oxford University Press, 1995. *On
the troubled roots of the US relationship with Islam – remember
“the shores of Tripoli”?
Carol L. Anway, Daughters of Another
Path: Experiences of American Women Choosing Islam Yawna Pubns 1995.
Allan D. Austin (editor), African
Muslims in Antebellum America: Transatlantic Stories and Spiritual Struggles
Routledge; Revised and Updated edition 1997.
Kathleen Benson and Philip Kayal, eds. Community
of Many Worlds: Arab Americans in New York City Syracuse Univ Press 2002
James A. Bill and John Alden Williams. Roman
Catholics and Shi‘i Muslims: Prayer, Passion, and Politics University
of North Carolina Press, 2002. *Not
specifically about the US, but a fascinating comparison between Christian and
Muslim traditions, suggesting that Islam is far more diverse and complex than
most Americans think.
Claude Andrew Clegg III. An
Original Man: the life and times of Elijah Muhammad New York: St. Martin's
Press, 1997. *Superb
biography that traces the development of the Nation of Islam
Edward E. Curtis, Islam in
Black America: Identity, Liberation and Difference in African American Islamic
Thought. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2002
Robert Dannin, Black
Pilgrimage to Islam New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Sylviane A. Diouf. Servants
of Allah: African Muslims enslaved in the Americas New York University
Press, 1998.
Diana Eck, A New Religious
America Harper San Francisco 2002
Steven Emerson, American
Jihad: The terrorists living among us New York: The Free Press, 2002.
*Emerson is hated by Muslim activists for what they see as his over-emphasis on
Islamist terrorism. Nevertheless, his work is well researched and highly
informative on the extremist subculture.
Karl Evanzz. The
Messenger: The rise and fall of Elijah Muhammad New York: Pantheon Books,
1999.
Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, ed., The
Muslims of America New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. *Yvonne Haddad
is perhaps the most respected scholar on this topic
Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and
John L. Esposito, eds., Muslims on the Americanization Path? New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000.
Asma Gull Hasan. American
Muslims: the new generation 2nd ed. New York: Continuum, 2002.
Akel Ismail Kahera, Deconstructing
the American Mosque: Space, Gender and Aesthetics Univ of Texas Press 2002. *Academic
and complex, but nicely illustrated
Jeffrey Lang, Even Angels
Ask: A Journey to Islam in America Amana Pubns 1997 *Case-study
of conversion to Islam
C. Eric Lincoln, The Black
Muslims in America 3rd ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W.B. Eerdmans; Trenton, N.J.:
Africa World Press, Inc., 1994. *Lincoln
was the greatest scholar on the Black Muslim movement, and his text remains a
classic.
Clifton E. Marsh , From
Black Muslims to Muslims: The resurrection, transformation, and change of the
lost-found Nation of Islam in America, 1930-1995 2nd ed. Lanham, Md.:
Scarecrow Press, 1996.
Melani McAlister, Epic Encounters:
culture, media, and U.S. interests in the Middle East, 1945-2000 University
of California Press, 2001. *A
study of the media attitudes that do so much to inform and misinform American
attitudes towards Islam
Daniel Pipes, Militant
Islam Reaches America W.W. Norton & Company 2002
*Like Emerson’s book, controversial, but informative
Fuad Sha’ban, Islam
and Arabs in Early American Thought Durham, NC: Acorn, 1991
Jack G. Shaheen Reel Bad Arabs: How
Hollywood Villifies a People Interlink Pub Group 2001. *A polemic against media
stereotyping of Arabs and Muslims
Jane Smith, Islam in
America Columbia University Press 2000
Michael W. Suleiman (Editor) Arabs in
America: Building a New Future Temple Univ Press 2000
Vibert L. White, Jr. Inside
the Nation of Islam: a historical and personal testimony by a Black Muslim
Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. *A
frank exposé
Richard Wormser, American
Islam: Growing Up Muslim in America New York: Walker, 1994
*Aimed at a teen audience