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Understanding American Islam? Former Wall Street Journal editor Paul Barrett was working across the street from the World Trade Center on the day of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. In the year that followed, he edited the newspaper's front page, overseeing countless stories about Islam and its impact in far corners of the world -- and realized that little was known about Muslims living in America. Americans tended to associate their Muslim neighbors with the violent and negative images of terrorists seen in news headlines. Barrett set out to write a series of profiles of Muslim Americans that eventually turned into a book. His conclusion: There's a broad diversity of Muslims in this country, as diverse as the melting pot of America. Barrett is now a writer and editor for Business Week. I interviewed him at the Turkish Cultural Center in New York, where he had been invited as a guest of honor for a luncheon program about his book "American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion." How did you decide to write a book about Islam in America? What was your motivation? When people first meet me, often the first question on their minds is "How did you come to write this book?" During that first year after 9/11, my primary assignment at The Wall Street Journal was editing stories for the front page. I spent most of that year editing stories about Islam in the context of other countries and other cultures. When my work-life returned to normal a year later, it occurred to me I knew more about Islam overseas than I did in my own country. I found that incongruity strange. When I was able to get back into the swing of my own reporting, I decided to address it. I went out and gathered stories of individual people and individual communities in an effort to demonstrate the tremendous variety present in Islam in this country. And that's what this book is about: American Islam. In this country, many of the misunderstandings and misapprehensions we have about this religion stem from our confusion about who Muslims are and our tendency to merge and conflate the image of Islam and its adherents in the Middle East, Indonesia, Asia, Africa, Turkey, with the Muslims who may live across the street from us in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, California. So one of the very first efforts I made was to demonstrate with these particular stories how American Islam is very distinct from Islam as it exists elsewhere. The main way in which it is distinct is that it is so varied. We basically have in this country the United Nations of Islam. We don't have one predominant group. We don't even have one group that dictates to others what Islam means in this country. Most Americans think Muslims are of Arab descent. But most Arabs in the US are not Muslim. And most American Muslims are not Arab. ... Muslims are far better established and more integrated than most non-Muslims assume. Most private surveys show that Muslim family income is at the same level as non-Muslim Americans. The percentage of Muslims who have college degrees is just short of the general population. Even measures of civic participation, such as voter registration and intention to vote, (60 to 70 percent) match the general population's rate. In my mind, that's fairly impressive when you understand the overall Muslim American population is two-thirds first-generation immigrants. What was your approach? In writing this book, my approach was neither that of a prosecutor nor a defense attorney. It is important to emphasize how mainstream Muslims, in my view, are an integration success story, though one sadly interrupted and disrupted by the fallout of 9/11. However, there is an undercurrent in this country of extremist ideological and religious thought, and it is one that concerns many Muslims, not to mention the government. There are extremist preachers in some mosques, and extremist literature. There are small groups who talk in a kind of apocalyptic, you know, "clash of civilizations" way about the inability of Muslim culture to integrate with the West. One of the great challenges that Muslims face is figuring out how to integrate people who are prone to this kind of thinking and how to diffuse that way of thinking. This is a real challenge and one I think Muslim organizations are coming to grips with as they take their responsibility to integrate their constituents into the larger society more seriously. How did your subjects react when they learned of your Jewish background? And how did you choose your seven subjects to follow: Why did you not choose a Turkish subject, an Indonesian or a Bosnian? I chose my subjects the way journalists tend to choose to subjects: very unsystematically and serendipitously. You know, I started out with an imam who I'd met because his mosque is in Brooklyn. He happened to be African American, which in N.Y.C. represents a very substantial minority of Muslims. He also represents a story I thought my readers would already have some familiarity with: the story of the Nation of Islam and Malcolm X. What I wanted to show was that the roots of Islam in the African-American community do not begin with Malcolm X. It actually began in the 1600s and 1700s, with Muslim slaves brought to this country from West Africa. Once I moved from the newspaper profiles to the book, I did try to broaden my selection to provide more examples to show diversity. But I did not burden myself with trying to find a representative of every subgroup. I knew it was going to be imperfect. I also felt there were certain elements that had to be represented: It seems to me you have to write about the very distinct Arab community of the American Midwest. I kind of had to address the issue Americans know the least about: white converts to Islam. I also wanted to address the issue of male-female Muslim relations, something Americans seemed to be fascinated by. I wanted to address the fact that many Muslims come to this country to attend college and graduate school, which has been a major roadway for them to find their way into this country. I was looking for surprising, interesting and illuminating aspects. If the book had 15 chapters perhaps I would have included a Turkish Muslim, etc. I wrote a piece for the Los Angeles Times about the book. As I recall, the headline read "Writing about Muslims while Jewish." What I said in that article was that while my being Jewish at times did provoke a certain amount of skepticism and concern, over the long term it actually was a tremendous advantage. It was a kind of icebreaker to essentially explain to a skeptical group of interview subjects as they auditioned me why they should tell me anything in detail. And frankly, I auditioned them, too. My method was to try and focus in very tightly on individuals and families, and to be able to do that you need to be able to pick from the