Muslims In America Research Articles

Re-Territorializing Religiosity in Wholesome Muslim Praxis

Despite distorting narratives about extremism, specific individuals and communities of Muslims in America ground themselves in wholesome relationships among people and in the places where they find home. Between 2001 and 2009, Taqwa Eco-food Cooperative designed eco-halal food education and distribution for Chicago Muslims, promoting ethical praxis with local animals, lands, waters, farmers, farm workers, and fellow consumers. Founded and funded by an interfaith non-profit organization, Taqwa generated pluralistic community with an internally diverse Muslim community, local farmers, and interfaith partners. Amidst popular contempt for terrorism, Taqwa leaders reasserted wholesome Muslim identity by re-territorializing religiosity, enhancing care-based relations in local foodscapes. Concurring with religious studies scholarship on ecology, lived religion, and pluralism, Taqwa grounded religious meaning in materially significant, personal relationships in their local community of life. Responding to lived religious meaning nested in an ecologically holistic sense of place, Taqwa leaders crafted a purity-oriented project, inscribing identity through its beneficial relations with land and home, despite instances of migratory displacement, diasporic considerations, and externally produced problematic distortions of what it means to be Muslim in America.

Stigmatized Identities: Too Muslim to Be American, Too American to Be Muslim

In the United States today, Muslim identity is highly stigmatized. Much of this can be attributed to an increasing climate of Islamophobia. The current study finds that some Muslim Americans are confronted with another source of stigma: other Muslims. Using interview data with 23 Muslim Americans in and around Houston, TX, this study examines the intersection of religious out‐group and in‐group stigma in the lives of Muslim Americans. Findings suggest that stigma comes not only from non‐Muslims, but also from other Muslims. Some Muslim Americans are especially vulnerable to religious in‐group stigma. Those who are most acculturated to non‐Muslim, Western culture often face criticism from Muslim communities, be they inside or outside the United States. These Muslim Americans find that they are not perceived as fully Muslim or fully American, and therefore denied the full benefits of either status while simultaneously bearing the burden of both. This paper articulates the multiple dimensions of stigma faced by Muslims in America.

Religious Microaggressions: A Case Study of Muslim Americans

ABSTRACTThe increasing population of Muslims in America faces challenges not uncommon to other faith and immigrant communities. One particular challenge is Muslim experiences of various forms of discrimination, prejudice, anti-Muslim bigotry, and microaggressions, especially in post-9/11 America. While microaggressions have been discussed in the social sciences literature, religious microaggressions have not been clearly addressed in the social work literature. This article aims to fill this gap in the literature by examining the connections among racial microaggressions, the racialization of religion, and ultimately religious microaggressions. The article concludes by presenting implications for social work policy, practice, and education in the area of religious microaggressions.

Muslims in America: Identity Dilemma and the Islamic Fundamentals of Coexistence

Muslims in America: Identity Dilemma and the Islamic Fundamentals of Coexistence

FBI releases report on increased hate crimes

Hate crimes increased in 2015, according to a report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The report, 2015 Hate Crime Statistics, found a 6.8 percent increase in hate crimes in the United States in 2015. The 5,859 hate crime incidents reported in 2015 show an increase from 5,479 hate crimes reported in 2014. The demographic that faced the greatest increase in reported hate crimes was Muslims, who saw a 67 percent increase in reported hate crimes from 2014 to 2015. According to Mark Potok from the Southern Poverty Law Center, this is the highest number of hate crimes directed toward Muslims in America since 2001 with the al‐Qaida attacks on New York.

Www.Jihadusa.com: Al Qaeda, the Internet, and Homegrown Terrorism in the United States

The purpose of my paper is to examine the growing trend of al Qaeda and its affiliates, particularly al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s (AQAP) embrace of recruitment and radicalization of Muslims within the United States. Many experts have discounted the threat of homegrown radicalization and embrace of jihad taking place in the United States given greater assimilation, low poverty rates, and high educational attainment levels in many U.S. Muslim communities relative to those in Europe. However, al Qaeda and AQAP’s recruitment strategy has evolved. The Internet has now become the most important element and allows anyone anywhere access to intermediaries, like-minded individuals via blogs, chatrooms, Facebook, and Twitter, as well as audio and video sermons, messages, and publications. The recruitment strategy has become “bottom-up” comprising messages that compel would be jihadists to view the West as naturally at odds and at war with Islam. The ultimate goal is to force U.S. Muslims to choose sides, according to al Qaeda, you cannot be a good Muslim and embrace the West at the same time. Once you have chosen the path to Islam, the only logical and righteous path is the embrace of violent jihad against the enemies of Islam, the United States. Al Qaeda and AQAP’s recruitment also emphasizes the individual duty of every Muslim to join the global struggle or Ummah, and carry out jihad. By utilizing the Internet, al Qaeda and AQAP hope to allow Muslims in America to identify with and feel the same sense of subjugation and oppression felt by Muslims in Europe and other parts of the world where these factors had left Muslims more susceptible to recruitment. The paper also addresses other like-minded groups that have also embraced these al Qaeda Internet strategies, namely Al-Shabaab. In order to attract recruits from the U.S., the group also markets itself as part of the global universal Muslim struggle, and entices potential recruits via the Internet to embrace the “Ummah consciousness” and thus necessarily jihad against America. The paper will also address counterterrorist strategies aimed at preventing attacks perpetrated by those radicalized and recruited in the Unites States.

