[wvns] American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion

American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion
Paul M. Barrett, Joanne J. Myers
Carnegie Council
http://www.cceia.org:80/resources/transcripts/5423.html

Introduction
JOANNE MYERS: I'm Joanne Myers, Director of Public Affairs Programs,
and on behalf of the Carnegie Council I'd like to thank you all for
joining us as we welcome Paul Barrett to discuss his book, American
Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion.

In the decade before the events of September 11th, Islam was one of
the fastest-growing religions in North America. Mosques and Islamic
schools were going up in every major American city. Muslim leaders,
once a frustrated and marginal group, found themselves pursued by
politicians and news media alike.

But this courtship would not last long. Although Muslims had been
living in the United States since the early 1900s, and without
provocation, on that fateful day everything changed. Most
significantly is that in this post-9/11 world, one of the biggest
challenges facing Muslims is how to overcome the frequent stereotyping
which labels them as monolithic extremists bent on destroying the West.

This scenario is especially so for American Muslims, who see
themselves as anything but monolithic. Although the data for Muslims
living in America is imprecise, estimates suggest that there are
between three and ten million practitioners nationwide. This group
includes Asians, Arabs, and African-Americans. Therefore, to speak of
them as one community obscures the significant differences in
background and ideology that divide them.

In American Islam, our speaker this afternoon seeks to change our
misperceptions. He does so by providing us with an intimate portrait
of seven Muslim Americans who in his view offer portraits of
conflicted identities and an intricate mixture of ideologies and
cultures. From West Virginia to Northern Idaho and from Michigan to
New York, these stories show the diversity that lie within the
millions of Muslims who reside in the United States.

Paul Barrett was a reporter for the Wall Street Journal and is now an
editor at Business Week, heading their investigative reporting unit.
In the aftermath of September 11th, he became convinced that we needed
to learn much more about Islam in our country. Accordingly, using his
journalistic skills, he entered the world of his subjects to write a
series of engaging profiles of American Muslims for the Wall Street
Journal. His aim, he writes, "was simply to explore what for adherents
of the Muslim faith is the meaning of a normal life at this turbulent
moment in the history of the United States."

He asks: How do American Muslims, who represent a vast range of
backgrounds and views—including immigrants and native-born, black and
white converts, whether well-integrated or alienated from the larger
society—define themselves in a religious subculture torn between
moderation and extremism? The answer, he found, lies within their
individual stories.

While the tales told in American Islam represent only a microcosm of
the larger worldwide community, it is important to note that they face
the same religious, ethic, and sectarian divides that one finds
throughout the Muslim world.

Please join me in welcoming our guest today, Paul Barrett. We're
delighted you are here. Thank you.

Remarks
PAUL BARRETT: Thanks very much for that very generous introduction,
and thank you to all of you for coming to hear me speak. I am very
grateful.

My book is, in fact, a collection of portraits. It is not a work of
sociology or social science of any sort. My view is that we probably
have a few too many generalizations about Muslims in this country and
too little in the way of particular granular facts about Muslims in
this country, and I am to provide what I think of as the beginning of
what should be a continuing effort to understand our Muslim neighbors.

I thought I would start today with one of the main characters in the
book and tell his story, with the aim of addressing the question of
the degree to which Muslims are assimilated into American society. I
think there is a great deal of concern and questioning about whether
Muslims are marginalized and alienated from—and perhaps hostile
to—American society; or, as I would argue, on balance, Muslims as a
group are, in fact, impressively assimilated into American society, if
you take into account the full body of information about them.

So let me start with a man named Osama Siblani. I'll start with where
he was born. He came from Lebanon, where he was born in the mid-1950s
into a poor family in a village near Beirut. He served briefly in the
Lebanese National Army during the beginning of the civil war there,
and then, as one of the more ambitious and talented sons in a large
family—he had ten siblings—his parents scraped together money and sent
him to Detroit to go to college, which is a story that has been going
on with variations for many generations. As you probably know, in and
around Detroit is basically the unofficial capital of Arab America.
There actually have been people coming from Lebanon and Syria since
the 1920s to that area, originally to work for Henry Ford in the main
Ford auto plant there. And there are still Muslims coming from various
parts of the Muslim world to put together pickup trucks in Dearborn,
Michigan, outside Detroit.

