Recently in Muslims Category

As the lede of Lauren Markoe's RNS story suggests, the most striking findings of the new Gallup survey of American Muslims is that they are as optimistic as other Americans, and that their sense of well-being has increased faster over the past three years than those of other faiths. So much for the ill effects of Islamophobia, right?

Maybe. Some interviews with Muslims were conducted in February and March of 2010--before the "Ground Zero Mosque" and all the other anti-mosque-building protests broke out around the country. Others were conducted in October. It's not clear whether or how interviews conducted during these two points in time differed.

Be that as it may, no religious group aligns more closely with American Muslims than American Jews. After the Muslims, the Jews are the most likely to approve of President Obama and to see the Iraq war as a mistake. They are more likely than other non-Muslim religious groups to believe that Muslims are loyal to the U.S. and have no sympathy for al Qaeda. And 66 percent of Jews agree that most Americans are prejudiced towards Muslims, as compared with only 60 percent of Muslims themselves. My friend Jerome Chanes would call this gevaltism (as in Oy Gevalt!) by proxy. I'd say that whatever their worries about Muslim hostility to Israel, Jews are liberals with an acute awareness of what it's like to be an American non-Christian suspected of dual loyalty.

Given that Gallup's randomly obtained telephone sample totalled 868,264 adults, yielding 3,883 self-identified Muslims who could be controlled for numerous demographic variables based on U.S. Census data, you'd figure that one of the benefits of the survey would be one of the best estimates of the Muslim population in the U.S. ever offered. But you'd be wrong. Instead, the report ends with the following two sentences:

Only a census-style study that includes every household and inquires about religious affiliation, which is currently prohibited by law, would be able to provide such an estimate. Without the rigor of that model, we are limited to describing the Muslim Americans without providing the much-debated and discussed topic of the total number of Muslims living in America.

To say that this is nonsense is to indulge in gross understatement. Estimating the size of religious groups in the U.S. using telephone sampling methodology is absolutely normal, and large-sample surveys such as our 2008 American Religious Identification Survey are widely recognized--including by the Bureau of the Census in its Statistical Abstract--as providing dependable measures of religious identification in the U.S. In fact, just taking Gallup's aggregate numbers yields an adult Muslim population of .44 percent--precisely the same as the number obtained by Pew's large 2007 Religious Landscape Survey.

The problem, of course, is that the 2001 Mosque Study Project's figure of 7 million--over 2 percent of the population--is still being tossed around as a legitimate estimate--one that would put the Muslim population of the country ahead of the Jewish population and thus make it the largest non-Christian religion in the country. Personally, I'm not sure those bragging rights serve the Muslim community that well these days. But some Muslim organizations have tied their wagons to the outsize estimate and Gallup, whose work on Muslims sails under its Abu Dhabi affiliate, clearly wanted to stay out of trouble.

I'm back from England, and for purposes of this blog, our Oxford workshop's most interesting participant was Abdou Filali-Ansary, who offered a portrait of the Arab Spring filled with light and shadow. A Moroccan philosopher who successively directed the King Abdul-Aziz Foundation for Islamic Studies and Human Sciences in Casablanca and the Aga Khan University Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations in London, Filali-Ansary has thought and written as profoundly as anyone about Muslims in the contemporary world.

In his view, what the international news media have missed in covering the Arab revolutions of the past year has been the importance of a language of "ultimate values shared universally" regarding governance, civil society, and accountability. In standing for democracy and human rights, this amounts to "the de facto religion of humanity." On the rise in the Arab world over the past two decades and evident above all in the written press, it can be summed up in the Arabic phrase "dawlat al-haqq wa'l-qanun"--the rule of law or, more precisely, the state bound by law that respects rights. This secular principle could be found everywhere in Arab discourse, and was "more effective than the slogans of the Islamists," he said. It motivated the protests in the streets.

That was Filali-Ansary's good news. His bad news concerned the Islamization of higher education. At the University of Morocco, where he once taught, the Department of Philosophy has been replaced by a Department of Islamic Studies--where Islam is taught in a doctrinaire, ahistorical way as the answer to all problems. Nor is Morocco alone. Across the region, Islamists have corrupted the university when it comes to things Islamic, substituting religious preaching for an historically grounded understanding of Islam and society. The Islamic character of the state has come to be taken for granted, with Islamic law--Sharia--at the center.

The conflict between Qanun and Sharia represents, according to Filali-Ansary, a profound clash of worldviews that cannot be solved by a middle path combining elements of both. "It will be a long and painful struggle," he said, "more painful than we think." Last Friday's demonstration in Tahrir Square on behalf of a Sharia-based state testifies to the strength of the Islamist forces on the ground in Egypt.

The ability of Americans to think clearly about these issues is not helped by the Sharia Angst that has has been whipped up by a handful of ideological and religious zealots and embraced by some politicians in much the same manner as anti-Catholicism was whipped up and embraced in the 19th century. Indeed, contemporary Know-Nothingism, which would limit the practice of Islam via anti-Sharia laws, only serves to undermine the principle of universal respect for rights that we should be exemplifying to the Arab world. The Filali-Ansarys of the world deserve better from us.

