The Halal Melting Pot

Why Dearborn isn’t Paris.

On Christmas Eve 2006, a newly elected congressman named Keith Ellison gave a simple affirmation of faith before a crowd of Muslim Americans. Ellison promised that on January 4, 2007, he would place his hand on the Koran to take his oath of office. “You can’t back down. You can’t chicken out. You can’t be afraid,” he admonished. “You got to have faith in Allah, and you’ve got to stand up and be a real Muslim.” Although Ellison now represents Minnesota’s 5th District, he had traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, to deliver his message. It made sense: Located a few miles outside Detroit, for the last 100 years Dearborn has been the focal point for America’s growing Muslim community; Ellison himself was born nearby. Along Warren Avenue, Dearborn’s central artery, Islamic community centers are just a few short steps from Burger Kings. Thrilled that after a century of co-existence within American society a Muslim had finally achieved national office, Ellison’s rapt audience greeted his speech with enthusiastic affirmations of the greatness of God.

When it became known that he would swear his oath on a Koran, one of Ellison’s future colleagues, Virginia Republican Virgil Goode, raised strenuous objections. Joined by Dennis Prager, a conservative pundit appointed by President George W. Bush to the board of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, Goode warned that Ellison’s actions represented a subtle attack on Western civilization. “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped,” Goode wrote in a letter to his constituents. Not to be outdone, Prager compared the Koran to Mein Kampf. A typically slow pre-Christmas news cycle suddenly featured a religious-political controversy. Muslim organizations denounced Goode and Prager as a pair of bigots. Both refused to back down.

Prager can be dismissed as an opportunistic pundit ginning up a controversy. Goode, however, is a more complicated story. He had nothing to gain politically–and much to lose–by igniting an ugly public fury against his colleague’s religious tradition. Even the de facto leader of the Virginia Republican Party, the longtime senator John Warner, rebuked Goode. The more likely explanation is that Goode sincerely believes the arrival of Muslims into the American mainstream is a threatening dislocation. (Never mind that Ellison’s own background–born in Detroit, converted to Islam in college–undercuts Goode’s warnings.)

Ellison had one final message for his Dearborn audience, one that spoke directly to Goode’s intolerance. “Muslims, you’re up to bat right now,” Ellison said. “How do you know that you were not brought right here to this place to learn how to make this world better?” It is a message at the heart of American Islam, and one that, after the attacks of September 11, Muslim America’s neighbors largely do not believe it capable of answering. What has been so bewildering, and sadly revealing, is that five years after the attacks, there has been such little study of who the Muslim next door actually is–a vacuum filled by the fear and ignorance displayed by people like Virgil Goode. It’s a shame. For, in fact, a study of Muslim America actually points out how the pluralism that makes America what it is protects the country against the long-term aspirations of Osama bin Laden–and how giving in to Islamophobic demagoguery is exactly what al Qaeda wants.

The tension between American and Islamic identities is at the heart of American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion. Journalist Paul Barrett, a BusinessWeek editor who began writing about Islam while at the Wall Street Journal, takes readers deep inside Muslim America, revealing the struggles of identity that characterize this diverse community, particularly in an age of constant fear over the next jihadi attack. He devotes each chapter to a particular character–a liberal theologian, a civil-rights activist, academics, journalists, Web designers–and uses them to highlight a distinct issue. Barrett’s reporting is excellent. But his failure to take his analysis as deep as his journalism makes the book feel, in significant ways, less than the sum of its parts.

American Islam offers two central contentions. First, that the American Muslim community is itself a glorious mosaic–in addition to the expected imams and political figures, one of the book’s main characters, for example, is a white hippie who found Islam on the way to scoring marijuana. Second, the vast, moderate majority of American Muslims have to battle some of the strident versions of their faith in many of their major religious institutions. At times, Barrett seems to be saying that proximity to the liberalism of America itself has a moderating effect on Islam. The struggles resulting from this tension have consequences that extend far outside the mosque. A Sufi mystic sheikh remarks (before September 11), “I want Muslims in America to know that if we continue with the Wahhabi thinking, the Wahhabi ideology, we are going to a disastrous end ” This is not a political stand; it is life or death.”

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