Forging an American Muslim Identity: Time for Alternative Muslim Institutions

By Qamar-ul Huda

In his dazzling novel, The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh examines the individual and communal psychological effects of colonialism. The characters have intense experiences with real dilemmas of identity, faith, and loyalty. At one moment of the novel, an Indian officer in the British army during World War II screams, “What are we? We’ve learned to dance the tango and we know how to eat roast beef with a knife and fork. The truth is that except for the color of our skin, most people in India wouldn’t even recognize us as Indians.” The Indian officer is not only trying to understand his personal identity, but he’s more disturbed by the lost and newly found personal and national identities that were forged during these extraordinary times. Those questions posed by the character need to be revisited as minorities in the U.S.—“What are we?” Perhaps an even more profound question to reflect upon is “Where are we going?”

Often enough, war creates a powerful tension between history and individual lives. In the moment of war, as with mass evacuations, revolutions, forced population migrations, and genocides, nobody has the choice of stepping away from history. The calamities of wars in South Asia (the 1947 Partition, Kashmir, independence movements, terrorism, communalism, poverty, classism, religious riots, and so on) have had devastating impacts on families and individuals. My own family’s history has undoubtedly played a large part in opening my eyes to these events; they were not only divided up by the Partition of India & Pakistan, and the independence of Bangladesh, but also by the long-lasting effects of painful lost dreams of seeing friends and families again. My parents are originally from the Uttar Pradesh province in India. They moved to West Pakistan after the Partition and believed this was the safe homeland for Muslims, a new promised land for refugees and the marginalized. It is interesting how refugees are the objects of nation-state building and identity, while as a refugee there’s no attention given to the human experience of loss and suffering. Technocrats and bureaucrats come together to create formulas and quotas to compensate the suffering, but nobody bothers to ask the depths of these feelings and the broken hearts that are attached to the torment.

Muslims in the U.S. are still finding their place in history and in the social, cultural, and political landscape of America. On one hand, we are caught between outer forces of current events in the world—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the self-determination causes of Kashmiris and Palestinians; however, for many in the American Muslim community, these conflicts are pertinent to their own agendas of maintaining a victim-hood mentality and an identity of vulnerability. Mainstream Muslim organizations, and even local mosques, thrive on fundraising events where they claim to be the champion spokespersons of the oppressed and forgotten.

At the same time, American Muslims confront a media that presents the global Muslim community as one-dimensional fundamentalists whose beliefs represent the predominant practice in the Muslim world. The American consumption of pseudo-scholarly analyses like American Jihad: The Terrorists among Us, Swords of Islam, Holy War, Inc., Jihad vs. McWorld, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, and Pakistan: The Eye of the Storm intensely influence the perceptions of what Muslims are and what they are not.

These books are decorated with graphic covers of bearded men burning American flags or sometimes they consist of an exotic imagery of a mosque or harem to reproduce the fascination of the “Orient.” The truth is that these books are doing further damage by portraying a polarized world where a homogenous group of anti-western religious fanatics desires nothing but our destruction. Rather than offering careful analysis and exhaustive research, such books sell because they exploit our deepest insecurities and fears of a people who are essentially tied to a vision of a medieval jihadist world. Now more than ever, Islamic extremism is an uncontested evil in our world that can be packaged to sell fear. Muslims are the new crusaders of the 21st century, and there’s no distinction between the fundamentalists and non-fundamentalists.

As a minority group under siege, it is no wonder why the process of self-identity and self-definition of American Muslims is a tumultuous one. If self-definition is not in the hands of the majority of American Muslims themselves, but rather with a select elite group of Muslims who desire to project a conservative and reductionist faith, then actively participating in a dialogue of identity is crucial.

Let us be honest: within the American Muslim mosque communities, there is an unfortunate rise of religious chauvinistic forces claiming to be the vanguards of Islam. These fundamentalists have a tendency to denigrate other Islamic expressions and claim that anything different than what is presented is heretical and “un-Islamic.” There are obvious tensions between the religious understanding of the first generation immigrants and the second and third generation of American Muslims. Speaking generally, not only are the immigrant classes consumed with maintaining a status quo as a community, they are afraid of “losing their children” to western culture. As self-perceived vanguards of their religion and culture, they’re living a schizophrenic life because they live in the West but detest Western values, and to them Westernized Muslims represent one of the greatest threats to the religion. As a result they further commit to their strict interpretations to justify their own self-worth and to defend their identities. In the whole process of self-identity, these vanguards of Islam are interested in eliminating other voices of dissent, of alternative thinking and rethinking, of activism and of the artists who desire to construct a world of open ideas.

