POTENTIAL MURDEROUS AMERICAN MUSLIM SLEEPER CELLS
COLORADO ATTORNEY GENERAL JOHN W. SUTHERS
INFORMATION
REGARDING
COLORADO'S INVESTIGATION AND
PROSECUTION OF
MEMBERS OF
JAMAAT UL FUQRA
Beginning in
the late 1980s, the Colorado Attorney General's Office successfully prosecuted
members of a fundamentalist Sufi-militant Islamic sect known as "JAMAAT UL FUQRA".
Five FUQRA members were ultimately prosecuted between 1993 and 1994.
"FUQRA" is an Arabic word, which translates most accurately as "the
impoverished". The sect advocates the purification of the Islamic religion by
means of force and violence. Sheikh Mubarik Ali Jilani Hasmi, who is known by
many other aliases, and who also calls himself the sixth Sultan Ul Faqr,
originated this group in Pakistan.
In addition to being suspected of committing numerous acts of domestic terrorism, FUQRA members in the United States have been suspected of committing fraud against various governmental entitlement programs in an effort to financially support their activities.
Colorado's investigation indicated that the United States FUQRA movement was composed of approximately 30 different 'Jamaats' or communities, somewhat mobile in nature. Most of these 'Jamaats' are believed to currently exist today, along with what investigators deemed to be several 'covert paramilitary training compounds' -- one of which had been located in a remote mountainous area near Buena Vista, Colorado prior to Colorado's prosecutions in the mid-1990s. The corresponding FUQRA 'Jamaat' to the Buena Vista compound was located in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
Colorado's investigation of FUQRA was initiated in 1989 when Colorado Springs Police Department detectives, initially investigating a series of burglaries, were contacted by the owner of a storage locker site and were told about a locker of, what appeared to be, abandoned property.
In September 1989, detectives executed a search warrant of the storage locker upon suspicion of illegal explosives. The search of the locker disclosed numerous items believed to belong to the FUQRA sect then residing in that area. Several explosive components-- thirty to forty pounds of explosives, three large pipe bombs, a number of smaller improvised explosive devices, shape charges, ten handguns-- some with obliterated serial numbers-- silencers in various stages of manufacture, military training manuals, reloading equipment, bomb-making instructions, and numerous FUQRA-related publications were located in this storage area. Titles of some of the publications included "Guerilla Warfare", "Counter Guerilla Operations", "Understanding Amateur Radio", and "Fair Weather Flying," and "Basic Blueprint Reading and Sketching." Several silhouettes for firearms target practice were also discovered, including one with the words "FBI Anti-terrorist team" written on the target's torso bullseye.
Of great interest to law enforcement officials were documents concerning potential 'targets' for destruction and murder in the Los Angeles, Tucson, and Denver areas, including surveillance-type photographs, maps with hand-drawn overlays, notes, etc., concerning these targets. In addition, references to Buckley Air National Guard Base, Rocky Mountain Arsenal, the Air Force Academy, and electrical facilities in Colorado, and Warren Air Force Base, and two Wyoming National Guard armories in Wyoming were found. A somewhat detailed description of a firebombing attack on what is believed to have been the Hare Krishna Temple in Denver was also discovered. An attack, as described in these writings, did, in fact, take place in Denver in August 1984, causing an estimated $200,000 in damage. Investigation by Denver authorities at that time revealed that a Hare Krishna Temple in Philadelphia, where FUQRA activity also had been noted, was firebombed in a similar fashion.
Among the many documents found in the Colorado Springs' storage locker were numerous blank birth certificates; blank social security cards; several sets of Colorado drivers' licenses, each containing a picture of the same individual, but each with a different identity; and many underground press publications concerning the assembly of phony identification -- to be reproduced in a manner to "withstand even close government scrutiny".
Finally, the search disclosed a number of workers' compensation claims, which ultimately led to a full-scale fraud investigation being conducted by the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment in coordination with the Colorado Attorney General's Office and the Federal Bureau of Investigation Joint Terrorist Task Force.
This investigation revealed that Colorado Springs FUQRA members had defrauded the Colorado Department of Labor and Employment of approximately $350,000 dollars between September 1984 and January 1992. The mobility and multiple addresses and identities of the various FUQRA members posed a significant challenge to early detection and normal prevention of the fraud. As a result of the two-year investigation, five FUQRA members were indicted by the statewide grand jury in September 1992 on racketeering charges involving theft, mail fraud, and forgery. Six months after the indictments, further racketeering charges, including theft of rental property, conspiracy to commit murder and arson (the Denver Hare Krishna Temple), were also filed against the five individuals and a sixth person -- all FUQRA members. Some of the fraudulently obtained workers' compensation funds were traced directly to payments for a parcel of land near Buena Vista used by the group as a residence compound and training site.
One of the FUQRA defendants convicted is James D. Williams. After his conviction in 1993 for conspiracy to commit first degree murder, racketeering, and forgery, Williams fled and remained a fugitive until being apprehended in Virginia in August 2000. He was returned to Colorado and sentenced this past March to 69 years in prison. From at least the middle 1980's through 1990, Williams was a leader of a Colorado FUQRA.
The conviction for conspiracy to commit first degree murder referred to a comprehensive written plan for the murder of a Tucson, Arizona Muslim cleric, Rashad Khalifa. Khalifa was murdered in January 1990 in a manner that was remarkably similar to the written plan.
It is believed the activities of UL FUQRA across the nation continue. Just recently the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms (BATF) arrested one of the former Colorado defendants and FUQRA member, Vincente Rafael Pierre, in Virginia on alleged ammunition violations. In California, a FUQRA member was arrested on the suspected murder of a Fresno County Deputy Sheriff this last August. In addition, FUQRA operates something called the Quranic Open University in Los Angeles, which has received over $1.5 million dollars over the course of the last two years in charter school funding. This entity is also located in New York City and Philadelphia. There are believed to be active UL FUQRA training compounds still existing in New York, Michigan, South Carolina, California, and perhaps other states.
FUQRA or its members have been investigated for alleged terrorist acts including murder and arson in New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, Toronto, Denver, Los Angeles and Tucson. UL FUQRA is suspected of more than thirteen firebombings and, at least, as many murders within the United States
Showing of cartoons of Muhammad riles California campus
GILLIAN FLACCUS
Associated Press
IRVINE, Calif. - A student panel discussion on Islamic extremism that included a display of controversial cartoons that provoked protests by Muslims worldwide quickly descended into chaos as one speaker called Islam an "evil religion," and audience members nearly came to blows.
Organizers of the Tuesday night forum at the University of California, Irvine said showing cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad was part of a larger debate on Islamic extremism. But several hundred protesters, including members of the Muslim Student Union, argued the event was the equivalent of hate speech disguised as freedom of expression.