Siblani demonstrated upon arriving a very typical course of impressive
success. He held down a variety of menial jobs—delivering pizzas,
parking cars, that kind of thing—while going to college at night.
Obtained an engineering degree. Went to work for GM as a very junior
entry-level employee. As he described it to me, he thought he would
become president of GM in six-to-eight months; and when that didn't
happen, he quit. Things were just moving too slowly for him.

He got work with an import-export business that primarily sent heating
and air-conditioning equipment to the Middle East to contractors
there. He flew all around the Middle East, and was extremely
successful, particularly financially. By the time he was in his early
thirties, he was very well-to-do and well off enough to rebuild his
childhood home outside Beirut, where his mother still lived.

His life changed in 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon, as part of that
very complex series of events, where the PLO at that time was in
southern Lebanon and Israel was determined to drive the PLO out and to
install a friendly, presumably Christian, government in charge of Lebanon.

During the invasion, Osama Silbani's childhood home—the one for which
he had bought a washer, dryer, television, all kinds of modern
appurtenances, for the first time, for his aged mother—was destroyed
by an Israeli aerial bomb. I sincerely doubt that the pilot and
bombardier were aiming for Mrs. Siblani, but nevertheless this is
something that obviously struck home very severely.

He was frustrated at the way that the Israeli invasion, and the civil
war generally, were depicted in the American media and felt that the
media consistently favored Israel and presented the Arab cause in a
very unfavorable light. Prompted by that reaction, he decided to drop
his business career, take the money he had earned and money he could
borrow, and start a newspaper from scratch, with absolutely no
journalistic experience and no colleagues who had any journalistic
experience. He had to go to London and Saudi Arabia to find Arabic
typesetting equipment because none could be found in the Detroit area,
even though it was a center of Arab population.

A couple of years later, he founded what is now known as The
Arab-American News, which is a bilingual English- and Arabic-language
newspaper that comes in tabloid form. It presents the Arab brief. It
is the Arab perspective on the world. As he says, he makes no pretense
of being a balanced journalist in the American tradition. He is, as he
describes himself, a biased journalist. He is there to argue the Arab
cause, to explain the world through Arab eyes.

He has been very successful with this newspaper. Although it has had
business difficulties from time to time, it is now quite well
established and is one of the major institutions in the suburb of
Dearborn, outside of Detroit.

Simultaneously, Siblani has become one of the most powerful local
political power brokers in the Detroit area on behalf of the large
Arab population there. He himself is a registered Republican,
passionately anti-abortion, pro-business, and had voted for the most
part for Republicans down through the years.

In 2000, he played a key role in organizing Arab support for George W.
Bush, who very aggressively sought out Arab and Muslim support by
campaigning in mosques and Islamic centers and by basically explicitly
saying "Muslims and Arabs are part of the American tapestry and I
appeal to you for my vote." Siblani was critical in doing the
logistical work to make sure that that word got out to the Arab community.

Exit polling showed that in 2000 Arab and Muslim voters swung very
strongly to Bush, having actually been Clinton supporters in the prior
two elections. In fact, it's possible to argue, I would say, that
Muslim voters may have helped hand the presidency to Bush, because
there's a very substantial Muslim population in south Florida. If, as
many people view the election, as having turned on the Florida vote
and turned on several hundred Florida votes—if that's the way you
analyze that complicated election, with tens of thousands of Arab
votes favoring Bush, you could view it as being an Arab victory,
putting George Bush in the White House.