From the Editor

This issue of RoMES has been edited in a national atmosphere of anti-Muslim rhetoric, openly expressed by several candidates during the presidential primaries. Now the election campaign has moved to the appointment, by President-Elect, Donald J. Trump, of cabinet members and close advisors, many of whom share his views of the Middle East and its diverse population. And it does not look good for Muslims in America, including Muslims who are U.S. citizens. Along with Hispanics, African Americans, and Jews, Muslims—and indeed the Middle East as such—are regarded as problems that President-Elect Trump seems intent on doing something about. It is a view of Islam and the Middle East shared increasingly in word and deed by a sizeable and vocal portion of the electorate. What are we to make of the possibility of foreign and domestic policy being crafted by the likes of John R. Bolton, who associates Islam with jihadism and is an admirer of the Islamophobic writings of Robert Spencer? Will there be any tolerance in the new Trump administration of debate and the free exchange of ideas on the need for education about and understanding of the Middle East? The importance of this question relates to the growing population of naturalized and second generation citizens of Middle Eastern origins now living in the U.S. The Middle East is here, and contributing to American culture, religious life, economy, and citizenship.

Muslims in America

American Muslims face prejudice and discrimination, yet have a responsibility to break stereotypes and engage in dialogue with members of other faiths and ethnic groups.

Beyond Cooties and Crushes: The Potential for Evangelical Leadership in Christian Engagement with Islam

For those who are concerned about Islamophobia and wish to combat it within the context of religious liberty in America, this essay offers a proposal that evangelical Christians, who are thought to be part of the problem, can become leaders in interfaith engagement with Islam. The people most prepared to understand the experience of being Muslim in America are Evangelicals, and the real hope is that fervently orthodox Christians and Muslims may live in a peaceable community. We need Evangelicals to take the lead. What tempers Mainline Protestants, what has prepared them for interfaith engagement, is intellectual doubt, but this is also their limitation. What can temper and prepare Evangelicals to lead us in interfaith engagement toward Islam is confessional humility, after the example of St. Paul and in the image of Christ.

Sonic Jihad—Muslim Hip Hop in the Age of Mass Incarceration

This essay examines hip hop music as a form of legal criticism. It focuses on the music as critical resistance and “new terrain” for understanding the law, and more specifically, focuses on what prisons mean to Muslim hip hop artists. Losing friends, family, and loved ones to the proverbial belly of the beast has inspired criticism of criminal justice from the earliest days of hip hop culture. In the music, prisons are known by a host of names like “pen,” “bing,” and “clink,” terms that are invoked throughout the lyrics. The most extreme expressions offer violent fantasies of revolution and revenge, painted within a cosmic worldview that likens present conditions to the slave system that first brought African Muslims to America as slaves. The discursive war challenges the notion that the most radical voices in Muslim America are to be found in mosques or other Muslim gatherings. Such a position must contend with this sonic jihad and its aural assault against prisons. These artists arguably represent the most radical Islamic discourse in America today that undoubtedly ranks Muslim rappers among the most cutting-edge critics of mass incarceration.

When the Victims are not so Innocent: Extremist Muslim Activity in Western Bloc Countries