The president's Gandhian pilgrimage to India has got me thinking about the way prominent Indian-Americans tend to efface their religious past. OK, so maybe there was no way Bobby Jindal could have gotten elected governor of Louisiana as a Hindu or Nikki Haley governor of South Carolina as a Sikh. But what about comedian Aziz Ansari, who has half a million people following his Twitter feed? He famously jokes about doing unspeakable things to foodstuffs but try to invoke his Muslim antecedents and it's like you've trespassed against all that is holy.

Michael Schur (of the NBC sitcom in which Ansari appears) was quoted by David Itzkoff as doing just that In a New York Times piece last June--prompting excision of the offending line with the following correction:

In an earlier version of this article, Michael Schur, the co-creator of "Parks and Recreation," partly described Mr. Ansari as a Muslim. Mr. Ansari describes himself as an atheist.

Better an atheist than a Muslim these days. What Ansari wants to be known as is just "South Asian," and that's all that Kalefa Sanneh tags him with in his November 1 New Yorker profile. So Ansari grew up "South Asian" in South Carolina? That's it?

Or take the following passage:

It was a hot summer day in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, and Ansari was squinting at the lanes of traffic on Old Fort Parkway. "I thought I was going to die crossing the street to go to Chick-fil-A," he said. Ansari was in town to perform at Bonnaroo, the annual music-and-arts festival, which draws nearly a hundred thousand people to a square mile of farmland half an hour down the highway, in a town called Manchester. "In Observe and Report," the film starring Seth Rogen, Ansari played a moisterurizer salesman named Saddamn, who responds to an accusation of terrorism with a reasonable question: "Why the fuck would I flow up Chick-fil-A? It's fucking delicious!" It turns out that Ansari agrees with this assessment (the line in the film was his idea)...

Since Park51 blew over, Murfreesboro has become ground zero of anti-mosque agitation in America, but Kafela passes up the chance to make a connection.

My colleague Homayra Ziad, who has made a study of Muslim comedians, notes that American culture does not yet have a place for the "cultural Muslim." That goes for the "cultural Hindu" and the "cultural Sikh" as well. Cultural Jews there are aplenty. I say it's time for the South Asians to step up.

In her round-up of anti-mosque protests in yesterday's New York Times, Laurie Goodstein found her way to Diana Serafin, an unemployed California grandmother who's been frequenting Tea Party events and anti-immigration rallies.

She said they read books by critics of Islam, including former Muslims like Walid Shoebat, Wafa Sultan and Manoucher Bakh. She also attended a meeting of the local chapter of ACT! for America, a Florida-based group that says its purpose is to defend Western civilization against Islam.

"As a mother and a grandmother, I worry," Ms. Serafin said. "I learned that in 20 years with the rate of the birth population, we will be overtaken by Islam, and their goal is to get people in Congress and the Supreme Court to see that Shariah is implemented. My children and grandchildren will have to live under that."

The best surveys of Muslims in America indicate that indicate that they now constitute well under one percent of the population. The 2008 Trinity American Religious Identification Survey, the third in a series beginning in 2009, shows that over the past 20 years, the number of adult Muslims i grew from 529,000 to 1,349,000--from .3 percent to .6 percent of American adults--growing half a fast in the 2000s as in the 1990s. It's possible, but unlikely, that Muslims will make up four percent of the U.S. population in 20 years.

No doubt there are some American Muslims who wish to live by Shariah law, just as there are some American Jews who order their domestic relations according to rabbinic law--halachah. Or just as other religious communities, from the Amish to the Roman Catholics, have their own rules governing the conduct of their members. But the idea that Muslims in America represent some kind of demographic/ideological threat to the American legal system is beyond far-fetched. It's a lie.

If the extraordinary interview-by-proxy of radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Aulaqi in today's WaPo is to be believed, accused Ford Hood murderer Nidal Malik Hasan made contact with him last December, and emails between the two followed from there--including "two or three" responses from al-Aulaqi. The Yemeni journalist who conducted the interview--a man with close ties to Aulaqi--"declined to comment" when asked "whether Hasan mentioned Fort Hood as a target."

Did he or didn't he? Whatever, it's hard to believe that the FBI was as blithe or asleep at the switch as it now claims about the connection. Al-Aulaqi is, as the Post makes clear, a very well known figure--one of a handful native English-speaking radicals capable of influencing susceptible American Muslims to engage in acts of violence. And Hasan had given more than sufficient indiciation that he was susceptible.

But: Did Hasan pretend to the FBI that he was just pretending to be susceptible? In the reporting on his background, there are various stray remarks that people thought he was conducting research on the impact of Islamic teachings on Muslims in the military. It seems less and less plausible that what was going on here was nothing more than a troubled man increasingly drawn into a radical version of his faith and pushed over the edge by assignment to an overseas combat zone.

