Muslims in America:
Identity Develops as a Community Grows
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Imam Magid looks to the next generation of American Muslims to shape an Islamic identity in this country. "The children of American Muslims play together without recognizing ethnic backgrounds," he notes. "When our children ask each other, 'Where do you come from?' They answer, 'I come from America,' or 'I come from Virginia."' The implicit message, he says, which he shares with parents at the mosque, is: "America has the ability to create a collective identity, even though you come from different cultural backgrounds."

By raising the issue of children, he touched on a central issue of concern among American Muslims. How the next generation will carry on the faith is a question that has always concerned religious minorities in the U.S. But its urgency among Muslims can be glimpsed on an Internet site that specializes in selling audiotapes of prominent Islamic scholars. The number one lecture listed there focuses on retaining the loyalty of Muslim children to their faith.

In the view of Sheik al-Awlaki, at Dar Al-Hijra, a key to keeping younger Muslims active as Muslims lies in the use of English as the predominant language within Islamic organizations. "Whenever there's a switch in language from ethnic to English, you would suddenly find more participation among the young," he said. "It's immediate. English is their mother tongue."

This group will shape the future of Muslims in the United States, Sheik al-Awlaki says. Already a religious leader at the age of 30, he was born in New Mexico but raised mostly in his parents' native Yemen, before returning to the United States at 18. He refers to the younger generation as "Muslim baby boomers." The sons and daughters of immigrants and converts, they have a keener interest in civil rights and politics than their parents do, he says. But how they will exert their leadership is something he cannot predict.

Arabic is Islam's sacred language. The Prophet Muhammad received the Qur'an in Arabic from the Archangel Gabriel. Any rendering of the Islamic holy book into another tongue is considered an interpretation, not a translation. But as a means of communication, the majority of Muslims do not use Arabic, either globally or in the U.S.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, mosques and Islamic organizations increasingly switched to doing business in English, rather than relying on the native languages of their immigrant members. Last year, the change occurred at Dar Al-Hijra in Falls Church. "English is a determinate factor of the American Muslim identity," Sheik al-Awlaki says.

The use of English as the common medium of communication among American Muslim groups has broader implications, too, not least for the influence that they may have on Muslims overseas.

In an essay for the book, Muslim Minorities in the West (Altameira Press, 2002), the Moroccan scholar Abdul Hamid Lotfi said that American Muslims have steadily expanded their presence on the Internet, rather than attempting to make themselves heard over the far more expensive media of radio or television. The result, he says, was the creation of a "Muslim cyberspace, where ideas are exchanged and tested" in a democratic forum, outside the traditional grounds of the university or mosque.

The Internet, of course, is international, allowing ideas and discussions begun in the U.S. to find an audience in any number of nations overseas, a medium through which the Islamic population in this country could speak to its counterparts elsewhere.

But because the Internet is still so new, its effect in this area can only be conjectured. So when American Muslims speak about the effect they can have as bridge-builders between the United States and Muslims abroad, they tend to cite the value of personal contacts-and also to raise a caution about how those contacts can be undercut by the impact of American foreign policy decisions.

The latter issue is often raised in interviews with Muslims, usually with the expressed concern that the U.S. must be perceived by their counterparts overseas as taking a more active role in attempting to resolve certain long-term conflicts. Those conflicts are between the Israelis and Palestinians, the Pakistanis and the Indians over Kashmir, and the Russians and Chechnyans. But if it is possible to step beyond these weighty issues for a moment, then the possibility of what American Muslims might do for the image of their country in other parts of the world is a tantalizing one upon which to reflect.

The interview with Imam Magid, for example, took place the day before he was to depart on the pilgrimage to Mecca. In the conversation, he noted that before returning to the U.S. he was stopping in Sudan to speak at a university in the capital, Khartoum.

His audience, he explained, might be interested to hear about the life of his mosque in Virginia, including how other religious communities offered to help after anti-Muslim graffitti was painted on its exterior in the wake of the September 11th tragedy. "I think some of them might be shocked that some Jews and some Christians volunteered to paint our walls," he said.

A story like this reflects a situation that some academic authorities have remarked on as an important new piece of American Muslim life, post-September 11th. Many Muslims in this country, they say, were touched by gestures of kindness and concern from their non-Muslim neighbors during the tense weeks after the terror attacks. Some women wore headscarves as a way of showing support for Muslim women, while men and women alike called local mosques and offered to step in and help those-say, with grocery shopping-who felt afraid to go outside for fear of being harassed.

But regardless of how widely such information is shared, Mattson predicts that American Muslims will have "increasing influence" abroad. "Muslims in other parts of the world are going to receive American culture, and part of that includes American Muslim culture," she says.

She has her own, recent example. When she was elected the Islamic Society's vice president, the event was covered by television stations in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates. Later, Egyptian television followed up by interviewing one of the society's officials, a discussion that turned on the role of American Muslim women. "And that's getting to millions of people in Egypt," she points out.

"I'm an academic," she says. "I see how ideas have come down through history. And I do believe that ideas filter down and have an impact on things that are common knowledge, things that are known by the average person."

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