Ambassador Akbar and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog about Muslins in America.

Ambassador Akbar  and Abdur-Rahman Abou Almajd in dialog about Muslins in America.

"The 21^st century will be the century of Islam" Akbar Ahmed.

Ambassador Akbar

Ambassador Akbar Ahmed is currently the Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University in Washington DC, the First Distinguished Chair of Middle East and Islamic Studies at the US Naval Academy, Annapolis, and a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. He has taught at Princeton, Harvard, and Cambridge Universities and has been called “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” by the BBC.

Akbar Ahmed has long been one of the beacons of the Muslim spokespersons in the West so he is regularly interviewed by CNN, NPR BBC, and Fox and has appeared several times on Oprah. He is the author of over a dozen award-winning books, including Discovering Islam, which was the basis of the BBC six-part TV series called “Living Islam.” Following up on his critically acclaimed Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, his latest project, based on extensive fieldwork, has resulted in a full length documentary, Journey into America, shown at several film festivals and the book, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam (Brookings Press, July 2010).

To shed light on this increasingly important religious group and counter mutual distrust, renowned scholar Akbar Ahmed conducted the most comprehensive study to date of the American Muslim community. Journey into America explores and documents how Muslims are fitting into U.S. society, placing their experience within the larger context of American identity. This eye-opening book also offers a fresh and insightful perspective on American history and society.

Following up on his critically acclaimed Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization (Brookings, 2007), Ahmed and his team of young researchers traveled for a year through more than seventy-five cities across the United States from New York City to Salt Lake City; from Las Vegas to Miami; from the large Muslim enclave in Dearborn, Michigan, to small, predominantly white towns like Arab, Alabama. They visited homes, schools, and over one hundred mosques to discover what Muslims are thinking and how they are living every day in America.

In this unprecedented exploration of American Muslim communities, Ahmed asked challenging questions:

How do American Muslims of Arab descent differ from those of other origins (for example, Somalia or South Asia)? Why are so many white women converting to Islam? How can a Muslim become accepted fully as an American , and what does that mean?

Abdur-Rahman: You are one of the most distinguished Muslim scholars today, you wrote Discovering Islam, which was the basis of the BBC six-part TV series called “Living Islam.” Following up on his critically acclaimed Journey into Islam: The Crisis of Globalization, his latest project, based on extensive fieldwork, has resulted in a full length documentary, Journey into America, shown at several film festivals and the book, Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam in July 2010 . What about your comment?

Ambassador Akbar: Thank you. I appreciate the comments. I have been fortunate to work on a wide array of projects, the latest one is “Journey into America”. The Journey into America film and book has allowed me and my team to explore America and its Muslim community in a new way. To better understand the Muslim community and its attitudes toward American identity, I spent much of 2008 and 2009 traveling the United States. My research assistants and I visited 75 communities, from Dearborn, Mich., to Arab, Ala., and 100 mosques around the country. We conducted hundreds of interviews, and compiled some 2,000 responses to a long questionnaire.

We discovered that before the debate last year over a proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan, American Muslims felt under siege. We heard heartbreaking stories: schoolchildren assaulted as “terrorists,” women wearing the hijab attacked, and mosques vandalized and firebombed.

Adding to their sense of being unfairly singled out were commentators in the news media talking as if it were open season on Muslims. Bill O’Reilly compared the Koran to Hitler’s  “Mein Kampf,” and Tom Tancredo, a Republican who was then a congressman from Colorado, said the United States could respond to a future terrorist attack by bombing Mecca.

But I also saw much to encourage me during my travels. Muslims told me in the privacy of their homes that this country was “the best place in the world to be Muslim.”  A Nigerian in Houston said he placed Thomas Jefferson “at the top of my heart.” The bearded leader of a major Muslim organization called Jefferson, a defender of religious freedom, a role model.

In Paterson, N.J., an elderly woman from Cairo who got an education in America after her Egyptian husband deserted her told us, “America saved my life.” In the only mosque in the small city of Gadsden, Ala., we met a Muslim man who had lived in the area for decades and married a Christian woman. In a distinctively Southern accent, he summed up his identity as “Muslim by birth, Southern by the grace of God.”

