In 2000, George W. Bush won roughly 45 percent of the Muslim vote, according to Zogby. But by 2004, because of the tensions over the invasion of Iraq, the terrorist-detention facility at Guantanamo, and growing allegations of racial profiling of Muslims, Bush won just 7 percent of the vote compared with Democratic Sen. John Kerry’s 76 percent.
“I’ve talked to Muslim conservatives who asked me if I’m leaving the Republican Party. Those conversations are being had all over Washington,” says Suhail A. Khan, a former Bush administration official who is on the board of directors of the American Conservative Union. “I’ve said no, but many are. The question now is whether the damage will only be for a cycle or two or whether the GOP has lost the growing Muslim vote for a generation or more.” A Colorado native, Khan entered politics as a young Reagan Republican involved in conservative outreach in the liberal bastion of the University of California at Berkeley.
He helped organize the campus’ college Republican organization into the largest conservative campus group in California. Being a Muslim was never an issue in his conservative work until after 9/11, Khan says. Even then, he insists, as Muslims complained of racial profiling at airports and heard their religion used almost as an expletive, he felt welcome in most GOP circles.
He likens the situation among Muslims now to the conditions California conservatives faced after Gov. Pete Wilson backed Proposition 187, a ballot initiative that sought to block illegal immigrants from accessing state healthcare, public education, and other social services. Like Muslims, Hispanics are deeply conservative on social issues but feel alienated because of the GOP push against immigration.
But both political parties are to blame for the present tensions, he says.
While many GOP leaders such as Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin have taken positions against the Manhattan Islamic center near ground zero, President Barack Obama has waffled on backing America’s Islamic community, during his campaign and through his first two years in office.
Instead of asking what’s wrong with being a Muslim when his religious beliefs are called into question, Khan says, Obama and his advisers treat any report about his childhood upbringing in Indonesia as a “smear.” Khan says he takes heart in the conservatives who have supported Muslims rights during the ground zero controversy: New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, and Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, among others.
“I’m a committed Reagan Republican,” Khan says. “I don’t think the vast majority of Americans are racist, or prejudiced against Muslims, even those involved in the ground zero controversy.
“It’s just incumbent upon Muslim conservatives to redouble their efforts to tell the story.
“Shariah finance, stealth jihad — these terms are reminiscent of what we used to hear about American Catholics, that they were a secret group trying to take over the American government, trying to extend papal control over America.
They would say that American Catholics couldn’t possibly be loyal to the American government and Constitution because of their ties to Rome.
“But no Muslim I know is trying to extend Taliban-like Shariah in the United States. If you look at the Muslims involved in the mosque controversy, they’re not running to Shariah. They’re running to the U.S. Constitution and the First Amendment. ”
Many Muslims ended up in America after fleeing repressive governments in Iran, Somalia, Sudan, and elsewhere that use fundamentalist interpretations of Shariah to crush political opponents and limit the freedoms of women and ethnic and religious minorities.
The recent controversy over the planned Islamic center near ground zero not only has revealed a yearning among many Muslims to be accepted as Americans, but also has brought to the fore the diversity of viewpoints within American Islam. A number of American Muslims, for example, have been quite vocal in their opposition to the ground zero mosque. Shaimaa Aly, 29, who just earned her MBA from Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa, thinks organizers behind the Manhattan mosque should seriously rethink their plans before proceeding any further.
“If it is going to increase tension — even make it worse — there’s no need for it,” Aly says. She’s quite open about her appreciation of the “human rights” she has in the United States compared with her native Egypt.
She says she is also particularly thankful for America’s healthcare system, which she credits for the well-being of her 6-year-old son, who has a congenital medical condition.
Another prominent Muslim who was quite open in her criticism of the Manhattan Islamic project was Rima Fakih, a 25-year-old from Dearborn, Mich., who recently was crowned Miss USA. Fakih urges Muslim advocates to be sensitive to the feelings of victims of 9/11 and think more carefully about what is at stake for both communities.
“We should be more concerned with the [9/11] tragedy than religion,” she told reporters in August as the controversy was growing. Many Muslims like Fakih are quite aware they are living at a historic moment for the future of Islam in America. Their growing numbers and increasing prominence in areas such as business, politics, science, and academia put them under a microscope.
Though they bristle at what they perceive as racial profiling in airports and other places, many understand that they have a special responsibility both to their faith and their nation as it faces threats from the more radical elements within Islam.
Spiritual Tipping Point
The next few decades will likely determine whether Islam can truly become a reliable piece of the American mosaic.