Now, since then, Siblani has grown very disillusioned with Bush, as
have other Arabs and Muslims. But his political role and his role as
this kind of quasi-journalist opinion shaper has grown no less
significant.

In 2004, both the Republicans and the Democrats once again for every
office, ranging from county, to circuit court judges, to the White
House, sent their emissaries to his office, treating him extremely
deferentially. In the course of reporting my book, I witnessed some of
this and reported on it directly. I attended political rallies and
political dinners where pretty much the entire Michigan congressional
delegation would show up and pay deference to Osama Siblani the way
they would to any major ward-type politician who has a bloc of votes
that, if he doesn't control them exactly, he certainly has tremendous
influence over them.

So here is this man who has a large house in the suburbs. By the way,
he started out in Dearborn and then moved out to a fancier suburb
further out from Detroit, in the classic American pattern. He drives a
big Mercedes. His wife drives a fancy Lexus SUV. He is a Republican.
He is deeply immersed in secular American politics. He has operated
two businesses that have made him wealthy in two very different lines
of work. It would seem to me he represents everything that you would
expect from an immigrant assimilation story.

At the same time, this is a man who is branded by some local
publications, particularly Jewish publications in the Midwest, as an
extremist. That stems from the fact that he openly supports Hezbollah,
an organization that our government, of course, brands as a terrorist
organization, which first came to the awareness of most Americans back
in the 1980s when there were several very celebrated hijackings and
suicide bombings aimed at Americans. Since then, the interaction
between Hezbollah and the United States may have tapered off, but, as
you know, as recently as last summer, Hezbollah was responsible for
sparking the huge conflict that resulted in the massive Israeli
bombing of Lebanon.

You have a situation where a man, who not only sympathizes with but
speaks on behalf of Hezbollah, is also someone whose political support
is sought by all mainstream politicians of both parties. It would be
very hard to imagine another such character at this moment in American
politics and society who would have those two different aspects. I
don't propose to rationalize that for you, to explain to you how that
fits in, because it's quite the opposite; it doesn't fit into normal
categories. Although it is comparable, if you pause and think about it
for a minute, perhaps, to supporters in the 1970s, say, of the IRA, of
which there were quite a few people here in the New York area and
Boston and elsewhere who supported what clearly could be viewed as a
terrorist group but at the same time otherwise were involved in the
mainstream of American life.

So I offer Siblani as an initial quick illustration how it is
difficult to pigeonhole in many cases Muslim Americans, because their
array of experiences and views frequently just doesn't line up—or at
least at this point in our history doesn't line up—quite in our
existing categories.

Having said all that, I don't think there is any question over whether
Muslims in this country are well assimilated. They are. I would say
that the most helpful understanding of someone like Osama Siblani, who
I have come to know quite well, is that of course he is very
assimilated: he is very well educated; he is very prosperous; he is a
huge believer in our secular political system; he is a huge fan of the
First Amendment, which he can recite to you in his still-thick Arabic
accent word for word; and he prizes pretty much all that the civics
textbooks would have you prize about American society.

In that regard, he is not unusual. Muslims in this country overall are
better educated than Americans generally. Surveys show that something
like 59 percent of Muslim adults have graduated from college. The
comparable number for the overall population is 28 percent.

Muslim median family income is higher than the national median of
$55,000-and-change.

Muslims register to vote at a rate of about 80 percent. The overall
rate is in the low 70s.

I could go on, and in my book I do tick off some other statistics.
There are all kinds of indications of a population that is settling
in, digging in, or as one colleague of mine put it—and I've borrowed
this phrase before—"buying into the American dream," in all of its
standard material aspects.

A lot of this success is due to the subgroup of American Muslims that
most people don't think of first. Most people think that Siblani is
typical of American Muslims in being a person of Arab descent. They
think that most American Muslims are from Arab countries, which is not
correct. Most Muslims are not Arabs; and most Arab-Americans are not
Muslim, they're Christian. The largest subgroup of American Muslims is
from South Asia—Pakistan, India, and other countries in that
region—that represent some 34 percent of the Muslim population. People
of Arab descent represent only about a quarter. Another 20 percent are
African-American, mostly converts, and now the children of converts.
And a final 20 percent are immigrants from places like Iran, Turkey,
and the African continent.

