Muslims in the United States: The State of Research

1. The Development of Ethno-Racial Muslim Communities in the United States

Chapter 1 The Development of EthnoRacial Muslim Communities in the United States M USLIMS in North America come from many places, including the United States. Their histories are varied, and their identities diverse and changing. Processes of individual and community identity formation and change like those we are witnessing now in the United States are not new to followers of this major world religion. Within a century of the birth of Islam in seventh-century Arabia, there were contending interpretations, social groups, and sources of legal authority within the evolving Islamic community. Yet an identifiable “core” Islamic way of thinking and acting, based on the example and teachings of the Prophet Muhammad (570–632 C.E.), developed over time. This core comprises the five “pillars” of Islam: the profession of faith (there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet); the offering of prayers five times a day; alms-giving, or zakat; fasting for the month of Ramadan; and the obligation to go on pilgrimage to the sacred center, Mecca, once in one’s life if one can afford it. Islamic law, or shari‘a, was eventually represented by several major legal traditions or schools, but it developed on the foundations of the Qur’an, delivered from Allah to the Prophet Muhammad by the Angel Gabriel, and the collected traditions, the hadith. Islam is not a monolithic entity; its beliefs and practices are not the same throughout the world. An early battle (at Karbala in 680 C.E.) over the Caliphate—the political leadership of the rapidly growing Muslim community—produced a lasting split between Sunni (the majority) and Shi‘a Muslims. The former vest leadership in friends of the Prophet, and the latter in his family. There are many other divisions within Islam. (See appendices 1 and 2 for some important organizational features of Old World and American Islam mentioned in this essay.) 3 As Islam moved to new places and confronted older religions, Muslims conquered or coexisted with them and their non-Muslim adherents (Asad 1986; Bulliet 1994). Such regional interactions in the Middle East, Africa, Central Asia, South and Southeast Asia, China, and now North America have shaped the ways in which this decentralized and nonhierarchical religion is practiced throughout the world. The religion has no centralized clergy, and mosques operate independently of each other. Thus, Muslims in the United States understand and practice Islam in ways strongly shaped by the American historical context. The umma, or universal Muslim community, may be the goal sought by Muslims, but the reality is that asabiyya, or group solidarity and experience, shapes their everyday lives. Muslims in the United States have been defined and redefined by voices both internal and external to Muslim communities. Those definitions reflect, among other things, the complex relations among members of the ruling class and those being ruled in the American political context. Situating Muslim communities in the socioeconomic structure of the United States is crucial to their analysis, as is tracing their transnational networks and affiliations. Muslims now constitute an important part of North American society . Islam may be the fastest-growing religion in the United States, poised to displace Judaism and become second only to Christianity in number of adherents. Its growth is mainly due to the rapid influx of immigrants and their relatively high birthrate, but the number of African American, Euro-American, and Hispanic converts is increasing too. It is difficult to know exactly how many Muslims there are in the United States: in 1990 estimates ranged from 1.2 million to 4.6 million; in 1992 the American Muslim Council put the figure between 5 million and 8 million (Nu’man 1992, 11). The U.S. Census Bureau collects no information on religion, and there are no reliable nationwide surveys that can estimate the Muslim population comparable to those done by the National Jewish Population Survey.1 The American Muslim “community” at the turn of the twenty-first century is strikingly diverse, and the number of Muslims in various categories is debated. One attempt to categorize and count Muslim Americans (Nu’man 1992) put African Americans at 42 percent, South Asians at 24.4 percent, Arabs at 12.4 percent, Africans at 6.2 percent, Iranians at 3.6 percent, Southeast Asians at 2 percent, European Americans at 1.6 percent, and “others” at 5.4 percent. Another report (Ba-Yunus and Siddiqui 1999) put “Americans” at 30 percent, Arabs at 33 percent...