The Muslim community in America is not a monolith. Very broadly, it comprises three groups: African-Americans (many of them converts), immigrants (largely from the Middle East and South Asia) and white converts. And Muslims from every part of the world study and work in the United States.

Yet the diversity of the Muslim community is frequently obscured by ignorance and mistrust. We were often asked by non-Muslims whether Muslims could be “good” Americans. The frequency with which this question was asked indicated the doubts that many harbored. Too many Americans acknowledged that they knew virtually nothing about Islam and said they had never met a Muslim.

The book was released in 2010 and we held the premiere screening on the film in 2009. Since then, it has been shown in film festivals and Universities across the world, including being translated into Arabic.

Q: It is good idea to read in the opening chapter your compare Israel's 'feeling' of being under siege to that of Islam's feeling of being under siege Could you elaborate on that?

Ambassador Akbar: I gave the title Islam under Siege (2003) to my book from the notion of societies being under siege. We are living at a critical and dangerous time in history because several world civilizations are feeling simultaneously under siege. Muslims feel under siege and point to the plight of the Palestinians, the Kashmiris, and the Chechens. In spite of the UN resolutions and the suffering we see on television, little has been done to settle the problem of these people. Muslims view the continuing instability and violence in Iraq and Afghanistan with growing anger. They talk of the cloud of Islamphobia—a hatred of things of Islam. Indeed, television channels after September 11 broadcast news under the heading “America under Siege.” Israelis have felt under siege for several decades, believing that they are surrounded by Arabs determined to exterminate

them.

Individuals living in societies under siege are thrown off balance. They fall into notions of excessive group loyalty. In a heated climate there is little room for dialogue; the dominant ethos is one of group survival and security. Dishonorable acts, even rape and murder, are committed in the name of the group. Ironically, these dishonorable acts are meant to proclaim the honor of the individuals committing them.

Q: You and your team of young researchers traveled for a year through more than seventy-five cities across the United States from New York City to Salt Lake City; from Las Vegas to Miami; from the large Muslim enclave in Dearborn, Michigan, to small, predominantly white towns like Arab, Alabama, you visited homes, schools, and over one hundred mosques to discover what Muslims are thinking and how they are living every day in America, could you tell us about great stories that you faced?

Ambassador Akbar: Our greatest methodological challenge lay in the geographic boundaries of the community under study, which is spread across a vast nation. Some might be inclined to forgo traveling across its breadth and to draw conclusions from the works of others, brief discussions with elites, or mass polls. None of these approaches could yield the mine of information from face-to-face encounters in places of worship, homes, and recreation centers, which we endeavored to reach by all possible means of transportation—cars, planes, trains, and even boats.

Our team spent a year on the background work for the project and starting in September 2008 about nine months in the field. We visited over 75 cities and over 100 of the estimated 1,200 mosques, some of which are little more than a room or two. Following the anthropological techniques just mentioned, we endeavored to engage in participant observation to the extent possible.

This meant that we often stayed with Muslims to see how ordinary Muslims live their lives. We spent time with their families, opened the fast with them, observed them at prayer. Our strategy of having males speak to the men in the mosques and females to the women was very effective. Working within the culture of the respondents in this manner, the team gained unique access to the community and obtained important data. With a trained and motivated team, it was possible to maintain a frenetic pace and ferret out significant facts and figures on Islam in America over nine months. We approached the fieldwork with humility, bent on learning and listening. Thus we were able to collect the wide range of opinions and ideas needed to paint an accurate picture of the American moment that we wished to study.

The typical procedure on arriving in a city would be for me to address a large congregation on the first day in its main mosque, followed by an interfaith gathering, if possible, or reception. This would swiftly open the doors of the community, enabling the team to follow up leads. In addition, we would also research a city beforehand to determine what community members would be important sources of information. In Atlanta, for instance, we were welcomed at a dinner on our arrival by some thirty of the city’s leading Muslim figures, consisting of Bosnians, Turks, Arabs, Pakistanis, Indians, and Ethiopians, representing Sunnis, Shias, and Ismailis. Through contacts made at the dinner and research on the city, we were able to successfully arrange interviews and meetings. This was anthropology on speed—but still anthropology.