When the Victims are not so Innocent: Extremist Muslim Activity in Western Bloc Countries Khaleel Mohammed To some observers, the horrific crimes on 9/11 were not just the work of a few Muslim extremists, but rather the culmination of a philosophy preached by a religion bent on world domination. This negative image of Islam and Muslims, however, did not begin on September 11, 2001. Two decades before this event, Edward Said, had observed: So far as the United States seems to be concerned, it is only a slight overstatement to say that Arabs and Muslims are essentially seen as either oil suppliers or potential terrorists. Very little of the detail, the human density, the passion of Arab‐Moslem life has entered the awareness of even those people whose profession is to report the Arab World. What we have, instead, is a series of crude, essentialized caricatures of the Islamic world, presented in such a way as to make the world vulnerable to military aggression. In the 1997 reprint of his Covering Islam, Said further noted that, “malicious generalizations about Islam have become the last acceptable from of denigration of foreign culture in the West; what is said about the Muslim mind, or character, or religion, or culture as a whole cannot now be said in mainstream discussion about Africans, Jews, other Orientals or Asians” (Said , xii). To add to the egregiousness of this discrimination, Jack Shaheen has documented almost 900 films from the beginning of the cinema industry in the West, starting in 1896, that show how Arabs (read “Muslims”) have been constantly portrayed as “brutal, heartless, uncivilized fanatics and money‐mad cultural ‘others’ bent on terrorizing civilized Westerners, especially Christians and Jews” (Shaheen , 172). The recent furor over Donald Trump's failure to correct a supporter who assumed President Obama to be a Muslim, as well as Ben Carson's statement about not voting for a Muslim president only underline the pervasive demonization of Muslims in America. Anti‐Muslim prejudices in the U.S The word Islamophobia has been widely used to denote such prejudice against Islam. The term came into prominence with the 1997 Runnymede Trust's publication, Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All, although it had been used earlier without much notice (Richardson ). In opposition to the Runnymede Trust findings, some popular writers stridently claim that there is no such thing as Islamophobia—arguing that is it perfectly acceptable for people to state their feelings against a faith whose followers commit acts of terror with a goal to world domination. The pervasiveness of the negative depiction in films and news media, however, completely debunks this contention. In the week after 9/11, Arabs and South Asians reported 645 cases of bias and hate crimes (Cainkar ). During 2001, anti‐Muslim hate crimes in the United States increased by 1,700 percent. In the hurriedly passed Patriot Act of October 2001, John Ashcroft, the born‐again Christian U.S. Attorney General, rounded up 1,200 Arab, South Asian, and Muslim men on suspicion of possible ties to terrorism (Curtis IV , 100). Authorities stopped counting after that number, due to what it termed “statistical confusion” (Abdo , 84). Citing the need for national security, officials refused to release the names of the detainees or to allow them access to lawyers; they held them in custody without charging them with any crimes; in some cases, they refused to even notify their families. Although the importance of religion is often downplayed in the United States, a Newsweek poll in 2009 showed that approximately 62 percent of Americans believed the USA to be a Christian nation. Church leaders have not been reluctant to weigh in with their views of Islam and Muslims. In October 2002, Jerry Falwell, at the time Chancellor and President of Liberty University, the largest private Christian college in the USA, pronounced Muhammad a terrorist, the opposite of Jesus and Moses. Franklin Graham, son of renowned evangelist Billy Graham, called Islam a “violent and evil” religion. He later amended this sentiment to, Islam “is not the faith of this country. And that is not the religion that built this nation. The people of the Christian faith and the Jewish faith...

Muslims in Pre- and Post-9/11 Contexts

Muslims have never ceased to be important for the West and have been depicted in vilifying and stereotypical manners in western literature and films. However, after the tragic event of 9/11, a dramatic change has been observed in the world’s focus towards Muslims. Although stereotypes and discriminatory actions were nothing new to Muslims, the post-9/11 backlash was absolutely terrible and heartbreaking. People have started to consider Muslims either terrorists or sympathetic to terrorists, and they have been suspected and distrusted. Lots of books, articles and films have depicted Muslims in a derogatory and extreme manner. Pre-9/11 Hollywood movies True Lies and The Siege explicitly show the stereotypical attitude of the West to Muslims while post-9/11 novels like The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid and Once in a Promised Land by Laila Halaby depict the plight and predicament of Muslims in America. The article aims to depict the stereotypical, vilifying and antagonistic attitudes of the West to Arabs and Muslims in both pre- and post- 9/11 era. It also aims to prove that the depiction is highly motivated by the media, western authorities and the West’s desire for social, cultural and political dominance over the East. Keywords: Orientalism, Others, Terrorism, Media

Political Muslims in America: From Islamism to Exceptionalism

Political Muslims in America: From Islamism to Exceptionalism

HUKUM KELUARGA ISLAM DALAM MASYARAKAT MUSLIM DIASPORA DI BARAT (Perspektif Hukum Perdata Internasional)

This article discusses about application of the Islamic Family Law for the migrant muslims who live in the western countries, such as America, England, Germany and France. This discussion is analyzed in International Private Law theories of Personal Status. Each country will have different application because of the difference of principle in the International Private Law about Personal Status. The Islamic family law is not legally applied for migrant muslims in America and England courts because both are countries which apply common law system. They use the domicile principle in the case of personal status in the International Private Law discourse. Therefore, the muslims migrant society apply the Islamic family law culturally in their community, through an Imam or mufti as their leader and consultant. This application is not legal according to the states law. In the European continent countries which use the civil law system, such as in Germany and France, the Islamic Family law is applied for the migrant muslims society, if it’s compatible to the public order. The court may apply the Islamic family law for the migrant muslims, because both are countries which use the nationality principle for the case of personal status in the International Private Law discourse.

