Islam: The next American religion?
By Michael Wolfe
The US began as a haven for Christian outcasts. But what religion
fits our current zeitgeist? The answer may be Islam. Americans tend
to think of their country as, at the very least, a nominally
Christian nation. Didn’t the Pilgrims come here for freedom to
practice their Christian religion? Don’t Christian values of
righteousness under God, and freedom, reinforce America’s democratic,
capitalist ideals?
True enough. But there’s a new religion on the block now, one that
fits the current zeitgeist nicely. It’s Islam. Islam is the third-
largest and fastest growing religious community in the United States.
This is not just because of immigration. More than 50% of America’s
six million Muslims were born here.
Statistics like these imply some basic agreement between core
American values and the beliefs that Muslims hold. Americans who make
the effort to look beyond popular stereotypes to learn the truth of
Islam are surprised to find themselves on familiar ground.
Is America a Muslim nation? Here are seven reasons the answer may be
yes.
Islam is monotheistic. Muslims worship the same God as Jews and
Christians. They also revere the same prophets as Judaism and
Christianity, from Abraham, the first monotheist, to Moses, the law
giver and messenger of God, to Jesus - not leaving out Noah, Job, or
Isaiah along the way. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition only
came to the fore in the 1940s in America. Now, as a nation, we may be
transcending it, turning to a more inclusive “Abrahamic” view.
In January, President Bush grouped mosques with churches and
synagogues in his inaugural address. A few days later, when he posed
for photographers at a meeting of several dozen religious figures,
the Shi’ite imam Muhammad Qazwini, of Orange County, Calif., stood
directly behind Bush’s chair like a presiding angel, dressed in the
robes and turban of his south Iraqi youth.
Islam is democratic in spirit. Islam advocates the right to vote and
educate yourself and pursue a profession. The Qur’an, on which
Islamic law is based, enjoins Muslims to govern themselves by
discussion and consensus. In mosques, there is no particular priestly
hierarchy. With Islam, each individual is responsible for the
condition of her or his own soul.
Americans, who mostly associate Islamic government with a handful of
tyrants, may find this independent spirit surprising, supposing that
Muslims are somehow predisposed to passive submission. Nothing could
be further from the truth. The dictators reigning today in the Middle
East are not the result of Islamic principles. They are more a result
of global economics and the aftermath of European colonialism.
Meanwhile, like everyone else, average Muslims the world over want a
larger say in what goes on in the countries where they live. Those in
America may actually succeed in it. In this way, America is closer in
spirit to Islam than many Arab countries.
Islam contains an attractive mystical tradition. Mysticism is
grounded in the individual search for God. Where better to do that
than in America, land of individualists and spiritual seekers? And
who might better benefit than Americans from the centuries-long
tradition of teachers and students that characterize Islam.
Surprising as it may seem, America’s best-selling poet du jour is a
Muslim mystic named Rumi, the 800-year-old Persian bard and founder
of the Mevlevi Path, known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes.
Translators as various as Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, and Kabir and Camille Helminski have produced dozens of books of Rumi’s verse and have only begun to bring his enormous output before the English-speaking world. This is a concrete poetry of ecstasy, where physical reality and the longing for God are joined by flashes of metaphor and insight that continue to speak across the centuries.
Islam is egalitarian. From New York to California, the only houses of
worship that are routinely integrated today are the approximately
4,000 Muslim mosques. That is because Islam is predicated on a level
playing field, especially when it comes to standing before God. The
Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, “under God”) and Lincoln’s
Gettysburg Address (all people are “created equal”) express themes
that are also basic to Islam.
Islam is often viewed as an aggressive faith because of the concept
of jihad, but this is actually a misunderstood term. Because Muslims
believe that God wants a just world, they tend to be activists, and
they emphasize that people are equal before God. These are two
reasons why African Americans have been drawn in such large numbers
to Islam. They now comprise about one-third of all Muslims in America.
