18 December 2008
Building a Life in America
This article is excerpted from the richly illustrated book Being Muslim in America, published by the Bureau of International Information Programs. The entire book is available in PDF format.
Immigrants have come to America from every corner of the globe. The people are diverse but their reasons similar: Some sought to escape an old way of life, others to find a new one. Some were escaping violence, others the shackles of custom, poverty, or simple lack of opportunity. They came largely from Europe in the 19th century and from the rest of the world — Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Central and South America — in the 20th and 21st.
They arrived with hope, and often little else.
Their initial reception was frequently mixed. These new Americans found a vast new land hungry for their labor. But some, unfamiliar with these newcomers’ customs and religions, treated the new Americans as outsiders and believed they could never be real Americans. They were wrong. With freedom, faith, and hard work, each successive wave of immigrants has added its distinctive contributions to the American story, enriched our society and culture, and shaped the ever-dynamic, always-evolving meaning of the single word that binds us together: American. And today, this story is the Muslim-American story too.
In1965, a new immigration law reshaped profoundly the inward flow of new Americans. No longer would national-origin quotas determine who could come. In their place were categories based on family relationships and job skills. With this change, immigration numbers soared, bringing the first significant numbers of Muslims from South Asia and the Middle East to the United States. They arrived in a nation very different from the one experienced by 19th-century immigrants, but today’s new Americans face the old immigrant challenge of defining their place in America’s social, economic, and political fabric.
Consider two sisters, Assia and Iman Boundaoui. Their parents are from Algeria, and the girls were raised near Chicago, Illinois, as Muslim Americans. As reported by National Public Radio (NPR), Assia and Imam grew up watching both the children’s Nickelodeon station and the news channel Al Jazeera. When they got takeout food, they sometimes chose Kentucky Fried Chicken and sometimes their favorite falafel restaurant.
“In America, we would say we’re Muslim first, because that’s what makes us different, I guess,” Assia, age 20, told NPR. “But in another country, like in a Muslim country, we would say we’re American.”
Their story is both remarkable and not so, for there is nothing more American than new generations — from kaleidoscopic combinations of ethnicity and religion — defining themselves as Americans.
“America has always been the promised land for Muslims and non-Muslims,” observes Iranian-American Behzad Yaghmaian, author of Embracing the Infidel: Stories of Muslim Migrants on the Journey West. She told the New York Times, “They still come here because the United States offers what they’re missing at home.”
The tales of Muslim Americans track a familiar arc, but individually they add immeasurably to the vibrant diversity of a nation founded not on common ancestry, but on the shared values of freedom, opportunity, and equal rights for all.
“In every era of U.S. history, women and men from around the world have opted for the American experience,” writes historian Hasia Diner. “They arrived as foreigners, bearers of languages, cultures, and religions that at times seemed alien to America’s essential core. Over time, as ideas about U.S. culture changed, the immigrants and their descendants simultaneously built ethnic communities and participated in American civic life, contributing to the nation as a whole.”
Muslim Americans possess a diversity that is extraordinary even by American standards. In sharp contrast to other immigrant groups, Muslim Americans cannot be defined by race or nationality; in this sense, they more closely resemble the Hispanic Americans whose origins lie in Spain, the many nations of Latin America, and the islands of the Caribbean.
Muslim American diversity may be greater still, encompassing origins in South Asia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, Europe’s Balkan region, and Africa, as well as a small but growing group of Hispanic Muslims.
Because the United States does not track population by religion, there is no authoritative count of its Muslim population. Estimates range widely, from 2 million to 7 million or more. Of that number, approximately 34 percent are of Pakistani or South Asian origin and 26 percent are Arab.
Another 25 percent of Muslim Americans are indigenous, largely African American, and this adds still more layers to the rich Muslim-American experience. In other words, the Muslim-American saga is not just one of immigration and Americanization, but part of one of the most powerful themes in American history: the struggle for racial equality.