In its summary of the Hasan evidence to date yesterday, the NYT states that it all

will be studied by Army and Federal Bureau of Investigation agents trying to answer the same questions that many Americans have debated over the last 10 days:

Was Major Hasan a terrorist, driven by religious extremism to attack fellow soldiers he had come to see as the enemy? Was he a troubled loner, a misfit who cracked when ordered sent to a war zone whose gruesome casualties he had spent the last six years caring for? Or was he both?

Or, in addition, was he a man whom the FBI and/or the Army thought they were using for their own counter-terrorism purposes? And who will be looking into that question?

In its just released report on the Muslim population worldwide, The Pew Forum claims that Muslims constitute .8 percent of the American population. A year ago, its Landscape Survey reported that Muslims made up .6 percent of the American population. But this was not what that survey of 35,000 found. In a conference call for journalists, Luis Lugo said that Muslims had come in at just .3 percent of actual respondents--a number adjusted for statistical reasons to .4 percent. Pew chose to report .6 percent because that was the conclusion of its 2007 survey of Muslim Americans. Its rationale for substituting it for the actual Landscape Survey findings seemed less than plausible to me.

The only explanation for how the present .8 percent was arrived at is the following footnote, from page 24:

There has been considerable debate over the exact number of Muslims in the United States. The 2.5 million figure is a projection for 2009 based on the Pew Research Center's 2007 survey "Muslim Americans: Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream" (http://pewforum.org/surveys/muslim-american/) and available Census Bureau data (http://factfinder.census.gov/), adjusted for U.S. population growth. For a discussion of the larger debate, see http://pewresearch.org/pubs/532/questions-muslim-survey.

I don't understand how .6 percent in 2007 projects to .8 percent in 2009. But based on the actual Landscape Survey findings, Pew has now doubled its estimate of the proportion of Muslims in America. By way of comparison, the 54,000-respondent 2008 Trinity ARIS found the number to be .6 percent. That's good enough for me.

In his much awaited speech today, Obama said:

Much has been made of the fact that an African-American with the name Barack Hussein Obama could be elected President. But my personal story is not so unique. The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores - that includes nearly seven million American Muslims in our country today who enjoy incomes and education that are higher than average.

Actually, it's between one and two million Muslims in America, in all but the most self-serving estimates by Muslim organizations. The Trinity American Religious Identification Survey--54,000 respondents surveyed in 2008--has Muslims at .6 percent of the adult population, equal to 1,349,000 souls.

There's plenty of commentary in the offing on Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya--here's Klein's early guide to it--but I want to call attention to just this exchange on President Bush's War on Terror.

Q President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad, "war on terror," and used sometimes certain terminology that the many people -- Islamic fascism. You've always framed it in a different way, specifically against one group called al Qaeda and their collaborators. And is this one way of --

THE PRESIDENT: I think that you're making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations -- whether Muslim or any other faith in the past -- that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name.

And so you will I think see our administration be very clear in distinguishing between organizations like al Qaeda -- that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it -- and people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop. We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down.

But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.

I've generally thought the Bush administration deserves credit for not turning its response to 9/11 into a Holy War against Muslims, and thus that the expression "war on terror"--meaningless as it strictly speaking is--was essential to that effort. Occasionally, someone in the administration would use a term like Islamic fascism or militant Islam, but for the most part any reference to the religion was avoided.

A close reading of this exchange shows Obama taking the Bush line. What the questioner is angling for is an answer that differentiates Al Qaeda and those who collaborate with it from militant Muslim organizations with other agendas, such as Lashkar-e Tayyiba, the Kashmir-liberationist group believed responsible for last year's attacks in Mumbai, whose top leaders have been designated as terrorists by the U.N. Obama won't go there. Even as he emphasizes extending the hand of friendship to the Muslim world, he promises to "hunt down" organizations "like al Qaeda -- that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it." Where this leaves Hamas and Hezbollah remains to be seen.

Obama told Time's Joe Klein of that he is in favor of negotiating with the Taliban. General Petraeus agrees. This statement has prompted an elated response from blogger Mujahideen Ryder:"This is extremely good news, and makes me want to shout at all the Muslims in Texas, Virginia, Ohio, Florida and any other strong Republican states to get out there and vote for Barack Obama!"

However, scroll down and look at some of the comments and you can see this type of response is not unanimous. Some seem skeptical that Obama has their interests at heart. As in: "Obama is a Politician. At the end of the day he going to fold to the people who keep him in power."

Andre Carson has assumed his seat in the House of Representatives representing Indiana's seventh district as the second Muslim elected to Congress. My information is that, at least on the Democratic side, there was a decision to let him assume the seat as a courtesy to his late grandmother Rep. Julia Carson, who died last year. But he's got opposition in the primary contest in May, and there will be a vigorous general election fight as well. All of which could make Andre Carson the first sitting Muslim member of Congress to be defeated for reelection.