“For spiritual growth, our faith needs modernization,” says Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a retired U.S. naval officer and the son of Syrian political refugees.
He has treated U.S. Supreme Court Justices, senators, and congressmen and says he fully understands non-Muslim doubts about the status of Islam in the United States.
Jasser, who now practices internal medicine and nuclear cardiology in Phoenix, has started the American Islamic Forum for Democracy to fight against Muslim extremists. Moderate American Muslims can help reforms by making sure Shariah doesn’t become part of the American tradition, he says. “We must fight political Islam,” Jasser adds.
Yet extremist strains continue to trouble many mosques, charities, and other organizations that are considered mainstream to many in the Muslim community. Experts such as Spencer consider some of these institutions to be fronts for the Muslim Brotherhood, a group founded in Egypt in the 1920s that ostensibly renounced violence there but whose members have founded terrorist groups such as al-Qaida and Hamas, the group that controls the Gaza Strip and calls for the extermination of Israel. The imam behind the ground zero mosque is the most recent such example.
Though nearly every Muslim interviewed for this article described him a mainstream example of liberal, tolerant Islam, Feisal Abdul Rauf has made controversial statements over the years. He has shied from denouncing Hamas, has defended Iran’s fundamentalist clerics, and has criticized American foreign policy in false terms several times.
“We tend to forget, in the West, that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaida has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims,” Rauf said in one 2005 talk that was captured on video. “You may remember that the U.S.-led sanction against Iraq led to the death of over half a million Iraqi children.”
But even liberal groups have said that statistic is exaggerated. A Columbia University study estimated that 106,000 to 227,000 children died during the imposed sanctions. Furthermore, The Nation magazine argued in 2001 that sanctions were not as much to blame for the deaths as Saddam Hussein’s corrupt handling of U.N. humanitarian aid.
Extremism recently entangled a Muslim charity in Texas linked to Hamas. Nearly two years ago, the Richardson-based Holy Land Foundation and five of its leaders were found guilty of illegally funneling $12 million to Hamas, even after the United States had declared it a terrorist group in 1995.
After a mistrial, federal prosecutors convinced jurors in a second trial that the foundation “cooperated with Hamas fundraising” even though the charity “knew it to be violent and engaged in criminal conduct,” says Peter Margulies, a Roger Williams University law professor who studies terrorism financing. The case is on appeal. As part of a massive indictment, U.S. prosecutors labeled about 300 Muslims and Muslim groups as “unindicted co-conspirators,” or “joint venturers,” including such well-known nonprofits as the Islamic Society of North America and CAIR.
Frank Gaffney, founder and president of the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., along with Spencer and others who monitor Islamist groups, consider CAIR to be yet another major front for the Muslim Brotherhood operations in the United States.
Other fault lines for Islam in the United States cut through cultural grounds. Many Americans fear that groups such as CAIR, which describes itself as a civil rights organization, are pushing for special rights for Muslim communities that place them outside of American values.
The Ann Arbor, Mich.-based Thomas More Law Center has been at the forefront of legal actions to stop Shariah-based rights that groups around the nation are seeking. It unsuccessfully sued a California public school district to block its use of textbooks that taught Islamic prayers and practices to elementary students. An appeals court agreed with a judge that the text was not trying to evangelize but rather teach about Islam.
This past summer, the law firm fought charges against four Christians arrested for attempting to talk about their faith at a public Arab arts festival in Dearborn, Mich. Two of the arrested are converts from Islam — Muslims are forbidden from joining a new faith, according to Shariah.
The four “were not loud or boisterous yet the police came and arrested them,” says Richard Thompson, president and chief counsel of the Thomas More Law firm. A YouTube video showed police handcuffing the four and taking them away to jail, where they spent the night.
Evangelists were arrested in 2009 at the same festival, and this year’s participants say in a YouTube video that they purposely avoided conflict by talking only to festival-goers who approached them.
The city of Dearborn is denying discrimination, and a trial took place in September. Some, however, think the case shows the imbalance in the United States.
“What is happening is the government is taking the side of Muslims,” Thompson says. But many Muslims say some confuse normal, observant rituals of Islam with Shariah. Throughout the United States, comfortable accommodations are being made simply so that religious Muslims can fast, observe the call to prayer, or bury their loved ones in a traditional manner. Beauty queen Fakih’s brother Rami plays wide receiver and running back on the football team at Fordson High in Dearborn. The school’s student body is 85 percent Arab-American, and the city recently approved a local mosque’s request that the daily call to prayer be played on loudspeakers, as it is done in many Islamic nations.