Six Theses on the Sustainability of a Minority Culture in a Majority Society: The Jewish and Muslim Cases

In 2010, I participated in one of the workshops devoted to “Judaism and Islam in America.” I was asked to reflect on the question of assimilation and authenticity in the lives of Jews and Muslims in America. The core tension inhering in this question was how to understand and manage the relationship between preserving a faith or cultural tradition and the desire and need to be part of the American world in which Jews and Muslim live. I recall two impressions from the conversations that ensued around this question. First, there was a sense that Jews in western societies, by virtue of their long-standing presence — and equally long-standing outsider status — had struggled with this balancing act for quite some time. Their example might bear some historical lessons of value for Muslims, who, in the main, were much more recent arrivals in Europe and America. Second, the Jewish participants in the workshop, all of whom were, I believe, non-Orthodox, tended to retreat from a singular and unbending notion of authenticity and to highlight the elasticity of the interpretive practices of their tradition. Muslim participants, by contrast, appeared to feel much less at liberty to reinterpret their scriptural tradition. It seemed that they were committed to the authority of the word of the Prophet and relatively untroubled by the notion of authenticity. Notwithstanding the articulated differences over authenticity, there was also a sense of common cause. Participants from both groups recognized that their faith traditions have generated rich cultural heritages and habits that have survived and even flourished

Anti-racist teaching, student ethnography and the multiracial model of Islam

My Ethnography of the University (EUI) course 'Muslims in America' introduces undergraduate students to the racialisation of Islam and Muslims in the U.S. at large, and in the University in particular. In this article, I describe how an anti-racist pedagogy coupled with student ethnographic research can yield a rich learning process. Beginning with one of the key debates in the scholarship on Muslims in the United States, I introduce students to the productive ways in which a multiracial history of American Islam can inform their ethnographic research. Additionally, I elaborate the potential for student research to transform university policy. The University offers a valuable ethno- graphic site for the critical study of the history and place of Muslims in U.S. society, politics and culture.

A Fourth Time of Trial

This article revisits Robert Bellah’s conception of civil religion in America (using his methodology of deconstructing presidential addresses and other important political discourses), to posit that America is in the midst of a fourth time of trial, for which consensus on American identity and meaning in the world is in jeopardy. To that end, I revisit Bellah’s third time of trial to account for salient themes that have been added to American civil religion resulting from this period. Next, I analyse the public discourse of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama regarding the impact of 9/11 on American attitudes towards Muslims in America, to determine how the tenets of American civil religion have been affirmed, challenged, and critiqued in this time of trial, arguing for the need of a more implicit and inclusive understanding of civil religion. Finally, I suggest examples of Muslim Americans contributing to the broadening of recognizably American identity that aligns with the ways in which the post-9/11 presidents have made the case for an increase in American tolerance and diversity.

Therapy With Immigrant Muslim Couples: Applying Culturally Appropriate Interventions and Strategies

Despite the steady increase of Muslims in America, there is a scarcity of research for mental health professionals who wish to work with Muslim couples. The goal of this article is to provide mental health therapists the common features of Muslim marriages and how they are influenced by the religious and social context, with clinical implications for couples therapy interventions being discussed.

Islamophobia? Religion, Contact with Muslims, and the Respect for Islam

In the midst of growing reservations about Muslims in America, this study seeks to explore the factors accounting for Islamophobia by utilizing nationally representative data. The findings suggest that religious affiliations have differential effects on the degree to which one respects Islam, with Christians more likely to have low regard for Islam. The image of a God who punishes his followers for their sins has a positive association with the odds of Islam being least respected among all religions. While higher frequency of contact with Muslims predicts an overall improved opinion for Islam, evangelical and black Protestants present the opposite picture. Their increased exposure to Muslims leads to lower respect for Islam. I discuss the implications of these findings for theories of intergroup contact and subcultural identity.

THE INDIGENIZATION AND POLITICIZATION OF AMERICAN ISLAM

The increased presence and visibility of Muslims in America in the past century means that Islam is no longer to be characterized as a Middle Eastern or South Asian phenomenon. Given the fact that it is the fastest growing religion in America, Islam is now a very American phenomenon. The face of American Islam has changed dramatically especially after the events of September 11, 2001. This article will examine the impact that recent events have had on the American Muslim community and will focus on increasing political engagement by members of the community. It will examine the political experience of American Muslims and will discuss how community members have come together to try to change the American political landscape.