The panel, which included one Muslim speaker, was sponsored by the College Republicans and The United American Committee, a fledgling group not affiliated with the university.
During the discussion in a nearly packed 424-seat campus auditorium, a UAC moderator displayed six cartoons: three depicting Muhammad, including one of him wearing a bomb-laden turban, and three anti-Semitic cartoons he said had appeared in Middle Eastern newspapers.
Thousands of Muslims worldwide have protested, sometimes violently, since the cartoons were published in a Danish newspaper in September and then in other European newspapers. The drawings are offensive to Muslims because Islamic tradition frowns on any depiction of Muhammad or any other prophets for fear they could lead to idolatry.
The talk got off to a contentious start with the Council on American-Islamic Relations - an invited guest - boycotting the event and calling the UAC a "fringe group."
Tensions quickly escalated when panelist Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson said that Islam was an "evil religion" and that all Muslims hate America. Hecklers repeatedly interrupted the talk and, at one point, campus police removed from the audience two men, one of them a Muslim, after they nearly came to blows.
Later, panelists were cheered when they referred to Muslims as fascists and accused mainstream Muslim-American civil rights groups of being "cheerleaders for terror."
"I put out a call to Muslims in America: put out a fatwa on (Osama) bin Laden, put out a fatwa on (Abu Musab) al-Zarqawi," said panelist Lee Kaplan, a UAC spokesman. "Support America in the war on terror."
Although there were numerous heated exchanges, there were no immediate reports of violence.
Osman Umarji, former president of the Muslim Student Union, equated the decision to display the prophet drawings to the debasement of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust.
"The agenda is to spread Islamophobia and create hysteria against Muslims similar to what happened to the Jews in Nazi Germany," said Umarji, an electrical engineer who graduated from Irvine last spring. "Freedom of speech has its limits."
Brock Hill, vice president of the College Republicans, said his group had a First Amendment right to display the cartoons.
"We're not going against Islam whatsoever," he said. "This is about free speech and the free marketplace of ideas."
Southland Muslims Angry At Mayor, Governor
(CBS)
LOS ANGELES Southland Muslim leaders gathered Sunday to discuss violence
in the Middle East and one prominent leader criticized Mayor Antonio
Villaraigosa and Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger for supporting Israel.
Salam al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, said
the group is concerned about the mayor and governor's attendance at a pro-Israel
rally Sunday. He said many Muslims were upset by the nature of the public
discourse surrounding the conflict between Israel and the militant group
Hezbollah.
"We take issue with the governor and the mayor taking sides on this issue -- the
pro-Israeli side -- without consulting residents of California and Los Angeles,"
al-Marayati said. "The mayor and the governor should not drag us into this
foreign conflict."
Villaraigosa and Schwarzenegger are slated to attend a 4:00 p.m. pro-Israel
rally at the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles.
The Muslim Public Affairs Council held a meeting Sunday with 10 local Southern
California Muslim organizations in response to the violence in the Middle East.
Local organizations present at the rally included The Shura Council, an
Anaheim-based organization that represents 60 mosques in Southern California,
and CAIR. It was determined at the meeting that the council will link with 12
national Muslim organizations.
Al-Marayati said the council invited Villaraigosa to an interfaith vigil last
Sunday, but that the mayor's office did not respond until last Friday,
declining.
"The mayor either needs to meet with us or we go to City Hall," said al-Marayati.
"People keep casting us as if we are representing foreign groups," said al-Marayati.
"We are here to represent Americans."
Pregnant woman recounts shooting rampage
August 8, 2006
The Associated Press
NEW YORK — Dayna Klein was writing thank you notes and making telephone calls in her office at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle when she heard what sounded like bubble wrap popping.
When she also heard screaming and hurried footsteps, she got up from her desk and went to the office doorway and encountered a man holding a handgun.
As he pointed the gun at the pregnant Klein, she reflexively covered her stomach with her left arm. The bullet pierced her forearm and thigh _ but missed her midsection.
She later called 911 and convinced the gunman to speak with the operator, leading to his surrender. The July 28 shooting rampage _ fueled partly by ethnic hatred, authorities say _ left one woman dead and five others, including Klein, injured.
"I was trying to save the baby," Klein, who is four months pregnant, said Tuesday in Manhattan on the eve of a scheduled appearance on NBC's "Today" show. "I took a one-in-a-million chance and I was right."
After she was shot, the gunman left Klein's office, storming through other parts of the second floor, firing shots and threatening to kill anyone who called police.
With blood soaking her clothing, Klein, 37, crawled from the doorway to her desk and grabbed the phone. As she began pleading for help with the 911 operator, the gunman, wearing jeans and a green rugby shirt, returned.
"'Since you can't follow ... directions,'" Klein recalled him telling her, "`now you're the hostage.' He put the gun up against my head and starting barking orders at me to tell the 911 operator."
Klein said the gunman told her that he was a Muslim, and that Jews and the Bush administration needed to stop supporting Israel, particularly financially.
She said he also told her that the U.S. needed to end the Iraq conflict, and that he didn't care about her, her unborn or himself. Then he demanded to talk with someone from the CNN cable network.
Eventually, Klein, who is Jewish, persuaded the gunman to talk to the operator, who managed to talk the man into surrendering.
"He put the gun down in front of me and he held up the phone and said, 'Now you tell her I put the gun down.' He hung up on the 911 operator, he folded his hands behind his head and walked out of my office."
Klein's husband, Erez, learned about the shootings from a friend of the woman who was killed. He immediately drove to the hospital, traveling on highway shoulders and car-pool lanes in rush-hour traffic.
As he drove, he called a friend and asked her to find any information on the Internet. The friend told him there had been a shooting and that a pregnant woman had been shot but was in good condition.
"When they said pregnant lady shot, I knew she was the only pregnant lady on the staff," said Erez Klein, a wine buyer for Whole Foods Market.
Seattle police have arrested Naveed Afzal Haq, 30, of the Seattle area. He has been charged with aggravated murder in the death of Pamela Waechter, 58, director of the Jewish charity's annual fundraising campaign.
Haq also faces five counts of attempted murder, kidnapping involving a teenage girl who was taken hostage briefly, burglary for allegedly entering a locked building and malicious harassment under Washington state's hate-crime law.
Muhammad Ullah, a family friend and a senior member of a mosque founded in part by Haq's father, described Haq as a quiet loner with few friends. In a statement, the Islamic Center of the Tri-Cities offered condolences to the shooting victims.
Dayna Klein, who wears a brace on her arm for a few hours a day, is unsure whether she'll ever regain full use of her left arm. She will undergo tests and is seeing specialists.
Klein also is unsure whether she will return to her job as director of major gifts at the federation: "My energy has gone into my medical treatment."