crowd people who are willing to tell their story candidly, and not speak in press releases and speeches and tell their story in human terms. As for Asra Nomani, one of the characters you profile, to what extent does she represent Muslim women in America? First we have to back up and explain who Asra Nomani is. Asra is an Indian immigrant who came here as a very young child. Her family story is very common in American Muslims' stories. They came here because her father was a graduate student at West Virginia University. He came to this country to get an education and ended up settling in Morgantown, West Virginia. He became a professor, a prominent citizen in town and an elder in the Muslim community. He was one of the founders of the mosque in Morgantown. Now the story that I wrote about Asra in some ways begins with the opening of the new mosque in Morgantown. .... One of the interesting aspects of the design is that it was built with a women's prayer balcony. In the old mosque, the women prayed behind the men. In the new mosque, women were relegated to a separate balcony with a wall preventing them from seeing over. This event in and of itself was remarkable: It's always interesting to see how a religious group that has transported itself to a new culture makes what seems like a counter-intuitive move back towards orthodoxy. But in fact it's quite typical among religious immigrant groups in this country for a second generation to become somewhat more orthodox than the first generation, which is more oriented toward establishing itself and playing down its religious orientation. Historically you can see this in second generations of Jewish and Catholic immigrants. But here is this new arrangement, and Asra, who had grown up as an American and considered herself a feminist, though an observant Muslim, felt very alienated and frustrated by this arrangement. She thought it was almost sacrilegious the way she was cut off from the imam and couldn't see what was going on. And she announced she was simply not going to follow those rules. She was going to pray in the back of the main prayer hall, as was done in most countries throughout the world. She began praying in the back of the prayer hall. She had her niece and her mother with her. They weren't doing anything loud or brash. But this led to a big blow-up in the community. She was chastised by male members of the congregation. Her father was ostracized; he was one of the founders of the mosque, and he was basically driven out of his leadership position by men he had known for 25 to 30 years. And soon her experience there and the controversy had emanated out to other congregations around the US, where her story was very meaningful to a lot of other Muslim women of her generation who shared some of her frustrations. So that's why I chose to tell her story. The tension reflected in her life, her effort to bridge East and West, traditional and modernity, I think are very prevalent in the lives of many women even if they don't go to this end. Do you think that Muslim voices are not represented in the mainstream media? I think 10 years ago that assumption could be correct, but today that is less accurate. If you and I wanted to sit down at a computer and go through a media database, we would find quite a few articles describing Muslim life in the US, including articles that reflect Muslim political views as well as op-eds. In the digital world there is no shortage of Muslim voices, but how many people are going and virtually sitting in an audience and listening to those Muslim voices? There are many, many very sophisticated Muslim Web sites. Earlier, you mentioned that the Muslim college graduation rate is somewhat less than that of the general American population. Can you explain this? My point actually was how striking it is to me that the rates are very similar. Muslims are more integrated and more successful than many Americans understand. A very substantial fraction of Muslim immigrants come to this country for higher education. That's why they've been so successful; they don't come here and start on the lower rungs. Some short-term developments that we have alluded to are very interesting: People now in college, in their 20s and 30s, are reverting to tradition. They have parents who came here and identified themselves primarily through their nation of origin, and thought of themselves as Egyptians, Lebanese, Indian, not as Muslims. But their children, who grow up speaking with American accents and going to American schools, find themselves living with one foot in a traditional environment and one foot in an American world, and it's quite common that when they go off to college, pertaining to socializing, dating, alcohol they find a different environment. And their reaction is to re-embrace religion as a form of identity, something they can meet other people through and gain a sense of solidarity. So you have this fascinating phenomenon where people in their 20s might dress in a conservative way while their parents might have a more secular appearance. It's not unusual for Muslim student associations on campuses to be fairly orthodox in their practices. My guess is that over time this will become part of the longer history of second generations re-embracing tradition, as opposed to being a permanent development. One last thought: You shouldn't discount the effect of 9/11, which served as a catalyzing event in all senses of the word, good and bad. It stirred suspicion and bigotry at certain levels. It also sparked greater communication along religious and ethnic lines. In my experience, despite the trauma and despite the FBI investigations and despite the nasty words that may have been exchanged on the street during the trauma of 9/11, many Muslims, particularly immigrants, who want to stay, are going to bring the foot that was still in the old country and plant it here. That doesn't mean that they're going to become "Wonder bread, apple pie" Americans overnight, but that they're demanding to be Americans. It's a very complicated process, not necessarily a linear development, as Professor Herbert taught us about Catholics and Jews. 28.06.2009 Interviews AYDOĞAN VATANDAŞ ------------------------------------ ========================================== MILIS MAJELIS MUDA MUSLIM BANDUNG (M3B) Milis tempat cerita, curhat atau ngegosip mengenai masalah anak muda dan Islam. Sekretariat : Jl Hegarmanah no 10 Bandung 40141 Telp : (022)2036730, 2032494 Fax : (022) 2034294 Kirim posting mailto:majelismuda@yahoogroups.com Berhenti: mailto:majelismuda-unsubscr...@yahoogroups.comyahoo! Groups Links <*> To visit your group on the web, go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/majelismuda/ <*> Your email settings: Individual Email | Traditional <*> To change settings online go to: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/majelismuda/join (Yahoo! 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