For American-Muslims, the process of making a home in the Diaspora involves balancing the problems of assimilation and the demands of complex integrationist cultural values. First generation immigrant Muslims are not the only ones who struggle to assimilate American values, but rather, their experiences are shared by the next generation of Muslims who inherit, to a certain degree, an amalgamation of values and ideas on self-identity.

The second and third generations of American-Muslims are more likely to challenge what was transferred to them, while at the same time, feeling comfortable in developing a distinct American-Muslim culture. There are numerous studies of ethnic minority groups who have come to the U.S. in the nineteenth and twentieth century like the Italians, Irish, Mexicans, and Jewish immigrants and needed to reconcile the tension of denying elements of their identity for validation from the majority. While each group has its own unique American history, the pattern of assimilation is the same: internal differences of the community allowed the separation of mini-communities that empowered themselves to define and set their own agenda. It is this process of push and pull that creates innovative approaches for building a broad spectrum of identities.

If fundamentalists take control of mosques and educational institutions, and they are committed to a strict interpretation of the tradition to justify their own self-worth and to defend their identities, then it is time for progressive, forward-thinking, passionate, globally-minded, and tolerant Muslims to develop alternative institutions to articulate a self-critical community.

The students who take introduction to Islam classes with me often pose questions on Islamic law, human rights, gender equality, Islam as a “missionary faith,” and the treatment of non-Muslims. Since the September 11th attacks, the central interest revolves around “Islamic terrorism”—the variety of fundamentalisms, the roots of “Islamism,” the global reach of radical Islam, the threat of political Islam, and most commonly, the place of anti-intellectualism in Islam. I find second and third generation American Muslims in class reiterating these same problems and often enough questioning why there is a dominance of military rule in Muslim societies and how the madrasa institution was transformed from elite educational centers of learning to training camps for terrorism.

Clearly Western media is not responsible for Muslim failures, nor are they the solution to presenting a more positive spin to the Muslim world. As much as there needs to be more serious studies on the inability for Muslim societies to transform themselves from predominantly feudal societies to modern pluralistic democratic polities, I think there needs to be equal attention given to what it means to be an American Muslim, and to what extent are we connected to other Muslim communities outside of our immediate communities. Other than a shared faith, which is no minor element in the equation, how will we determine what our place is here in the U.S. and with other Muslims around the world? How will we contribute to the debate of Islam and democracy and the massive debate of the convergence of religion and the state. We can no longer present simplistic responses or definitions which are a combination of mindless regurgitation of positions and arguments but do not have any reasonable solutions to resolving ongoing questions.

In order to move beyond the fundamentalist, reductionist, puritanical and symbolic Islam that is usually projected in mainstream Muslim organizations and mosques, it is now time for socially and politically-minded reformers to aggressively and vocally cultivate a liberal ethos. This does not mean liberalism or liberal values which stem from Western ideologies and then applied to Islam. I am not advocating an intellectual project to read Islamic texts in ways that will reconcile the tradition with the ideology of liberalism. On the contrary, it is crucial in our time to question the validity of institutions that have been identified as “Islamic” for symbolic reasons, while rethinking and reevaluating which institutions are desperately needed for cultivating a liberal Islamic ethos. This ethos consists of attitudes developed and nurtured by institutions that espouse broad-mindedness, tolerance, compassion, and an absolute conviction that all members of society are equal and have human dignity. As with any idea put forth by a community that is different in religious conviction or political attitudes from the majority, a liberal ethos must uphold the equal rights of all members of the society. It is connected to liberalism because it is connected with a political theory that understands that the state is responsible to and the servant of the community of citizens. American Muslims need to be engaged in critical areas of tolerance of diversity and pluralism, respect for law, mutual rights and responsibilities between the people and their government, and the place of secularism.

An honest exploration of ideas will lead to innovative thought that will empower us to self-define our identity and not just inherit the baggage of our parents who themselves were shaped in traumatic times. We need to determine what exactly is our place in the U.S., and whether our voices together can enrich our experiences. Like the characters of Ghosh’s remarkable novel, within each one of us there is a quest for and recognition of personal identity within the American Muslim community. In order to reconcile these notions of personal identity and national identity, one has to be aware of the context in which they were produced and for what reasons.

Dr. Qamar-ul Huda is assistant professor of Islamic Studies & Comparative Theology at Boston College.