Being and Belonging: Muslims in the United States since 9/11

6. Overstressing Islam: Bridgeview's Muslim Community Since 9/11

CHAPTER 6 OVERSTRESSING ISLAM: BRIDGEVIEW’S MUSLIM COMMUNITY SINCE 9/11 CRAIG M. JOSEPH, MELISSA J. K. HOWE, CHARLOTTE VAN DEN HOUT, BARNABY RIEDEL, AND RICHARD A. SHWEDER EVEN BEFORE 9/11, a debate had simmered for some time in the United States about the ability and willingness of Muslims to become full participants in American society and the compatibility of Islam with democracy and modernity. The debate was sometimes framed as a general philosophical and normative question about the character of our liberal and pluralistic society; it raised provocative questions about the extent to which our political and legal institutions are premised on “thick” versus “thin” notions of citizenship and can accommodate immigrant minority groups who hold divergent views of gender, religious practice, civic participation, communal in-group loyalty, authority relations, and so forth. At a more specific and less theoretical level, however, the debate quickly, even if quietly, became a discussion about whether “there is something in Islam” that makes Muslims resistant to tolerance, respect for pluralism, and other features of contemporary liberal democracy, with an emphasis on “there is something in Islam.” That stress was not just a matter of linguistic emphasis; it also revealed certain recurrent anxieties in the mainstream non-Muslim population , even among secular liberals, about the place of Muslim immigrants in American society. Undoubtedly many non-Muslim mainstream Americans have never been overly stressed by the “something in Islam” thought. Nevertheless, a range of popular anxieties, some mild, some extreme, can be identified. In the eyes of some non-Muslim American observers, Muslims, and especially Muslim immigrants, are a potentially indigestible minority, one resistant to overstressing islam 129 assimilation because of values or practices or beliefs that are incompatible with America’s modern, individualistic, progressive, tolerant way of life. Others have viewed Muslims even more darkly, as a fifth column, a community that at least passively supports terrorist violence against the United States.1 Lately, as some civil libertarians may have feared, discussion of internment has been explicit, though not so much as a concrete proposal for dealing with a current threat as a reconsideration of earlier episodes of internment.2 Quite apart from this discussion is the constant stream of Islamophobic rhetoric, often equal parts ignorant bigotry and religious fanaticism, from some evangelical Christian leaders, such as Franklin Graham, and their followers. This essay, and that in chapter 7, emerge from the Russell Sage Foundation project “The Qur’an and the Constitution: Islamic Adaptations in the United States” and focus on the life of Muslim youth and adults (predominantly Arab Palestinian, Syrian, Egyptian, Moroccan, and Sudanese) in Bridgeview, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. The essays might be viewed as a call for a skeptical critique of one kind of polarizing discourse, in which exaggerated or overstressed majority group fears of so-called difference are matched against real or imagined minority group fears about mainstream bigotry, pressures toward assimilation, or a loss of a meaningful collective identity. Such debates often work to the detriment of a realistic and more moderate appraisal of the mutual accommodations, internal disagreements, and creative cultural and religious transformations that may be taking place both within and between Muslim and non-Muslim groups in a liberal, pluralistic, and somewhat decentralized, democracy such as our own. We thus approached the Russell Sage Foundation conference as an opportunity to take stock of some of the ways that developments in one particular Muslim Arab community do not readily fit in the something about Islam mold. Our portrait of the community is partial (space considerations alone make that necessary) and provisional (we are still in data analysis mode). Generally speaking, how are Bridgeview’s Muslims doing in the aftermath of September 11? This is obviously not a question with a simple answer, and we explore some of the complexities of this community’s experience. One of the striking aspects of Bridgeview is the degree to which it has been able to maintain both lively diversity of opinion and lifestyle within the community and peaceful—and sometimes collaborative—relationships with non-Muslim communities. Indeed, although it is important to maintain constant awareness of the challenges and threats the community faces on a daily basis—not least of which are ongoing government scrutiny and arrests and prosecutions of residents and instances of hostility from non-Muslims—it is fair to say, we think, that one of the dominant themes of the Bridgeview story is resilience, the failure of the 9/11 attacks to...