There are mosques and Muslim social and cultural institutions throughout the country, in urban centers and rural communities alike. Want to visit the International Museum of Muslim Culture — the first Islamic history museum in the United States? Forget about traveling to New York or Washington; instead you must head for the Arts District of Jackson, Mississippi. Dearborn, Michigan, is home to the nation’s largest Arab-American population. Muslims from South Asia and Africa form vibrant and growing communities in the New York-New Jersey area. Somalis have settled in substantial numbers in Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota, and Southern California is home to the country’s largest Iranian-American population.
Yet even these ethnic communities are hardly monolithic. Many of the Arabs living in Dearborn and elsewhere are Christian, not Muslim, and a number of Iranian Americans living in Los Angeles are Jewish.
Generalizing about such a diverse a population can obscure more than it explains. Better, perhaps, to study representative experiences.
“We all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry,” says the noted African-American poet Maya Angelou, “and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter their color; equal in importance no matter their texture.”
Iman Boundaoui of Chicago, for example, found that freedom involved her decision to wear a head scarf. She recalls a vivid incident during a high school trip to Paris, France, when her group talked with girls at a private Muslim school founded in response to a French law banning head scarves in public schools: “And me and my friends were looking at them,” Boundaoui told NPR, “and at that moment we were like, ‘Thank God we live in America,’ that I can walk down the street with my scarf on without having to decide to take it off because I have to go to school.”
For Pakistani immigrant Nur Fatima, freedom instead means that after moving to an area of Brooklyn, New York, known as Little Pakistan, she could choose to remove her head scarf, reveling in the fact that Americans generally regard these social and religious choices as private matters. “This is a land of opportunity, there is equality for everyone,” Fatima told the New York Times. “I came to the United States because I want to improve myself. This is a second birth for me.”
Today, in a thousand different circumstances, Americans of Islamic faith embrace their heritage as a crucial part of a self-fashioned identity in which they choose from among all the possibilities of freedom that this land bestows upon all its citizens. As they explore the possibilities, they discover that they, too, have become Americans.
“We stress the American Muslim identity, that home is where my grandchildren are going to be raised, not where my grandfather is buried,” Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, told California’s Sacramento Bee newspaper.
With growing numbers, confidence, and organization, Muslim Americans contribute in every field, from business and scholarship to sports and the arts. Their stories range from Pakistan-born Samiul Haque Noor, whose spicy halal dishes earned him the 2006 award for best food street vendor in New York City, to Dr. Elias Zerhouni, from Algeria, head of the National Institutes of Health from 2002 to 2008; from Newsweek commentator and editor Fareed Zakaria, to actor and hip-hop artist Mos Def; from professional basketball star Dikembe Mutombo of the Houston Rockets, to Representative Keith Ellison of Minnesota, the first Muslim member of the U.S. Congress.
A new generation of Muslim Americans enriches American medicine, science, and literature. Obstetrician and gynecologist Nawal Nour, born in Sudan and raised in Egypt, pioneers women’s health issues as founder of the African Women’s Health Center in Boston, Massachusetts. She received an esteemed MacArthur Fellowship (nicknamed the “genius grant”) in 2003 and Stanford University’s Muslim Scholar Award in 2008.
Iranian-American scientist Babak Parviz of the University of Washington has made exciting breakthroughs in nanotechnology — ultra-small electronic and biological applications at the cellular and molecular level — including tiny devices that can assemble and reassemble themselves independently.
Writer Mohja Kahf, who came from Syria as a child, has skewered American culture generally and Muslim Americans themselves with gentle irony and razor-sharp observations in her poetry (E-mails From Scheherazad) and an autobiographical novel set in Indiana (The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf) — books that have drawn fervent admirers, especially among younger Muslim-American women.
She also writes a frank online column about relationships and sex for younger Muslims and believes that with such works as The Autobiography of Malcolm X and Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner, Muslim-American literature can now legitimately be considered a distinct genre.