Our work has had several outcomes besides this book. By filming our interviews and anything that caught our interest in the context of the project, we collected valuable film material. With the help of my son, Babar Ahmed, a professional filmmaker, we produced the documentary Journey into America in time for the Islamic Film Festival organized by the Islamic Society of North America in Washington, D.C., on July 4, 2009.¹ Since then, the film has been shown in France, Australia, Pakistan, and other countries and in the United States at venues including the National Cathedral. We also maintained a popular blog, www.journeyintoamerica.wordpress.com. Altogether, we gathered about 2,000 questionnaires from people of all ages, races, religions, and classes across the country.

The questionnaires were designed with two objectives in mind: to capture the views and social circumstances of a particular individual at a particular time in his or her life, and to penetrate that subject’s personality. We presented open-ended questions and included ample space for the interviewee’s responses.

Pressures were constant and often arose from unexpected quarters. In Atlanta and Dallas our rental car was broken into, and in New Orleans and Boston the car was towed away. In Atlanta, Hailey’s expensive camera, with shots of some significant moments of the journey, was stolen. When I fell ill in freezing Nashville in winter, the team bundled me up and we climbed into the minivan early in the morning for our next stop in Memphis. Miraculously, we somehow kept to our busy schedule. Over these long grueling months away from home, the team never complained.

Q: Why are so many white women converting to Islam?

Ambassador Akbar: Four out of five white converts in to Islam are women, out of an estimated 30 thousand converts a year in America.  Of the women we met, like Nicole Queen for example, many had striking similarities in their reasons for converting to Islam.

Women we met were seeing a culture out of control and women being treated as objects. They see Islam as a way of drawing boundaries around, and demanding respect for themselves and their families. They also complained that the excesses in society are a threat to the young. Each conversion is different and is to be examined only in its own context but we found many women reacting to aspects of their society—the indulgence, excesses and consumerism of the past twenty years.

These women were clearly not happy with what they were seeing around them. They went looking for modesty, and found it in Islam.

Q: Why is there truly a deep divide between Muslims and Jews in America? And when will Muslims get along with other religious groups, such as Mormons in Utah?

Ambassador Akbar: The paradoxes underlying the complicated relationship between Jews and Muslims result from their shared genealogical history: both these Abrahamic peoples claim descent from an eponymous ancestor.

Their conflict can be understood in what anthropologists call agnatic rivalry, or the competition between a father’s brother’s sons for social and political dominance.

Both have challenged American identity in profound ways. Jews have had to face long periods of virulent anti-Semitism, which has now faded but not entirely disappeared.

Muslims have encountered Islamophobia, especially after 9/11. It is each group’s response to America that is so different. American Jews have confronted American predator identity by forcefully working within the system to reinforce and bring to the fore American pluralist identity. They have been the greatest champions of the Founding Fathers and the nation’s founding principles. Muslims,

in contrast, have either met predator identity head-on or gone to the other extreme and pretended to be invisible. Neither of these strategies has been beneficial to the Muslim community, which could learn from the Jewish experience, especially because the two religions have so much in common in their theology and culture.

Despite the similarities, the valiant efforts of Jews and Muslims to create harmony between their faiths are challenged at every turn by each group’s fear of the other. To my mind, few things are as urgent as building bridges between Jews and Muslims, and perhaps there is no country in the world  where this can happen except the United States.

A minority community in the United States whose experience is similar to the Jewish one, Mormons may have important lessons for Muslims.

Responding to the plight of the Muslim community after 9/11, many compassionate, sincere, and committed Jews and Christians made genuine attempts to understand Islam. Interestingly, Mormons had already been reaching out to Muslims from the birth of their religion. Upon meeting my first Mormons at Palmyra, I felt as if I was a long-awaited visitor. The Mormons appeared truly happy to see us, their influential leaders showing us around with enthusiasm and constantly pointing to the similarities between our faiths with some pride. Perhaps the attacks on the Muslims had struck a nerve among the Mormons. After all, the Prophet Muhammad, (peace be upon him) from the earliest days, was attacked by Christians as a failed priest, an errant bishop, and even the Anti-Christ. The mainstream Christian reaction to Joseph Smith was somewhat similar, and even the terminology relayed the same opposition and vitriol.