South Florida Shaken By Anti-Semitic Vandalism
By:
Shelley Benveniste
Wednesday, August 2,
2006
MIAMI BEACH – Four separate acts of anti-Semitic vandalism recently occurred in the Jewish community of South Florida. Two synagogues, Young Israel of Greater Miami and Congregation Shaaray Tefilah, and two stores, Kosher World and Judaic Enterprises, were spray-painted with hate-filled graffiti.
All the vandalism sites are located within a few blocks of each other in the city of North Miami Beach in a neighborhood that is home to approximately 800 Orthodox families.
The incidents occurred Sunday morning, July 30. The buildings all had "KKK" and swastikas spray-painted on their walls with red paint. The synagogues had an additional message: "UR NEXT."
The vandals, if convicted, could face third-degree felony charges under Florida's House of Worship Protection Act. Additionally, Florida's Hate Crimes Act reclassifies specific offenses, making hate-related violations a third-degree felony.
Tension among Jews worldwide has risen as a result of the current clash between Israel and Hizbullah. Last Friday's shooting at the Jewish Federation of Greater Seattle, which left one woman dead and five other people wounded, has further exacerbated the tension. The alleged perpetrator of this crime was a Muslim man who was reported to have fired a gun into the facility.
Local authorities do not necessarily connect the recent event in North Miami Beach with Israel's present warfare. This is not the first time that anti-Semitic episodes have occurred in the area; Anti-Defamation League statistics show that hate crimes involving Jews are on the increase.
Rabbi Pinchas Weberman, spiritual leader of Ahavat Yisroel Congregation in Miami Beach and liaison between the Miami-Dade Police Department and the Jewish community in South Florida, concurs. "North Miami Beach has a diverse population. Unfortunately, there is a criminal element eager for the opportunity to operate," he said. "I don't think the recent incidents were terrorism, but an angry reaction based on the success of the recent law enforcement crackdown in the area."
The proprietor of Kosher World, Yitzie Spalter, has another prospective. He feels that terrorism, defined as a political tool of fear, has been quite successful in this case. Spalter declared that his father, a Holocaust survivor, had all the bad memories brought back by this disturbing event.
"They targeted anti-Semitic graffiti on Jewish locations," Spalter said. "It is a hate crime and not a random act of vandalism."
Rabbi Yoseph Bronstein of Judaic Enterprises was out of town when the incident occurred, and cut his trip short to hurry back to Florida. Bronstein, who has many customers who are not even Jewish, implored the community, "It is a crime to all people. We need to not let them win the war!"
Spokesman for the North Miami Beach Police Warren Hardison revealed that one "youth" had already been arrested near the scene with a spray can of paint in his possession. The suspect, he said, "is under investigation."
"All of these type incidents are treated with very serious consideration," Hardison said. "Whether an occurrence is the result of a teenager wanting to see his handiwork onthe nightly news, or a seriously deranged and dangerous individual or group, you just don't know."
Hardison's department, which is working with the Miami-Dade County Police, is increasing surveillance for all Jewish organizations, schools and businesses in the area. Everyone is on high alert.
Muslim Group Upset by
Bush's Use of 'Islamic Fascists'
By Alison Espach
CNSNews.com Correspondent
August 11, 2006
(CNSNews.com) - A Muslim group criticized President Bush for saying that
America is "at war with Islamic fascists" after U.K. authorities arrested 24
British citizens of Pakistani origin in an attempt to bomb numerous flights to
the U.S. Thursday. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) said the
president's "hot button" terminology puts the name of Islam and the Muslim
community at risk.
Bush called the attempted terrorist attack "a stark reminder that this nation is
at war with Islamic fascists who will use any means to destroy those of us who
love freedom, to hurt our nation."
Nihad Awad, executive director of CAIR, believes Bush should not even mention
Islam when referring to the would-be terrorists.
"We have to isolate these individuals because there is nothing in the Koran or
the Islamic faith that encourages people to be cruel or to be vicious or to be
criminal," Awad said. "Muslims world wide know that for sure."
Middle East expert and Islamic history expert Daniel Pipes told Cybercast
News Service that Awad's claim is a "debatable proposition."
"Islam is a political religion in a way that none other is," said Pipes,
director of the Middle East Forum and author of "Militant Islam Reaches
America." "There are many elements within the religion and the history of Islam
that suggest there is a dynamic of conquest.
"There is something inherently expansionist about Islam," Pipes continued.
"Jihad is expansionist warfare."
Pipes praised Bush specifically for his use of the phrase "Islamic fascists."
"For the president to articulate who the enemy is so clearly and unambiguously
is a huge step forward," Pipes said. "You cannot diagnose and treat a disease
without first identifying and naming it. So, a strategist cannot defeat an enemy
without first identifying it and naming it."
Muslims should not be disturbed by the term "Islamic fascists," Pipes argued,
because Bush is "identifying not Islam the religion, but a radical form of
Islam."
"Those groups that are protesting tend to support that form of Islam," Pipes
contended. He believes most Muslims have no problem with the phrase because they
understand it to refer to an extreme form of Islam separate from their beliefs.
In addition to limiting the president's comments, CAIR wants the U.S. media to
disassociate Islam with terrorists "to make sure we don't start a religious war
against Islam and Muslims." The group says American reporters should adopt the
policies of the British media when identifying suspected terrorists.
Most British media will not identify terrorists as "Muslim," "Islamic" or
"Islamists" even when physical evidence shows they were motivated by beliefs
based on Islamic teachings or writings.
Parvez Ahmed, chairman of the CAIR board, also anticipates a negative backlash
against the Muslim community.
"We also urge local law enforcement agencies to coordinate with Muslim leaders
to deter hate crimes," Ahmed said. "It is also important that our fellow
Americans understand that Muslims are law-abiding citizens who should not be
targeted or singled out because of their faith or national origin."
America's Muslims Aren't as Assimilated as You Think
By Geneive Abdo
Sunday, August 27, 2006
If only the Muslims in Europe -- with their hearts focused on the Islamic world and their carry-on liquids poised for destruction in the West -- could behave like the well-educated, secular and Americanizing Muslims in the United States, no one would have to worry.
So runs the comforting media narrative that has developed around the approximately 6 million Muslims in the United States, who are often portrayed as well-assimilated and willing to leave their religion and culture behind in pursuit of American values and lifestyle. But over the past two years, I have traveled the country, visiting mosques, interviewing Muslim leaders and speaking to Muslim youths in universities and Islamic centers from New York to Michigan to California -- and I have encountered a different truth. I found few signs of London-style radicalism among Muslims in the United States. At the same time, the real story of American Muslims is one of accelerating alienation from the mainstream of U.S. life, with Muslims in this country choosing their Islamic identity over their American one.
A new generation of American Muslims -- living in the shadow of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks -- is becoming more religious. They are more likely to take comfort in their own communities, and less likely to embrace the nation's fabled melting pot of shared values and common culture.
