A prosperous and fast-growing Muslim-American minority is making its voice heard. Some applaud this trend. Others worry that our traditional American Judeo-Christian culture is being undermined.
By Donna Gehrke-White and Tim Collie
Mukit Hossain is living the Islamic American Dream in the heart of the Old South.
Born and raised in Bangladesh, educated at Duke University, the former telecommunications executive had tired of his posh, suburban lifestyle two years ago and decided to become a farmer.
So he uprooted his wife and two daughters and bought a 15-acre spread just outside of Fredricksburg, Va. There, just miles from one of the Civil War’s most famous battlefields, the 49-year-old Hossain has invested a good portion of his savings in a venture to raise goats for the region’s rapidly growing Muslim market.
His wife, raised in Kuwait, heads the PTA at their children’s elementary school. One daughter is president of the student council. Like many parents with conservative values, the Hossains opted for rural life to instill stronger values in their children.
And while controversy rages around the nation over a ground zero mosque, Shariah (strict Muslim religious law) finance and home-grown terrorists, Hossain is busy expanding his business selling “halal” (ritually slaughtered) goat meat to a thriving immigrant community with roots in more than two dozen Muslim nations.
“America is not just a country — it’s an ideal,” Hossain says. “It fulfills human aspirations. You aspire to be better than what you are today. You find new challenges.”
By one measure, Muslims are the new model minority — upwardly mobile, highly educated, entrepreneurial social conservatives who believe that strong families and hard work can open doors to success in America.
Yet by another gauge, they are a suspect class: a diverse collection of races, ethnicities, and nationalities who adhere to a religion many fear is anathema to American ideals. Some — a distinct but dangerous minority, experts agree — harbor allegiances to repressive regimes and terrorist groups that consider the United States the next battleground in the clash of civilizations.
The optimistic scenario sees Muslims such as Hossain joining Jews, Catholics, and Mormons as part of the American mosaic. The nightmare is a bleak tableau similar to what is being played out in Europe, where radicalized Muslims in growing, unassimilated enclaves launch terrorist attacks and push for the recognition of Shariah in family and financial matters.
The ongoing controversy over the so-called ground zero mosque — an Islamic community center with mysterious financial backing originally planned for a site just two blocks from the scene of the World Trade Center attacks — is only the best-known among recent controversies involving Muslims around the nation.
In cities and towns across America, clashes have resulted over proposed mosques or demands for recognition and special rights for Islamic communities.
More disturbing has been a series of incidents in which Shariah has been used to justify brutality against women, discrimination, treason, and murder:
• In New Jersey, a family court judge rejected a woman’s request for a restraining order against her husband, who had raped her. The husband claimed that, under Islamic law, the wife must submit to him “and do anything I ask her to do.” An imam called as a witness backed up the husband. The ruling was overturned on appeal, but many were alarmed that such reasoning could take place in an American court.
• In October 2009, Luqman Ameen Abdullah, an African-American Muslim, was killed in a shootout with FBI agents in Detroit. A weapons smuggler, he was a member of a little-known Islamist network dedicated to the establishment — through violence, if necessary — of an enclave on U.S. territory to be governed by Shariah.
• In 2006, Somali Muslim taxi drivers revealed their decade-long practice of refusing to pick up passengers at the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport who were carrying alcohol or were accompanied by dogs, including guide dogs for blind customers, because doing so violated Shariah. After the boycott became public, the Metropolitan Airports Commission proposed special lights on their cabs indicating their adherence to the ban. The idea was rejected, but if it had been approved, it would have been the first time that a public agency had established Shariah law on public property in America.
• Incidents of Islamic honor killings also are becoming more apparent around the nation. In early 2009, Muzammil Hassan, a 44-year-old immigrant from South Asia, was charged with second-degree murder in the killing and decapitation of his 37-year-old wife, Aasiya. The couple had been known as prominent leaders in the American-Muslim community who sought better understanding of liberal Islam through Bridges TV, a television station near Buffalo, N.Y. Months later, an Iraqi immigrant ran down and killed his daughter with a Jeep because she refused an arranged marriage.
