Carnegie Reporter, Vol. 1, No. 4 | Muslims in America: Identity Develops as a Community Grows, page 2 (low bandwidth)

This happened while President Bush and others emphatically declared the U.S. not to be at war with Islam itself. That the situation might seem paradoxical to Muslims was noted by Yvonne Y. Haddad, a Georgetown historian who is an authority on Islam in the U.S. For American Muslims, she says, the present is both the best and worst of times. "They have freedom," she notes, "but they're being watched."

That particular sense of living with contradiction is not unique in American Muslim life. More basic is the problem that Islam is often described as the nation's fastest-growing faith, but that its numbers remain unknown. Because the U.S. census asks no question about religious affiliation, there is no official way of quantifying the Muslim population. Without such a figure, educated guesses abound, but these range so widely-from two million at the lowest to ten million at the highest-that the estimates themselves tend to be controversial. As of 2001, Islamic organizations like CAIR began to say the Muslim population had exceeded six million.

Another contradiction is the public perception that Islam is a "new religion" in the U.S., because of its rapid growth through three decades of immigration from Asia and Africa. But the faith's roots on this side of the Atlantic go back centuries, as African American converts will point out.

Muslims set foot in North America along with Spanish explorers and English settlers, who often came with their African slaves. How many slaves were Muslim is unknown, but a handful left behind evidence of their passing, including a scholar named Omar ibn Sayyid, a West African enslaved in North Carolina, who wrote an autobiographical letter in 1831.

Organized Islamic communities began forming in the American Midwest a century ago. But Muslim religious life became publicly visible only recently, as the number of mosques increased. Nor did the rise in Islamic population derive solely from the immigrants, but also from a large influx of African American converts, especially after 1975, when Imam W. Deen Muhammad led members of the black nationalist sect, the Nation of Islam, into the orthodox fold.

These days, blacks comprise upwards of one-quarter of American Muslims, while South Asian and Arab immigrants also constitute large groups. But the ethnic mosaic reaches much further, to embrace dozens of different groups. Even cities with relatively small Muslim populations can include a highly diverse range of people with no previous experience of each other. Take Seattle, for example, where prominent members of the Muslim community include white and black converts, Arab and South Asian immigrants and groups of Somalis from East Africa and Chams from Cambodia. Latino Muslims are also a growing community: the Washington, D.C.-based American Muslim Council estimates that there are 25,000 Muslims of Hispanic heritage in U.S. metropolitan areas.

Given that that degree of diversity is not unusual, what specific factors can form a common denominator in forging a true Muslim community in America?

"That's the question," says Sheik Anwar al-Awlaki, who is the imam, or spiritual leader, at Dar Al-Hijra, a major mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington suburb. "How much uniqueness American Muslims have among themselves," he says, "will determine whether they have an identity."

Elora Chowdhury, a program associate at the Ford Foundation and a Ph.D. candidate in the Women's Studies program at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, agrees that identity is an increasingly important issue, but is concerned about how public perception may affect individuals as well as the Muslim community as a whole. "I think that post-September 11th," she says, "my religious background as a Muslim woman has compelled heightened public curiosity and I feel that people often expect Muslims to have external markers when, in fact, there isn't a categorical identity that all Muslims-men and women-share."

Still, among the estimated one billion Muslims globally, those in the U.S. do possess a distinctive and potentially valuable economic identity, at least when one speaks generally. American Muslims include an unusually large proportion of highly educated professionals, especially physicians and engineers, who have arrived in this nation since the sweeping reform of federal immigration laws in 1965.

Their presence helps distinguish American Muslims as "the best educated elite in the Muslim world," writes Haddad, in an essay in the book, Muslims on the Americanization Path? (University of South Florida, 1998). And this professional cadre sharply distinguishes American Muslims from their counterparts in immigrant communities in Europe, says Sheik al-Awlaki. "In Europe, they're the working class," he explains. "In America, they're professionals and intellectuals."

A growing body of statistics lends weight to their observations. In December 2001, Bukhari's MAPS project published a demographic survey of nearly 2,000 American Muslims. Conducted by Zogby International, it reported that 58 percent of American Muslims were college graduates; three-quarters under 50, and two-thirds with an annual household income of $35,000 or more (nearly one-third said it was at least $75,000).

Strikingly, the survey also found a high commitment among Muslims to civic participation: 79 percent said they were registered to vote. Of that group, the overwhelming majority said they were "highly likely" to do so.

That finding in itself points to a sea-change in the basic political attitudes of American Muslims, one that suggests a Muslim political identity may be emerging. Only a decade ago, the question of whether Muslims should participate in any level of politics appeared to be up for grabs.

Ingrid Mattson, vice president of the Plainfield, Indiana-based Islamic Society of North America, said that as late as 1989, she heard people in mosques debating whether Islamic law permitted Muslims to vote in a society where they were a minority. But attitudes have shifted to the point that by February 2002, CAIR was busily promoting a nationwide voter registration drive. It would take place at mosques, coinciding with Eid al-Adha, the feast that marks the culmination of the hajj, the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

Next page: A rising interest in politics was not alone as an important development in Muslim life in the 1990s.

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