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Book of the month

American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion

 

By Paul Barrett

Book review by Daniel Benjamin
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In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the mainstream media in the U.S. carried plenty of stories on the many immigrants held in detention under the Patriot Act and on the questioning of large numbers of Muslims by law enforcement officials. But compared with the enormous amount of copy that newspapers devoted to Christian issues, the pederast priest scandals, for example, or the death of one pope and the election of another, the coverage of Islam in America was curiously inadequate.

That failure is slowly being remedied, and it is noteworthy that the 2007 Pulitzer prize for feature writing went to Andrea Elliott of
The New York Times for her multi–part portrait of an immigrant imam. But Elliott was not the first to step into the world of Muslim America. One of the few reporters who preceded her—and one of the best to have taken on the challenge—is Paul M. Barrett, who produced a series of page one stories for The Wall Street Journal in 2003. Those articles provided the basis for American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion, which provides one of the most thoughtful forays into Muslim America to date. (Full disclosure: Paul Barrett is a friend and former colleague.) This book does not aspire to give the definitive assessment of what is going on among believers of the nation’s fastest–growing religion—given the paucity of sociological data, it couldn’t. But through a series of seven profiles, it produces a set of powerful insights about Muslim life in the United States and the tensions that are shaping some of the major sub–communities that exist within the fractious diversity of Muslims in the United States.

Remarkably little is known about America’s Muslim population. It was commonly believed that between 3 million and 6 million Muslims lived in the United States. Last month, however, the Pew Research Center released a survey, which appears at first glance to be the most comprehensive yet, concluding that there are approximately 2.35 million Muslims in the country. This discrepancy in the issue of numbers is not very surprising given that the U.S. Census Bureau does not ask questions about religion, and that other researchers also shy away from this politically charged area of inquiry. But without this basic data, we are flying half–blind.

One of the striking lessons of the years since the 9/11 attacks, and especially since the Madrid and London bombings, is that it is important for Western countries to know their minorities—not just who they are but how they live and what they feel. Whereas in the Muslim world terrorists tend to be bred from the impoverished underclass, in the West they are typically disaffected immigrants. Countries that have serious problems with integration—high unemployment levels, discrimination and low levels of educational success—often, though not always, face a greater overall threat. Just ask the British, who have found this out the hard way, having weathered a series of major terrorist conspiracies in addition to the 2005 attacks.

American Islam is a study of people caught in the crosscurrents. Some of those portrayed are well–rooted in America, yet because they occupy leadership roles in a community with a large number of immigrants and others who feel removed from the nation’s power structure, they live double lives. They simultaneously play the role of dexterous insider among their co–religionists and outraged outsider with non–Muslims. Others profiled include individuals who are pressing their fellow Muslims to adopt changes that are at odds with hundreds of years of tradition. Still others still are reigniting ancient struggles, such as that between mysticism and orthodoxy, in a New World setting. Some of Barret’s most sympathetic portraits are of individuals who are trying to champion a tolerant, ecumenical version of Islam against the forces of insularity and xenophobia.

Barrett’s portraits, in their variety and range, are both carefully crafted and wise. Restraint is not a much–discussed virtue in non–fiction writing, but here it deserves great praise. The author acknowledges that there is insufficient data from which to generalize—the number of mosques in the U.S., say, or rates of observance versus Mosque attendance among American Muslims. So, instead of giving us unfounded assumptions, Barrett looks closely at his seven subjects and their micro–environments.

Among them are Osama Siblani, a colorful newspaper publisher of Lebanese Shiite origins who is a power broker in Michigan’s large and politically influential Muslim community, and noted Kuwaiti–born scholar Khaled Abou el Fadl, who has become something of a pariah in his community by challenging fellow Muslims to speak out against the attacks of 9/11.

A chapter on Siraj Wahhaj, a radical–leaning imam in Brooklyn, traces the complicated story of African–American Muslims. This group represents up to one–fifth of the country’s Muslim population, and it has historically had tense relations with Muslims of foreign ancestry— not least because of its attachments to figures such as Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan, who command little veneration from other believers. Although there are indications that African–American Muslims are increasingly joining the mainstream, survey data indicates that they comprise one of the angriest sectors of the broader Muslim community, a characteristic well–reflected in Wahhaj.

