Muslims in America: Identity Develops as a Community Grows by Gustav Niebuhr Muslim Americans come from diverse backgrounds and trace their roots to many nations. Though notable for its diversity, the community also struggles for unity.

In Islam, midday Friday marks the time ordained for communal prayers, the Salat Al-Jumah, whose attendance is binding on Muslim men worldwide. In the United States, hundreds of mosques and prayer halls exist where Muslims can meet the obligation, from Chicago to Corpus Christi.; Phoenix to Fairbanks; Brooklyn to Boston.

But one of the most intriguing sites, in terms of its proximity to civic power, lies within the basement of the United States Capitol building, where a room has been reserved for an hour for this very purpose.

To get there one February day, a visitor descended a flight of steps from the busy first floor, passed two statues of early American settlers and rounded a corner toward a warren of committee rooms. The only indication that a sacred threshold stood nearby was a row of empty shoes pushed up against the baseboard near a frosted glass door.

On that Friday, 55 people had come to pray. Arranging themselves in six rows, they knelt on cream-colored mats spread across the wall-to-wall carpet, facing east, the direction of Mecca, Islam's holy city.

The numbers were not remarkable: many mosques, including several within a few miles of the Capitol, draw far larger crowds. But the men and women in this room, by virtue of their youth, ethnic diversity and the generous number of professionals in their ranks, were broadly representative of the larger American Muslim population. Only their closeness to national power made them more anomalous than representative.

These days, American Muslims can look back on two decades of vitally important achievements, in which they elevated the public profile of their faith by building new houses of worship, formed advocacy and educational organizations and, most recently, became increasingly involved in national political activity.

In terms of the breadth of their ethnic diversity (and the widespread suspicion with which they have often been viewed), they may most closely resemble the Roman Catholics of a century ago, who entered public consciousness as their numbers rapidly increased through immigration.

But the comparison is a limited one. Nineteenth century Catholics had the advantage of a religious heirarchy to bind them and speak for them; in that heirarchy, too, a single ethnic group-the Irish-played the dominant role. By contrast, Islam is decentralized. And so far, no national grassroots organization has emerged that would unite Muslims' disparate communities.

"It's a very Protestant system," says Zaid H. Bukhari, a fellow at Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. "There should be a collective leadership among the Muslim community," he adds, pointing out that the current "struggle" among American Muslims is for that to develop.

Mr. Bukhari is well-placed to make such observations. At Georgetown, he is director of a research project called Muslims in the American Public Square, or MAPS, in its inevitable shorthand. Previously, he served as secretary general of the Islamic Circle of North America, a Queens, N.Y.-based membership association in the mainstream of American Muslim life.

His comments raise the question of how close Muslims are to being able to form a national community, such that people can speak of a distinctly American Muslim identity, with an attendant public voice and way of voting. And, were such a community to take shape, could it become a bridge of understanding between the U.S. and Muslim majority nations? The latter question is largely dependent on a positive resolution to the first.

In the view of many Muslims, the movement toward an American Muslim identity has come under intense but conflicting pressure since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. The assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were, after all, carried out by violent extremists who claimed to act in the name of Islam, but whose deeds have been roundly condemned by many Muslim organizations and leaders here in the U.S.

Nevertheless, a predictable by-product of the tragedy has been a rapid escalation of public curiosity about Islam in general and American Muslims in particular. Sales of the Qur'an, Islam's holy book, shot up in the attacks' wake, as did books by such academic writers on Islam as Karen Armstrong, John L. Esposito and Bernard Lewis.

To respond creatively to the public curiosity, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy organization, began urging mosques nationwide to host open houses, advertising that on a specific day non-Muslim neighbors could drop by, ask questions and pick up basic material on Islam. Many mosques did so, and many of their leaders reported larger-than-expected crowds.

But a part of the attention paid to American Muslims has been unnerving. In the wake of September 11th, vandals struck several mosques, and some Muslims received threatening phone calls. Perhaps even more disconcerting for some was the federal government's increased scrutiny of illegal immigrants, its detention of people who had violated their visa restrictions and its closure of Islamic charities that officials said were linked to terrorist groups.

Next page: This happened while President Bush and others emphatically declared the U.S. not to be at war with Islam itself.

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