Fady Joudah, born to Palestinian parents in Texas, grew up to become an emergency-room physician, now working in Houston, and has served with Doctors Without Borders at refugee camps in Zambia and in Darfur, Sudan. He is also a major new poet and winner of the prestigious Yale Series of Younger Poets competition for his collection The Earth in the Attic.
“These are small poems, many of them, but the grandeur of conception inescapable,” wrote poet and critic Louise Glück in her introduction to Joudah’s book. “Fathers and brothers become prophets, hypothesis becomes dream, simple details of landscape transform themselves into emblems and predictions. The book is varied, coherent, fierce: impossible to put down, impossible to forget.”
A new, truly American Islam is emerging, shaped by American freedoms, but also by the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, attacks. Even as surveys by the Pew Research Center and others show that Muslim Americans are better educated and more prosperous than the average, the terrorist attacks — planned and executed by non-Americans — raised suspicions among other Americans whose immediate responses, racial profiling among them, triggered in turn a measure of Muslim-American alienation. Sadly, suspicions of this kind are not uncommon — in the United States or in other nations — during wartime or when outside attack is feared. But 2008 is not 2002, when fears and suspicions were at their height. Context is also important: Every significant immigrant group has in the United States faced, and overcome, a degree of discrimination and resentment.
Nur Fatima, for example, celebrated her new-found freedom in a New York Pakistani community where, a few years earlier, fear was high and both businesses and schools closed in the wake of 9/11, according to the New York Times. By the time Fatima arrived, Little Pakistan had recovered under the leadership of local businessman Moe Razvi, who helped start English and computer classes, opened a community center, and led community leaders to meet and improve relations with federal authorities.
“The annual Pakistan Independence Day parade is awash in American flags,” the Times reported. “It is a transformation seen in Muslim immigrant communities around the nation.”
Among the healthy responses to the tensions triggered by the terrorist attacks is an expansion of the interfaith dialogue in the United States.
“Anytime you share a space with someone of another culture, you are bound to grow as an individual and learn to see things from another perspective,” said Kareema Daoud, a doctoral student in Arabic language and literature at Georgetown University who has served as a volunteer citizen ambassador for the Department of State. “There is beauty in diversity,” Daoud concludes.
The 9/11 attacks also galvanized the Muslim-American community to become more active in civic and political activities — to advocate for issues of concern, to build alliances with non-Muslim organizations — and to confront intolerance and threats of violence.
“Active engagement and involvement in politics reflects the fact that American Muslims are part of the social fabric of America, and also reflects their patriotic concern for this country,” says editor and writer Nafees Syed of Harvard University in a commentary on the free-wheeling discussion Web site altmuslim.com
Paraphrasing President John F. Kennedy, Syed continues, “The question is not only how taking part in the political process will aid American Muslims, but how American Muslims can help this country.”
Like the global population, the majority of American Muslims are Sunni, although there are large numbers of Shia and groups who actively follow Sufi traditions. Despite this diversity, says Paul Barrett, author of the 2007 book American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, “distinctions that possibly loomed larger elsewhere are instead in America ‘diluted’ in the deep pool of pluralism that characterizes American society. ... Many immigrants have taken the ambitious step of crossing continents and oceans because they want to escape old-world antagonisms, to pursue education, economic betterment, and a more hopeful life for their children.”
Progressive forms of belief, a more prominent role for women, even the recent evolution of “mega-mosques” resembling in size the large evangelical Christian churches — are among the characteristics of a rapidly evolving, uniquely American Islam.
“I have found that Muslims in America are melding their faith, ethnic background, and the folkways of their adopted land in many different ways,” Barrett said in an interview on altmuslim.com. “There is no one formula, just as there hasn’t been a formula for past immigrant groups. ... I’m confident that there won’t be one story about how Muslims assimilate. There will be many stories.”