Barrett has an engaging, straightforward style, and, like all good storytellers, he lets his characters speak for themselves. He lets the reader hear the unadorned story of Abdul Kabir Krambo, an American–born hippie–turned–Sufi whose faith has given him an anchor in life but not quite enough equanimity to deal with foreign–born Muslims. Krambo describes himself as “the token white guy” on the board of his mosque, most of whose members don’t always approve of his westernized ways. Krambo’s mosque was burned down in 1994. The mystery of whether the attack was carried out by non–Muslim Americans or anti–Sufi Muslims provides a perfect example of the complex circumstances that plague the central characters in American Islam.

Barrett has a sharp eye for both the humanity and idiosyncrasy of his subjects. Describing Asra Nomani, the former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of Standing Alone in Mecca, he shows readers her principled determination to gain equal treatment in her hometown mosque in West Virginia as well as the deep discomfort she brings upon her family because she is an unmarried mother. Nomani is a courageous woman and has an acute sense of justice. But in demanding that her parents back her in a campaign for the right to pray among the men of her mosque she reminds one of the morally charged figures in a George Eliot novel, whose lack of balance or concern for loved ones raises separate ethical questions.

Barrett doesn’t speak much to transcontinental experiences, but the currently accepted wisdom among scholars of terrorism is that a second catastrophic attack on the United States has not occurred because the foot soldiers of jihad are not here, or at least not in great numbers. Unlike their European brethren, American Muslims are not ghettoized. Muslims in this country are, by and large, well educated and able to earn good salaries. Though they may be angry about U.S. foreign policy, they are not alienated from American society or values. The Pew Survey paints a somewhat less rosy picture, but its title, American Muslims: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, indicates that generalizations about the socio–economic conditions of this group still stand. “American Muslims have bought into the American dream,” Marc Sageman, the author of Understanding Terror Networks, likes to say. “What is the European dream?”

But will American Muslims continue to buy into the dream as increasing numbers of their youth identify themselves by their religion first and their nationality second, and as a majority say life in the U.S has become more difficult since 9/11? That there are some extremists afoot is clear from Barrett’s chapter on Sami Omar al–Hussayen, a Saudi graduate student at the University of Idaho who is the Web master of a legal student group, the Islamic Assembly of North America. Members of this group may not be giving material support to terrorists—a charge for which al–Hussayen was unsuccessfully prosecuted under the Patriot Act—but they are addicted to some deeply toxic anti–American rhetoric, such as the writings of the "Awakening Sheikhs" of Saudi Arabia, Safar al–Hawali and Salman bin Fahd al–Awda, and that is not encouraging.

The counterpoint to the al–Hussayen story comes in "The Activist," one of the most affecting chapters in Barrett’s book. It describes the trajectory of Mustafa Saied, an Indian–born Muslim who gravitates to the Muslim Brotherhood while in college and spends his time at rallies where the chant is "Idhbaahal Yahood" ("Slaughter the Jews"). He later renounces his extremism after intense conversations with other Muslims, one of whom persuades him that "the basic foundations of American values are very Islamic—freedom of religion, freedom of speech, toleration."

Saied’s is the kind of story that cheers law enforcement officials, who look to the American Muslim community as the line of first defense against terrorism. Trusting that despite the traumas of the post–9/11 period, most Muslims still believe it is possible to satisfactorily practice Islam in the U.S., they hope the community will dissuade members who are tempted by radicalism, failing which they will notify the authorities about individuals who may be inclined to violence.

The challenge will come when the laws of probability catch up to the U.S. and the next bomb inevitably goes off, some tiny clique having radicalized, or outsiders—perhaps converts from Europe—having slipped in to carry out an attack. How the nation as a whole reacts, and how Muslims weather the eventual backlash, will be a profound test of our social cohesion. The indications from Paul Barrett’s superb American Islam provide some optimism for one half of this equation, and the more non–Muslims know about this minority in their midst, the more likely we are not to overreact when that time comes.

***

Daniel Benjamin is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institutions. He is the co–author of The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right.

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