World-Herald Editorial: Muslims in America

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden’s pronouncement that his “foremost” mission as the head of America’s space exploration agency is to improve relations with the Muslim world not only is bizarre.

It also distracts from the welcome fact that an impressive new book has just come out explaining the diversity, opportunities and challenges of this country’s Muslim population.

Omaha was among the U.S. cities that the book’s author — Dr. Akbar Ahmed, a well-known scholar of Islamic studies at American University in Washington, D.C. — visited during 2008-09 in assembling this important work. In fact, Ahmed’s book (titled “Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam”) begins by describing a scene in Omaha.

This ambitious, remarkably wide-ranging book provides much material that offers hope. It also has much information that makes for sobering, and sometimes troubling, reading.

On the positive side: Ahmed and his team found many inspiring examples of American Muslims who express deep affection for the United States. They met American Muslims who espouse moderate views and who are working for community betterment with an encouraging can-do spirit.

Many Muslims, Ahmed writes, are deeply admiring of this country’s spirit of religious tolerance. As a result, they describe the United States as the “best place to be a Muslim.”

One Muslim immigrant from Nigeria now living in Houston praised the Declaration of Independence. He told Ahmed and his team that Thomas Jefferson “is at the top of my heart. I love him.”

In Buffalo, N.Y., the Islam-affiliated Universal School uses an open, positive atmosphere “to educate children to become good Muslims as well as good Americans,” Ahmed writes. His team found such schools in major cities across the country, including Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles and Atlanta.

Far from being harsh, fundamentalist-style “madrassas,” such schools combine conventional American-style instruction in math, reading, etc., with courses in Islamic study.

“We met many younger American Muslims who were balancing their Islam with their Americanness and a good grasp of both,” Ahmed writes.

Ahmed found admirable examples of interfaith dialogue involving Muslims, and the book praises Omaha’s laudable work on that score.

Given that Omaha is the birthplace of Malcolm X, it is especially worth noting that Ahmed and his team found many examples of African-American converts to Islam who expressed the view that “Islam saved my life” and who are showing inspiring civic-mindedness by joining together to help the disadvantaged.

A predominantly African-American mosque in Atlanta is home to an energetic religious leader who promotes interfaith dialogue. A similar tradition is found in Detroit, with the message of tolerance championed by the late Imam W.D. Mohammed.

The book describes African-American Muslim leaders who promote messages of pluralism in cities such as Dallas, Memphis and Las Vegas.

Interestingly enough, it turns out that Salt Lake City is home to around 20,000 Muslims, and Ahmed’s team received strong expressions of positive feeling toward the city from Muslims there.

At the same time, the book straightforwardly lays out many challenges and problems.

Lack of unity and leadership are common problems. The book describes a wide array of sometimes angry frictions within the Muslim population — between Islamic modernists and literalists, between Muslims of different ethnic origins, between African-American Muslims and immigrant Muslims, between different generations.

“There is no unity here,” one observer said of a large mosque in New York City.

In many cases, frictions within a mosque aren’t remedied unless one group splits away to create a separate religious community (though internal frictions are, of course, a long-standing challenge in Christian and Jewish communities too).

The book relates how a considerable number of American Muslims — whether traditionalist or modernist — succumb to bitterness, suspicion, paranoia and/or isolation.

The book sheds light on the disturbing phenomenon of Muslim-on-Muslim violence — specifically, the use of violence by radical Muslims to intimidate and silence moderate Muslims. The description of such brutality against a Muslim man and his family in Dearborn, Mich., makes for frightening reading.

By flirting with overheated rhetoric and angry interpretations of international relations, Ahmed writes, some literalist Muslims “play a dangerous game.”

In a subsequent editorial here, we’ll note further material from Ahmed’s book and examine constructive ways for Americans — Muslim and non-Muslim alike — to move forward.

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