Part of this is linked to the resurgence of Islam over the past several decades, a growth as visible in Western Europe and the United States as it is in Egypt and Morocco. But the Sept. 11 attacks also had the dual effect of making American Muslims feel isolated in their adopted country, while pushing them to rediscover their faith.
From schools to language to religion, American Muslims are becoming a people apart. Young, first-generation American Muslim women -- whose parents were born in Egypt, Pakistan and other Islamic countries -- are wearing head scarves even if their mothers had left them behind; increasing numbers of young Muslims are attending Islamic schools and lectures; Muslim student associations in high schools and at colleges are proliferating; and the role of the mosque has evolved from strictly a place of worship to a center for socializing and for learning Arabic and Urdu as well as the Koran.
The men and women I spoke to -- all mosque-goers, most born in the United States to immigrants -- include students, activists, imams and everyday working Muslims. Almost without exception, they recall feeling under siege after Sept. 11, with FBI agents raiding their mosques and homes, neighbors eyeing them suspiciously and television programs portraying Muslims as the new enemies of the West.
Such feelings led them, they say, to adopt Islamic symbols -- the hijab , or head covering, for women and the kufi , or cap, for men -- as a defense mechanism. Many, such as Rehan, whom I met at a madrassa (religious school) in California with her husband, Ramy, also felt compelled to deepen their faith.
"After I covered, I changed," Rehan told me. "I felt I wanted to give people a good impression of Islam. I wanted people to know how happy I am to be Muslim." But not everyone understood, she said, recalling an incident in a supermarket in 2003: "The man next to me in the vegetable section said, 'You'd be much more beautiful without that thing on your head. It's demeaning to women.' " But to her the head scarf symbolized piety, not oppression.
A group of young college-educated women at the Dix mosque in Dearborn, Mich., described the challenges many Muslims face as they carve out their identity in the United States. I spoke with them in the winter of 2004, after they had been to the mosque one Sunday for a halaqa (a study circle) focused on integrating faith and daily life. They were in their twenties: Hayat, a psychologist; Ismahan, a computer scientist; and Fatma, a third-grade teacher.
Hayat said veiling was easier for her than it had been for her sister,
10 years her senior, because Hayat had more Muslim peers when she reached high school and felt far less pressure to conform to American ways. When she went on to the University of Michigan, she was surrounded for the first time by young Muslims who dared to show pride in their religion in a non-Muslim setting.
Ismahan recalled similar experiences. In elementary school, she had tried to fit in. As an adult, though, "I know I don't have to fit in," she said. "I don't think Muslims have to assimilate. We are not treated like Americans. At work, I get up from my desk and go to pray. I thought I would face opposition from my boss. Even before I realized he didn't mind, I thought, 'I have a right to be a Muslim, and I don't have to assimilate.' "
Fatma described the mosque as central to her future: "What made me sane during years of public high school," she said, "was coming to the halaqa every Sunday." Fatma was also quick to distinguish herself from other young Muslim women who embrace American mores. "Some Muslims do anything to fit in. They drink. They date. My biggest fear is that I might assimilate to the American lifestyle so much that my modesty goes out the window."
Imam Zaid Shakir -- who teaches at San Francisco's Zaytuna Institute, America's only true madrassa -- refers to such young Muslims as the "rejectionist generation." They are rejectionist, he says, because they turn their backs not only on absolutist religious interpretations, but also on America's secular ways. Many of these young American Muslims look to Shakir (and to celebrated Zaytuna founder Hamza Yusuf) for guidance on how to live pious lives in the United States.
I spent several days at one of the institute's "mobile madrassas," this one in San Jose, and watched hundreds of young Muslim professionals sit on cushioned folding chairs and listen intently as Yusuf delivered his lecture. "Everywhere I go, I see Muslims," he told them. "Go to the gas station and the airport. Muslims are present in the United States, and that was not true 20 years ago. There are more Muslims living outside the Dar al-Islam [Islamic countries, or literally the House of Islam] than ever. So we have to be strategic in our thinking, because people who are our enemies are strategic in their thinking."
The "enemies" Yusuf referred to that day were not non-Muslims, but rather those who use Islam as a rationale for violence. For the students at this madrassa and for many Muslims I interviewed, their strategy focuses on public displays of their faith.
Being ambassadors of Islam is daring behavior when you consider that American Muslims live in a country where so many people are ignorant of -- if not hostile to -- their faith. In a Gallup poll this year, when U.S. respondents were asked what they admire about the Muslim world, the most common response was "nothing" (33 percent); the second most common was "I don't know" (22 percent).
Despite contemporary public opinion -- or perhaps because of it -- Muslim Americans consider Islam their defining characteristic, beyond any national identity. In this way, their experience in the United States resembles that of their co-religionists in Europe, where mosques are also growing, Islamic schools are being built, and practicing the faith is the center of life, particularly for the young generation. In Europe and the United States, young Muslims are unifying around popular imams they believe understand the challenges they face in Western societies; these leaders include Yusuf in the United States and Amer Khaled, an Egyptian-born imam who lives in Britain. Thousands of young Muslims attend their lectures.
In my years of interviews, I found few indications of homegrown militancy among American Muslims. Indeed, thus far, they have proved they can compete economically with other Americans. Although the unemployment rate for Muslims in Britain is far higher than for most other groups, the average annual income of a Muslim household surpasses that of average American households. Yet, outside the workplace, Muslims retreat into the comfort zone of their mosques and Islamic schools.
It is too soon to say where the growing alienation of American Muslims will lead, but it seems clear that the factors contributing to it will endure. U.S. foreign policy persists in dividing Muslim and Western societies, making it harder still for Americans to realize that there is a difference between their Muslim neighbor and the plotter in London or the kidnapper in Baghdad.
Geneive Abdo is the liaison for the Alliance of Civilizations at the United Nations and author of "Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11" (Oxford).
Vocal American Muslim group cast as object of mistrust
Suspicious donations at center of debate
International Herald Tribune
March 14, 2007
With violence across the Middle East fixing Islam smack at the center of the U.S. political debate, an organization partly financed by donors closely identified with wealthy Gulf governments has emerged as the most vocal advocate for American Muslims — and an object of wide suspicion.
The group, the Council on American- Islamic Relations, or CAIR, defines its mission as spreading the understanding of Islam and protecting civil liberties. Its members appear frequently on television and are often quoted in newspapers, and its director has met with President George W. Bush. About 500,000 people, including many journalists, receive the group's daily e-mail newsletter.
Yet a debate rages behind the scenes in Washington about CAIR and its financing and motives. A small band of critics has made a determined but unsuccessful effort to link it to Hamas and Hezbollah, which have been designated terrorist organizations by the State Department, and have gone so far as calling CAIR an American front for the two.
In the latest confrontation, on Tuesday, CAIR held a panel discussion on Islam and the West in a Capitol Building meeting room despite demands by House Republicans that the speaker, Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, not allow the event. The Republicans referred to CAIR as "terrorist apologists."