The similarities between the two faiths were picked up early in Mormon history. When Joseph Smith declared his faith, mainstream America described him as a “Yankee Mahomet”  or “backwoods Mahomet.” As early as 1842, the New York Herald editorialized that Joseph Smith “indicates as much talent, originality, and moral courage as Mahomet, Odin, or any of the great spirits that have hitherto produced the revolutions of the past ages.” In a speech in 1853, Brigham Young, the second prophet of the Mormons, compared Joseph Smith to the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), a comparison still made among Mormon scholars.”

Thus from Mormonism’s birth, its founder was compared to the Prophet of Islam—approvingly by Mormons and dismissively by their critics.

Imam Shuaib-ud-din of the Islamic Center, one of the imams of Salt Lake felt that Mormons, like Muslims, are very family-oriented: “And their values are very conservative. Probably the best place for a Muslim to raise his family is Utah.” He praised the Salt Lake City clothing store Modest by Design, which caters to LDS people. At the same time, he recognized their fundamental theological differences and also noted relations have remained cordial since 9/11.

Q: How can west and Muslims ever understand each other?

Ambassador Akbar: The United States that we have come to know in our travels is indeed a nation of multiple identities, both divided and wondrously united. As the ethnographic data of the preceding chapters indicate, the divisions occur between and within communities and at times put serious strain on the overall unity of any of these. Of wide concern at present are the stresses that have arisen with the growth of America’s Muslim community and its unfortunate association with 9/11. Increased and intense dialogue that leads to understanding seems the obvious way to reduce these stresses, but it can only be achieved through mutual appreciation, beginning perhaps with the founders of both the United States and Pakistan, a major Muslim nation.

The first and most important recommendation is that American leaders help to change the tone of the discussion of Islam. Too many Americans consider Islam a pestilence, and their dislike of it has become almost an obsession. American Muslim leaders, too, need to face the crisis in their community rather than recoil in the customary defensive manner. At present, Muslim leaders are paralyzed by fear of informants (especially in mosques), indecision (regarding whether to support Republicans or Democrats, for example), and compromise (putting aside parts of their own identity in order to ingratiate themselves with the majority). Muslims, especially the young, are also frustrated with the corruption and ineptitude of Muslim leaders in Muslim countries, and further frustrated by the support they receive from the United States. These leaders appear out of touch even with those cases that require ordinary human compassion. For example, Muslims have not been heard condemning the atrocities in Darfur, or the too often repeated attacks on Christians in Egypt and Pakistan or on the Bahais in Iran.

New Muslim voices need to be heard in the media. Even after so many years since 9/11, commentary on Islam is given mainly by men of the older generation of immigrants whose heavy accents and poor grammar betray their background and lose their case the moment they open their mouths. When they do speak, they do little more than intone, “Islam is a religion of peace” and “We love America.” It is time to encourage them to take up American pastimes like sailing and long mountain treks so that they are kept busy and out of public sight. The Neocons and security experts, too, should rediscover these American pastimes. It may help them become more self-reflective.

Muslims also need to invest time, effort, and resources to a serious study of both their own community and larger American society.

They are not living in a vacuum, and the two are interconnected. I found the lack of curiosity among Muslims we met on the journey dispiriting. Again and again, when I would invite them to ask me about the purposes of my journey into America—or about any aspect of it—the response was meager.

American Muslims need to overhaul the management of the mosques and provide a long-term policy for training American imams. Without a wise and well-informed imam, the community is like a ship without a rudder. The mosque is the hub of the community’s religious activity, but too often the imam is the focus of controversy.

Equally important, America needs to learn about Muslim culture, especially about the seminal figure of Islam, the Prophet of Islam (peace be upon him). Most Muslims we met—old or young, male or female, black or white—named the Prophet as their most inspiring figure. In keeping with Muslim tradition, many added the words “peace be upon him” as a blessing every time they mentioned his name. Women had tears in their eyes when they spoke of him and his compassion, love, and merciful nature. Like Muslims the world over, many African Americans who converted to Islam after hearing stories of the Prophet and his concern for the poor and the dispossessed took the name Muhammad as a mark of affection. White converts saw in him an answer to the spiritual problems of the world. Hence, if the American aim is to win Muslim hearts and minds, it is not good strategy to hurl abuse against the Prophet.

Abdur-Rahman: Thank you a lot, ambassador Akbar.