Meanwhile, this egalitarian streak also plays itself out in relations
between the sexes. Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, actually was a reformer
in his day. Following the Qur’an, he limited the number of wives a
man could have and strongly recommended against polygamy. The Qur’an
laid out a set of marriage laws that guarantees married women their
family names, their own possessions and capital, the right to agree
upon whom they will marry, and the right to initiate divorce. In
Islam’s early period, women were professionals and property owners,
as increasingly they are today.
None of this may seem obvious to most Americans because of cultural
overlays that at times make Islam appear to be a repressive faith
toward women–but if you look more closely, you can see the
egalitarian streak preserved in the Qur’an finding expression in
contemporary terms. Islam shares America’s new interest in food
purity and diet. Muslims conduct a monthlong fast during the holy
month of Ramadan, a practice that many Americans admire and even seek
to emulate. I happened to spend quite a bit of time with a non-Muslim
friend during Ramadan this year. After a month of being exposed to a
practice that brings some annual control to human consumption, my
friend let me know, in January, that he was “doing a little Ramadan”
of his own. I asked what he meant. “Well, I’m not drinking anything
or smoking anything for at least a month, and I’m going off coffee.”
Given this friend’s normal intake of coffee, I could not believe my
ears. Muslims also observe dietary laws that restrict the kind of
meat they can eat. These laws require that the permitted, or halal,
meat is prepared in a manner that emphasizes cleanliness and a humane
treatment of animals. These laws ride on the same trends that have
made organic foods so popular. Islam is tolerant of other faiths.
Like America, Islam has a history of respecting other religions. In
Muhammad’s day, Christians, Sabeans, and Jews in Muslim lands
retained their own courts and enjoyed considerable autonomy. As Islam
spread east toward India and China, it came to view Zoroastrianism,
Hinduism, and Buddhism as valid paths to salvation. As Islam spread
north and west, Judaism especially benefited. The return of the Jews
to Jerusalem, after centuries as outcasts, only came about after
Muslims took the city in 638. The first thing the Muslims did there
was to rescue the Temple Mount, which by then had been turned into a
garbage heap. Today, of course, the long discord between Israel and
Palestine has acquired harsh religious overtones. Yet the fact
remains that this is a battle for real estate, not a war between two
faiths. Islam and Judaism revere the same prophetic lineage, back to
Abraham, and no amount of bullets or barbed wire can change that. As
The New York Times recently reported, while Muslim/Jewish tensions
sometimes flare on university campuses, lately these same students
have found ways to forge common links. For one thing, the two
religions share similar dietary laws, including ritual slaughter and
a prohibition on pork. Joining forces at Dartmouth this fall, the
first kosher/halal dining hall is scheduled to open its doors this
autumn. That isn’t all: They’re already planning a joint Thanksgiving
dinner, with birds dressed at a nearby farm by a rabbi and an imam.
If the American Pilgrims were watching now, they’d be rubbing their
eyes with amazement. And, because they came here fleeing religious
persecution, they might also understand. Islam encourages the pursuit
of religious freedom. The Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is not
the world’s first story of religious emigration. Muhammad and his
little band of 100 followers fled religious persecution, too, from
Mecca in the year 622. They only survived by going to Madinah, an
oasis a few hundred miles north, where they established a new
community based on a religion they could only practice secretly back
home. No wonder then that, in our own day, many Muslims have come
here as pilgrims from oppression, leaving places like Kashmir,
Bosnia, and Kosovo, where being a Muslim may radically shorten your
life span. When the 20th century’s list of emigrant exiles is added
up, it will prove to be heavy with Muslims, that’s for sure.
All in all, there seems to be a deep resonance between Islam and the
United States. Although one is a world religion and the other is a
sovereign nation, both are traditionally very strong on individual
responsibility. Like New Hampshire’s motto, “Live Free or Die,”
America is wedded to individual liberty and an ethic based on right
action. For a Muslim, spiritual salvation depends on these. This is
best expressed in a popular saying: Even when you think God isn’t
watching you, act as if he is. Who knows? Perhaps it won’t be long
now before words like salat (Muslim prayer) and Ramadan join karma
and Nirvana in Webster’s Dictionary, and Muslims take their place in
America’s mainstream.