In December, Senator Barbara Boxer of California issued a routine certificate of appreciation to the CAIR representative in Sacramento, but she quickly revoked it when critics assailed her on the Web with headlines like "Senators for Terror."
"There are things there I don't want to be associated with," Boxer said later of the revocation, explaining that her California office had not vetted the group sufficiently.
After a brief interview, Boxer declined to answer additional questions about the commendation to the Sacramento representative, Basim Elkarra. A spokeswoman, Natalie Ravitz, said in an e-mail message that the senator had decided "to put this entire incident behind her."
Joe Kaufman, who Boxer's office said first drew her attention to CAIR's troubled reputation, founded a Web site that tracks what he calls the group's extremism, cairwatch.com. Other critics include the Investigative Project on Terrorism, a conservative group that attempts to identify terrorist organizations, and the Middle East Forum, a conservative research center that says its goal is to promote U.S. interests in the region.
"You can't fight a war on terrorism directly when you are acting with a terror front," said Kaufman, who advocates shutting down CAIR.
Founded in 1994, CAIR had eight chapters at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, said Ibrahim Hooper, a spokesman, but has since grown to about 30 chapters.
In broad summary, critics accuse CAIR of pursuing an extreme Islamist political agenda and say that at least five figures with ties to the organization or its leadership have been either convicted or deported for links to terrorist organizations. They include Mousa Abu Marzook, a Hamas leader deported in 1997 after the United States failed to produce any evidence directly linking him to any attacks.
There were no charges linked to CAIR in any of the cases involved, and law enforcement officials said that in the current climate, any hint of suspicious behavior would have resulted in a racketeering charge. CAIR officials say that the accusations against it are rooted in its refusal to endorse the U.S. government's blanket condemnations of Hezbollah and Hamas, although it has criticized Hamas for civilian deaths.
Several federal officials said CAIR's Washington office frequently issued controversial statements that have made it hard for senior government figures to be associated with the group.
Last summer, CAIR urged a halt to weapons shipments to Israel as civilian casualties in Lebanon swelled. In September, CAIR held a dinner for former President Mohammad Khatami of Iran at a time when much of official Washington had ostracized the Islamic republic. In November, it sponsored a panel discussion by two prominent academics who argue that the pro-Israeli lobby exercises detrimental influence on U.S. policy on the Middle East.
"Traditionally within the government there is only one point of view that is acceptable, which is the pro-Israel line," said Nihad Awad, who helped found CAIR and is its executive director. "Another enlightened perspective on the conflict is not there, and it causes some discomfort."
CAIR has raised some suspicion by accepting large donations from individuals or foundations closely identified with Arab governments. It has an annual operating budget of about $3 million, and CAIR said that it solicited major donations for special projects, like $500,000 from Prince Alwaleed bin Talal of Saudi Arabia to help distribute the Koran and other books about Islam in the United States, some of which generated controversy.
The donations are a source of contention within CAIR itself. Several CAIR branch directors said that they had avoided foreign financing and had criticized the national office for it.
Faces of American Islam [Muslim Immigration]
by Daniel Pipes and Khalid
Durán
Policy Review
August/September 2002
This study also appeared as
"Muslim Immigrants in the United States"
Center for Immigration Studies Backgrounder
August 2002
Our respective bookshelves groan under the weight of books bearing titles like Islam and the West, The Future of Islam and the West, and The Islamic World and the West. What is striking about these books - all quite recently written and published - is the anachronism of their geographic premise. With millions of Muslims now living in the West, especially in North America and Western Europe, the old dichotomy of Islam and the West exists no more. This presence of Muslims in the West has profound importance for both civilizations involved, the Western and the Islamic, and has a potential for both good and ill. Indeed, looking ahead, it is hard to see any other cultural interaction quite so fraught with implications as this one.
As has become evident of late, a vast number of Muslims, those living in Europe and the Americas no less than those elsewhere, harbor an intense hostility to the West. For most Muslims, this mix of envy and resentment remains a latent sentiment, but for some it acquires operational significance. Merely to conjure the names of Ayatollah Khomeini, Muammar Qaddafi, Saddam Hussein, and Osama bin Laden is to convey the power of this hatred, its diverse ideological roots, and its power to threaten. Their counterparts also live in the West, where they have a unique inclination not just to disrupt through violence but also to challenge the existing order. Will this challenge be contained or will it bring yet greater problems, including violence?
This essay focuses on just one portion of Western Islam, namely those Muslims who live in the United States and who are either immigrants or their descendants (hereafter referred to as "Muslim immigrants"). It does not deal with the other major component, the converts, nor does it deal with other Western countries.
Demography and Geography
The first challenge in studying Muslim immigrants in the United States is counting them. By law, the official census cannot count adherents of a religion, and Muslims are too few to show up reliably in most survey research. In addition, there are questions about whom to count (do Ahmadis, legally not considered Muslims in Pakistan, count as Muslims in the United States?). Taking these and other complications into account, a statistical picture is emerging that points to a total Muslim population in the United States of about 3 million, of which immigrants make up two-thirds to three-fourths. Accepting that this number is necessarily rough, it does point to somewhat over 2 million Muslim immigrants, or slightly less than 1 percent of the U.S. national population.
Immigrant Muslims are ethnically extremely varied, coming from virtually every country where Muslims live, or well over a hundred countries in all. Symbolic of this diversity, Los Angeles alone boasts such exotic food fare as the Chinese Islamic Restaurant and the Thai Islamic Restaurant. The largest number of immigrants derive from three main sources: South Asia, Iran, and the Arabic-speaking countries. The single largest group of Muslim immigrants are those from South Asia (meaning Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan), followed by perhaps 500,000 Iranians and 400,000 from the Arab countries. Shi'is, who make up about 10 percent of the worldwide Muslim population, probably comprise about the same percentage of the U.S. Muslim population.
Like most immigrant communities, Muslims are considerably younger than the national average and heavily weighted toward males. Indeed, Islam is the most male religion in the United States, with roughly two men for every woman. There are many reasons for this imbalance, some of them concerning the mostly African-American convert population, others having to do with the general pattern of immigration in which men move to an area before women follow them. Other factors pertain to the specifics of Muslim immigration; for example, several thousand former soldiers of the Iraqi army who defected during and after the Gulf War were settled in the United States. Birth rates for immigrant Muslims start very high, then drop over time as these populations westernize.
Muslims tend to live in the major metropolitan areas where immigrants historically have congregated, including the country's largest cities (New York, Los Angeles, Chicago). More broadly, the Islamic map of the United States features four major regions, all urban: the New York to Washington area; California, especially Los Angeles and San Francisco; a triangle stretching from Chicago to Cleveland to Detroit; and Texas, especially the Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth areas. The southeast and northwest portions of the country have the fewest Muslim immigrants, with the exceptions of southern Florida and the Seattle area.