During the Ramadan holiday, the high school was among the few in the nation to allow the football team to practice from 11 p.m. to 4 a.m., as Muslim players were not supposed to eat or drink from dawn to sundown during the month-long religious holiday.
Rami says practicing at night could be confusing, and he would forget that he could drink water during practice.
“Then I remember, you know,” he says. “I look up. There’s no sun. I can drink. I can eat.”
Disquieting Presence
As the pace of mosque construction accelerates nationally, many communities find themselves at odds with the idea of a visible Islamic symbol in their midst.
Even though the FBI shows Muslims are seldom the victims of hate crimes, community activist Zainab Elberry in Nashville worries about violence. She has reason: Her community has contended with attacks against three Islamic worship centers.
First a small mosque was torched in 2008 in rural Tennessee about 40 miles from Nashville; the suspect was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison. The Al-Farooq Mosque in Nashville was vandalized this year with “Muslim Go Home” and other graffiti splashed on its walls.
Then in August, a mosque being built about 25 miles south of Nashville was vandalized. A suspicious fire damaged construction equipment. “It’s quite disconcerting,” Elberry says. “This thing is accelerating. People don’t understand what Islam is.” Tennesseans are concerned about thousands of Muslim refugees brought to the Nashville area as part of a U.S. resettlement program, for Africans and thousands of Kurds from Iraq, Elberry says.
Then there are the cultural differences, such as the different way Muslims bury their deceased. Muslims believe in burying bodies in white cloths, not coffins. That has raised concerns about possible contamination of groundwater.
The issue also has been raised in eastern Connecticut where Muslims proposed a cemetery.
Groundwater isn’t affected, Elberry says, but longtime residents haven’t been persuaded.
Also stoking mosque fears, she says, is the furor over the Islamic center near ground zero. But Elberry says, “People should be able to build mosques wherever they want. Our people died innocently too [during the 9/11 attacks]. People died of all faiths.”
Although many Muslims praise Shariah for providing them with Islamic-based rules to live morally, Thompson believes the system “is the exact opposite of the U.S. Constitution and the Western way of life.”
“We have taken the lead in fighting what we think is the foremost threat to security of the United States and that is Shariah law,” Thompson says.
Often, Thompson says, local, state, and U.S. government agencies will quash free speech to appease Muslims.
Thompson’s firm sued Miami-Dade (Fla.) County — and won — when buses there refused to accept paid advertising that advised people where they could receive help if they wanted to leave Islam.
His firm also filed suit — and ultimately convinced New York — to run ads on buses from the same company that now is advertising its opposition to the mosque and community center near ground zero.
Critics consider the advertisers an anti-Muslim organization.
Many Muslim-Americans also are divided over Shariah.
Some say Muslim-Americans practicing their own personal Shariah is a night and day difference from that practiced in poorer, predominantly Muslim nations.
Michaela Corning, a 30-something Seattle businesswoman who converted to Islam, says Shariah is not about “holy jihad” and stoning women. Rather, she says, it is a set of principles for Muslims to go by, “just like what is in the Talmud” that Orthodox Jews respect and follow.
“Shariah is actually positive,” Corning says.
Nevertheless, many other Muslim-Americans say they also don’t want Shariah institutionalized in America.
Pardis Afshar says her family came to the United States to escape Iran’s Shariah. When she visits Iran she says she notices how many Iranians rebel, such as taxi drivers refusing to pick up passengers dressed in religious garb. There is tension between the religious and those who just want to be left alone, she says.
“Honestly, I don’t think it is any way to run a country,” says Afshar who just graduated from college last spring and landed a job on a newspaper on Florida’s West Coast. “The laws do not make any sense. They might have made sense in the 1600s, but not now.
“I was not really raised knowing Islam,” she adds. “I went to a church and synagogue before a mosque.” Still, she says she considers herself a Muslim and she practices its moral tenets. So does Dr. Jasser. Both feel Islam has enriched them. But Jasser says, he doesn’t want an imam preaching politics. He has walked out of mosques where they did.
It’s too painful for him. His family was persecuted by a Syrian government that used Islam to hurt others. His mother and father fled to America. They cherish how Uncle Sam separates faith from state. “My parents immediately felt American,” he adds. “They believed in Western thought and freedom. So do I.”
That freedom, he believes, has helped make Muslim-Americans so successful. Where else, he asks, could a refugee boy become a doctor — and end up treating his adopted country’s top leaders?
continued in the next section
As originally published in Newsmax magazine.
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