• This past summer, 14 suspects in Minnesota, Alabama, and California were charged with funneling money and fighters to Somali terrorists. Ten of the indicted were Minnesotans who had gone back to their native Somalia to fight.
• Taken together, these incidents represent a troubling pattern to some experts who believe that fundamentalist Islam is taking root in America and encouraging a new generation of homegrown terrorists in a “stealth jihad.”
They point to Faisal Shahzad’s attempted car bombing in Times Square; the Fort Hood massacre, in which American-born U.S. Army Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 people; and the emergence of al-Qaida cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who allegedly influenced Hasan.
All three are Muslims who strengthened their foreign allegiances to fundamentalist Islam despite years in the United States.
Even more disturbing is the seeming reluctance of many U.S. Islamic leaders to condemn such incidents and denounce groups or individuals espousing terrorism. Critics of Islam point to an apparent lack of will among American-Muslim leaders to challenge fundamentalism in their own mosques. The critics see this as one indication that the religion simply hasn’t evolved from its medieval roots the way that Christianity or Judaism has.
“There is no significant liberal traditional within Islam as a whole,” says Robert Spencer, director of the website Jihad Watch and author of several books and a blog that examine the Koran in exhaustive detail.
Spencer adds: “There’s no equivalent within Islam of Episcopalianism or Unitarianism or reform Judaism. It doesn’t exist. The literalistic, dogmatic view of Shariah — this is the dominant mainstream of Islam.
“Fundamentalist Islam is incompatible with numerous U.S. constitutional freedoms. Any knowledgeable, devout practitioner of it is not going to be assimilating or comfortable within a societal framework that advocates equality of rights for women, freedom of speech, or non-establishment of official religions.”
But American-Muslim scholars and other experts on Islam say this outlook misinterprets Islam and further misunderstands American Muslims, many of whom came to America precisely because they reject the more draconian forms of fundamentalist Islam.
Muslims such as Hossain and others see their faith as a collection of beliefs, prayers, and practices that forms a personal code for themselves, not a law to be imposed on others.
American Muslims “benefit from the American ideal of pulling yourself up from the boot straps,” says Ihsan Bagby, an associate professor at the University of Kentucky who sits on the board of the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). “I know they are very happy about the openness in the United States.”
Pollster John Zogby, who is an Arab-American Christian, has done extensive surveys of the American-Muslim community that reveal a deeply patriotic, quite conservative stream that he likens to other minority groups such as Hispanics, Catholics, or Jews.
“In terms of Shariah law, that’s not why Muslims came here, and for those [who] are second- and third-generation Americans, they have no concept of Shariah law,” Zogby tells Newsmax, referring to Islamic religious law. “The idea that there’s some effort to institute Shariah in the United States is fiction.
“Muslims are here in America and they’re here to stay — trying to attack them with concepts like Shariah is just going to backfire on politicians who attempt it.
“They’re growing in size and they’re maturing politically as well as organizationally. They also live in all 50 states — in a way that can easily tip very close elections.”
Who Are America’s Muslims?
As with any religious or ethnic group, generalizations only go so far. But polls by Zogby, Gallup, and Pew during the past decade reveal a picture that experts generally describe politically as “big government social conservatives” remarkably similar in some ways to the Hispanic population. Most are better educated and higher earning than the overall American population — partly because immigration rules have favored skilled, hi-tech professionals during the past few decades. They tend to favor liberal government programs on healthcare, school funding, and the environment. But Muslim views on social issues such as abortion, the death penalty, tax cuts, forcing U.S. citizens to speak English, and (perhaps surprisingly to some) tougher laws to fight terrorism place them comfortably among America’s conservative grass roots. Politically, Muslims as a group have moved back and forth between parties.
continued in the next section
As originally published in Newsmax magazine.
No comments:
Post a Comment