Many of these centers have a specific ethnic quality. California has, especially, many Iranians; Los Angeles may have the second-largest Iranian population of any city after Tehran. Texas has a majority of South Asians. The Midwestern triangle has mostly Arabs and American blacks, though Chicago has a near-plurality of East Europeans (Albanians, Bosnians, Turks). Detroit has the country's largest concentration of Arabs (mostly Lebanese, Iraqis, Palestinians, and Yemenis), a legacy of the days when Henry Ford employed Lebanese laborers.
Unlike the Muslim immigrants in Europe who live in ghetto-like areas, Muslim immigrants to the United States are highly dispersed. The only town in the country with a substantial concentration of Muslim immigrants is Dearborn, Michigan, where they make up perhaps 30 percent of the population; one part of Dearborn, called Southend, is about 97 percent Muslim. In contrast, efforts at Muslim-only towns (such as Baladullah, a Muslim enclave in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California) consist mainly of African-American converts to Islam.
Immigration History
The earliest Muslim immigrants came as slaves from Africa beginning perhaps as early as 1501. Their absolute numbers are open to substantial disagreement, with one foremost scholar, Allan D. Austin, putting their number at 40,000 (for the United States alone) and another, Sylviane Diouf, estimating between 2.25 million and 3 million (for the Americas as a whole). The slave-owners sometimes appreciated and rewarded their literate Muslim slaves, but they despised the religion of Islam and did what they could to prevent it from passing from one generation to the next. As a result, except in vestigial forms (one group of Trinidadian Baptists engages in practices to the present that recall Islamic ritual), the religion disappeared by the 1860s, or two generations after the import of slaves ceased.
The first free Muslim immigrants may date back to the later sixteenth century, when captured Muslim soldiers were deposited on the coast of North Carolina and elsewhere in the South; if so, then the Melungeons, swarthy whites living on the Cumberland Plateau in remote parts of the southeastern United States, from Virginia to Kentucky, may be their descendants.
The modern history of Muslim immigration to the United States began a decade or so after the Civil War, consisting mostly of Levantines but also a few Muslims from Yemen, South Asia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. For example, some 700 Punjabi farmers immigrated from India to California. This second wave of immigration lasted, with numerical ups and downs, until 1924, when the door to non-European immigration clanged nearly shut. Over the next 40 years, the few Muslim immigrants tended to be Soviet-bloc refugees who arrived in the aftermath of World War II. By the time of the landmark 1965 change in the immigration law, about 100,000-150,000 Muslims lived in the United States.
That 1965 legislation initiated the third wave of immigration, which continues to the present. Opening the doors to immigrants from the entire world, it put a premium more on skills and family ties than on provenance. Indeed, with time, making the U.S. population more diverse became a goal in itself, as symbolized by the lotteries, starting in 1989, which gave a chance to anyone around the world to come to the United States with his immediate family. Accordingly, the numbers of Muslim immigrants began to increase rapidly starting in the late 1960s. A recent analysis completed by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that, among countries with large Muslim majorities, Pakistan has been by far the leading source of immigrants over the last decade, followed by Bangladesh, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Egypt.
Reasons for Immigrating
Muslims since 1965 have arrived in the United States for three main reasons. The first is refuge. Tragic events in predominantly Muslim countries often lead directly to the emergence of a Muslim ethnic community in the United States; Afghanistan and Iraq offer particularly stark examples. The Muslim countries being disproportionately dominated by dictators means that tyranny, persecution, poverty, violent regime changes, civil strife, and wars have driven some of the most talented and wealthy from Muslim countries in the Middle East, South Asia, and beyond. Some examples by category:
Ethnic persecution. Expulsion of Asians from Uganda, followed by smaller numbers from Tanzania and Kenya, led to some 6,000 Muslims in North America. Saddam Hussein's extermination campaign against the Kurds led to mass exoduses in 1989, 1991, and 1996.
Religious persecution. Hindu-Muslim clashes in India cause a steady stream of Muslims to seek safety in America, even as members of the country's elite leave due to job discrimination. There was even one case of a French Muslim seeking asylum in the United States.
Islamism. Members of the Ahmadi sect fled Pakistan when their faith was deemed not Islamic in 1974, as did many other Muslims running from the Islamist dictatorship of Gen. Zia ul-Haq. The Iranian revolution of 1979 targeted the sort of person most likely to seek refuge in the United States. Persecuted by Islamists, members of anti-Islamist movements such as the Republican Brothers of the Sudan and the Association of Islamic Charitable Projects of Lebanon immigrated to the United States.
Anti-Islamism. Conversely, Islamists flee repression from countries such as Algeria, Egypt, Lebanon, and India by moving to the land of the infidel, where they (ironically) find the freedom to express their views.
Civil wars. Waves of immigrants arrived as a consequence of the endless civil war in Sudan, the 1971 Pakistani civil war, the 1975-90 Lebanese civil war, the 1990s anarchy in Somalia and the former Yugoslavia.
International wars. The Israeli victories in 1948-49 and 1967 caused waves of emigration. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in December 1979 and the decade of warfare that followed prompted the educated to flee. The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990 brought not only Kuwaiti citizens and residents, but also 10,000 Iraqis, one-third of them soldiers (and their family members) who surrendered to the Allied troops and could not be sent back without imperiling their lives.
With the Muslim world dominated by dictators, it seems unlikely that this flow of refugees will end or even lessen any time soon.
The second major reason for immigration is education. By the 1990s, U.S. colleges and universities attracted over a half million foreign students, many of whom chose to remain in the United States, where facilities for their profession are superior, political freedoms wider, and economic rewards greater. Among medical students, more than 75 percent - and perhaps as many as 90 percent - end up staying in the United States. Female students are also particularly inclined to stay; they appreciate the independence, self-sufficiency, and opportunities for assertiveness the United States offers them and know that to return means having to conform to restrictive ways, demure behavior, and family dictates.
A third reason for immigration is Islamist ambition. Although the numbers in this category are smaller than those for refugees or students (and, indeed, some Islamists also fit in those two capacities), Islamists have particular importance, for they harbor religious and political ambitions that are in a potential collision course with the majority population.
Islamists arrive in the United States despising the country and all it represents, intending to make converts, exploit the freedoms and rights granted them, and build a movement that will effect basic changes in the country's way of life and its government. The superpower status of the United States makes it especially attractive to those who wish to change the world order; what better place to start? Islamists do not accept the United States as it is but want to change it into a majority Muslim country where the Koran replaces the Constitution. "Our plan is, we are going to conquer America," is how a missionary put it already in the 1920s.1 His latter-day successors are no less ambitious. They have two alternate strategies, nonviolent (i.e., conversion of the Christian majority) and violent (i.e., jihad), to accomplish this.
Islamists also find several other advantages to U.S. residency: The protection of freedom of expression permits them to write or broadcast whatever they wish. Good communications and transportation allow the Islamists to stay in constant touch with their movements. There is no country as open to outside actors or influences as the United States. And American affluence offers possibilities for fundraising.
But it's not a complete paradise, especially if the Islamists engage in illegal activities. Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh spending the rest of his life in a U.S. jail for his part in attempting to blow up New York City landmarks, finds things less than ideal in the United States: "I came here to smell freedom; I found it to be suffocating here." Since September 2001, groups (such as the Global Relief Foundation) and individuals (such as Enaan Arnaout, head of the Benevolence International Foundation) who hitherto found the United States a playground for dubious behavior suddenly have found themselves caught up with the law.
Beyond these categories, Muslim countries have some of the highest birthrates in the world, even as Americans barely have enough children to replace themselves. Demographically, the two groups complement each other so well that the continued immigration of Muslims seems highly likely.
Once in the United States, temporary sojourns often turn into permanent residence. Workers get accustomed to higher incomes, students stay on beyond their schooling, intellectuals appreciate the freedom of expression. In general, families stay more than singles, women more than men, educated and skilled individuals more than those who are not, rich ones more than poor ones, and economic refugees more than political ones. There is a growing sense among immigrant Muslims that the home countries are fated to remain politically unfree and economically backward; not surprisingly, they see the United States as a permanent abode.
Religious Practice, Education
Do immigrants become more religious or less so on arrival in the United States? Both. Those who embrace the freedoms America offers and become religiously less observant (or even convert out of Islam) are acting out what they could not fully express in the home countries. In contrast, about one-third of Muslim immigrants say they have become more religious in the United States. Their increased piety has two main sources, cultural and moral. On the cultural level, immigrants respond to the strangeness of a new land by emphasizing familiar rituals and spending time at the mosque. On the moral level, they respond to the radical openness of American life by emphasizing their hitherto neglected faith. (As one man told the New York Times, "When I came to America, I really became a Muslim. Back home, I took it for granted.")
Survey research indicates that the numbers of those who live in some fashion by the laws of Islam are about equal to the numbers of those who do not.2 Such numbers may be deceptive, however, for Muslims tend to overstate their piety. Perhaps half of Muslims here restrict themselves to halal meat. A third of the women obey the injunction against wearing makeup in public, and roughly the same number avoid shaking hands with a member of the opposite sex who is not related to them. A smaller number, 20 percent to 25 percent of schoolgirls, cover their hair. Prayers are less common; no more than 10 percent of those with access to mosques attend Friday prayer services. The consumption of alcohol is widespread. The prohibition of extramarital sex is commonly violated, especially by young men who tend to see non-Muslim women as fair game.
Muslim immigrants of recent years boast exceptionally high levels of education. A 1999 survey found that 52 percent of them have a graduate degree.3 South Asians appear to be the best educated of all. (Exceptions to this pattern do exist, of course: Yemeni farmers, Iraqi soldiers, and most illegal immigrants are far less educated.) This impressive fact results in part from the Muslim community in North America drawing disproportionately on the elites. Very often it is the best educated who come to settle in the United States. Some of the most talented members of society are establishing new lives in the West.
Immigrant Muslims tend to concentrate in the professional and entrepreneurial vocations, and especially in engineering and medicine, which jointly employ about one-third of Muslims in the United States. With such high educational levels, it comes as no surprise that many members of this community have done well; average income for Muslims appears to be higher than the U.S. national average. Although new, the community boasts a good share of millionaires as well as many other accomplished individuals (including one Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Ahmed H. Zewail, and such notables as the movie actor Omar Sharif, the basketball player Hakeem Olajuwon, and the model Iman). Muslim Americans proudly say that theirs is "the richest Muslim society on earth" (as Muqtedar Khan put it in the December 1995 edition of the Message), and they are right; more than that, it may be the most accomplished.
Intra-Muslim Tensions
America constitutes a microcosm of the Muslim world, with multiple nationalities present as well as elements of Islam's entire cultural, racial, and sectarian diversity. Thrown together, these peoples discover the differences that lie below the surface of their common faith. Much of this is due to differences in custom. Turks put up gravestones and decorate them with laminated photographs of the deceased; Saudis see gravestones (even without pictures) as a form of idolatry and deem photographs even worse. Because they speak the language of the Koran, Arabs sometimes display an impatience bordering on arrogance toward the Islamic practices of non-Arabs. The result is intra-Muslim bias. "Muslim parents do not mind their son marrying a white American girl, but they would object if he married a Muslim girl of a different school of thought (Shi'i/Sunni), or different tribe, like Punjabi, Sindhi, Pathan, Arab vs. non-Arab, Afro-American vs. immigrant, or different class, Syed [descendant of the prophet Muhammad] vs. non-Syed," observes Shahid Athar in Pakistan Link (August 18, 1995).
Politics fuels animosities. Iranians and Iraqis have not forgotten their long and bloody war from 1980 to 1988, nor have Kuwaitis forgiven Iraq's 1990-91 occupation of their country. Saudis and other Gulf Arabs are disliked for the way they treat Muslim workers in their countries.
Religiosity is another issue. Are mosques to be moderate or Islamist? Many institutions roil with confrontations along these lines. The most public such dispute has taken place weekly for nearly two decades in front of the Islamic Center in Washington, on the sidewalk of a major avenue. One Mohammad Al-Asi, a white convert, tried to take over the mosque in the first flush of the Khomeini revolution two decades ago. He was ousted. By way of protest, he and his crew hold a Friday prayer service on the sidewalk each week.
The conflict between Sunnis and Shi'is, which goes back to the first years of the Islamic religion, still has great force. Shi'is have their own mosques and rarely socialize with Sunnis.
Then there are the enduring tensions with American converts to Islam, who are overwhelmingly African-American. Their enormously different backgrounds cause the two groups - immigrants and natives, foreigners and Americans, Muslims born and reborn - not always to get along well. As one convert puts it, "proselytes almost always complain of the terrible frustration they endure as they struggle to adjust to their new religious community."4
Children - and Growing Up
Muslim immigrants widely see a range of American customs touching on family relations and the position of women as morally corrupt and endangering their way of life. Their worries include family honor, divorce, abandonment of faith, and intermarriage.
To Muslim parents, children must be respectful, honest, modest, and hard-working. In contrast, they see American children as disrespectful, self-indulgent, proud, and unwilling to work. Many Muslim parents send their children to Islamic schools to control the moral tone of the classroom. Some students find Islamic schools attractive, for they no longer stick out. And yet, Islamic schools do not always isolate Muslim children from the rest of society or solve the problem of uncoolness. Muslim students are known to hide their families' religious values: Ramadan fasting becomes a diet to lose weight, while not going to the mall is a matter of babysitting duties. Some girls leave home wearing the loose-fitting clothes their parents require but carry something tighter to change into on reaching school. The daughter of a Palestinian family attends an Islamic school, where she wears long dresses and hijab (head scarf) and sits separate from the boys. But the hijab comes off as soon as she's out of school.
The opposite pattern also exists. In recent years, during the revival of Islam, children of unobservant parents found a range of attractions in Islam - morality, discipline, even plain old-fashionedness. The younger generation rediscovers Islam as the religion of its heritage and takes it up with various degrees of strictness. It's not a simple duality, with parents on one side and children on the other.
Separation of the sexes follows from the assumption that if men and women are allowed to mingle, they will indiscriminately engage in sex, disrupting society. Only in a "modern and enlightened" Muslim family do man and woman meet each other before marriage.5 Fortunately, the two styles can coexist, though with difficulty, and American Muslims are evolving a compromise between arranged marriage and love marriage.
Just when Muslim girls traditionally would be separated from boys, taken out of school, and perhaps start wearing a head covering, their American counterparts begin to discover and experiment with their sexuality. To prevent such experimentation, Muslim parents seek to enforce the traditional rules and sometimes even cloister their daughters. But the family lacks aunts and uncles to stand guard; by law, girls must go to school until 16 or so; and at 18, they acquire additional rights. Worse, at times the parents' insistence that their children live as though back in Egypt or Pakistan leads to deep tensions and even, when girls and sex are involved, to violence and death.
Still, the restrictions on meeting young Muslim women lead their male counterparts to look outside the community for companionship and sex, which leads inevitably to their getting involved with non-Muslim women and eventually marrying them. This diminishes the pool of Muslim men, leading Muslim women in turn to go out and find Christian men. A Muslim woman being forbidden to marry out, her taking a Christian husband is an act of defiance that effectively expels her from her community and sometimes even her own family, prompting more than a few of them to convert to Christianity.
To encourage the young to marry within the faith, American Muslims are developing a number of novel solutions, including summer camps, socials for singles, and marriage advertisements. But even these Muslim institutions have a difficult time keeping boys and girls apart.
Institutions
One scholar dates to 1982 and the founding of the Islamic Society of North America the "shift from self-imposed alienation from U.S. culture to tentative experiments at political participation."6 As late as 1991, an analyst wrote that "Muslims have an inordinately small number of political organizations in contrast to other ethnic and religious groups of comparable size."7 Since that time, an entire infrastructure of Muslim organizations has developed in the United States. It covers a wide range of concerns - religious, social, political, professional, ethnic, doctrinal.
From the outside, the major Islamic organizations resemble their Jewish counterparts and to some extent are modeled on them. Both take up such issues as religious discrimination, intercommunal relations, and Middle Eastern policy; sponsor testimonial dinners, conferences, and trips to Capitol Hill; and issue press releases, launch direct mail campaigns, take out newspaper ads, and publish periodicals.
Below the surface, however, a profound difference separates the two: Whereas the Jewish institutions are conventional ethnic organizations anchored to the mainstream of American political life, the Muslim ones overwhelmingly pursue an Islamist agenda far outside that mainstream. As one moderate Muslim leader, Muhammad Hisham Kabbani, has warned, extremists have "taken over 80 percent of the mosques" in the United States; another moderate refers to the Islamist leaders as "swindlers" and "radicals." The main institutions of American Islam do not represent the interests and views of the moderate Muslims who are good American citizens.
The most visible Muslim organizations are those that claim to represent Muslim political interests, and especially the trio of the American Muslim Council, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Muslim Public Affairs Committee. It is striking to note that all three organizations are Islamist and so seek to forward goals deeply at variance with mainstream American principles (as well as the aspirations and concerns of a majority in the Muslim community). They aspire to achieve four general goals: winning special privileges for Islam (e.g., calling for the creation of a White House Muslim advisory board); intimidating and silencing the opponents of militant Islam (e.g., having death edicts brought down on them, as happened to Khalid Durán); raising funds for, apologizing for, and otherwise forwarding the cause of militant Islamic groups abroad, including those that engage in violence (e.g., the Holy Land Foundation, closed down for raising money "used to support the Hamas terror organization," in President Bush's words); and sanitizing militant Islam (e.g., jihad is not warfare but a form of moral self-improvement).
Which brings us to the subject of terrorism: Since the November 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane by an Egyptian, the immigrant Muslim community has been associated with a great number of violent incidents - many having taken place long before the atrocities on September 11, 2001. These include the February 1991 murder of Mustafa Shalabi in Brooklyn, N.Y.; the January 1993 attack on CIA personnel, killing two; the February 1993 World Trade Center bombing; the March 1994 shooting at a van of Orthodox Jewish boys, killing one; the February 1997 murder atop the Empire State Building of a Danish tourist; the October 1999 crash of an EgyptAir flight near New York City, killing 217; the February 2002 murder of a Tennessee state license examiner; and the July 2002 attack on the El Al counter at Los Angeles International Airport, killing two. In its long history of immigration, the United States has never encountered so violence-prone and radicalized a community as the Muslims who have arrived since 1965.
Which Way?
Because the immigrant Muslim community is so new, it is still very much in formation. Which way will the first generation of immigrant children turn? Will their dual identities as Americans and Muslims be complementary or contradictory? Will they accept or reject the Islamist program of changing the United States? Will they control the urge toward violence? More broadly, will they insist on adapting the United States to Islam, or will they agree to adapt Islam to the United States? Much depends on the answers.
A few things are clear: However numerous the American converts to Islam, the immigrant community will set the tone. Fashioning a separate American Islam, away from such historic centers as Egypt and Pakistan, will be a great challenge. And both the United States and Islam are likely to be deeply affected by their mutual encounter.
NOTES
1
Quoted in Andrew T. Hoffert, "The Moslem Movement in America," The Moslem
World, 20 (1930), 309.
2 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Adair T. Lummis, Islamic Values in the
United States (Oxford University Press, 1987), 25 shows 46 percent of a
sample of 347. That number has probably gone up in the intervening years.
3 Council on American-Islamic Relations, "Report Outlines Political
Attitudes of American Muslims: 96 Percent Believe Muslims Should Get Involved in
Local and National Politics" (December 22, 1999).
4 Jeffrey Lang, Even Angels Ask: A Journey to Islam in America
(Amana, 1418/1997), 138.
5 Badruddin Khan (pseud.), Sex, Longing, and Not Belonging: A Gay
Muslim's Quest for Love and Meaning (Floating Lotus, 1997), 160.
6 Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, "Maintaining the Faith of the Fathers,"
The Development of Arab-American Identity, Ernest McCarus, ed. (University
of Michigan Press, 1994), 75.
7 Steve A. Johnson, "Political Activities of Muslims in America,"
The Muslims of America, Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, ed. (Oxford University Press,
1991), 117.