The population is much more varied than most Americans understand. The
places of origin frequently help shape the views of American Muslims
to a greater degree than we appreciate. For example, while overall
there is a tremendous amount of antipathy toward the state of Israel
among Muslims, that antipathy is much stronger among the Arab
component than it is, for example, among the South Asian component,
let alone among the South East Asians who may not care that much about
the Arab-Israeli conflict one way or the other; it just may not be one
of the leading things on their mind.

The concerns of inner-city African-American converts are frequently
very different. They tend to be much less well off than their
co-religionists and there is quite a bit of tension between many black
Muslims and immigrant Muslims.

I would come back to an overall point, that, by any conventional
measure, I would argue that American Muslims are probably less
different from other Americans than non-Muslims assume.
But they are different, and I want to stress several ways in which
Muslims are different. This takes us back to the seeming anomaly of
Mr. Siblani's views.

Muslims are subjected to a very particular set of biases. While these
may have heightened since 9/11 a little, they have also actually
wavered a bit, if you look at polling before 9/11 and since. So I'm
not sure actually that 9/11 itself has had a huge influence on this.
Here are a few examples:
Forty-five percent of people polled by Gallup last August said that
they have some feelings of prejudice towards Muslims.
Fifty percent said they would favor a special identification card for
Muslims based strictly on their religion, something that obviously
doesn't exist and couldn't exist constitutionally in our country.
Forty-nine percent would favor special security provisions at airports
for Muslims, again just based strictly on their religion.
Thirty-one percent said they would not want a Muslim as their neighbor.
Thirty-eight percent said they believe Muslims are sympathetic to al
Qaeda—in other words, they are not loyal to the United States; are
loyal to arguably the United States' greatest enemy.
A fascinating qualification to all of that grim data is that if you
break the respondents down into two groups, those who say they know
Muslims and those who say they don't think they know a Muslim—and
there's a little ambiguity there because some people aren't sure
whether they know a Muslim, of course—those who say they know a
Muslim, their level of bias tends to fall off by half, very
substantially. So that is perhaps reason for optimism in the future.

Another reason for optimism in the future is, again, the level of bias
falls off very substantially when you look at people who are ages
18-to-34 as opposed to 34 and older. Older people have much more
pronounced biases against Muslims than younger people.

So Muslims are subjected to this kind of bias.

There are also examples of specific acts of discrimination. Nearly
three-quarters of American Muslims responding to a survey by the
Council of American Islamic Relations report that they or someone they
know had suffered a specific act of prejudice since 9/11. That same
group, known as CAIR, has reported that in 2005 it received almost
2,000 civil rights complaints, up 30 percent since 2004. That includes
everything from actual alleged hate crimes, to someone attacking
someone, to someone saying something to them that's nasty at work, or
perhaps being fired they believe because of their religion.

I would note that those kind of statistics are sometimes subject to
being distorted. As groups like CAIR become more sophisticated, they
often become better at gathering such information. So seeming
increases can sometimes reflect that a little bit.

American Muslims are frequently told that Americans don't like them,
and this problem is getting worse. CAIR, for example, on its website
right now, if you go and look, it says: "It is clear that there
remains a growing atmosphere of fear and hostility toward American
Muslims, Arab-Americans, and South Asians."

Conservative radio hosts, of course, consider it absolutely routine to
insult Muslims and the religion of Islam. This is a truly disgusting
problem all across the country. One example of a man who was actually
fired for this is a guy named Michael Graham, who used to be a host on
WMAL, a big AM station in Washington, D.C. In one broadcast in July
2005, he said this 25 times: "Islam is a terrorist organization."

Finally, sadly, some of our evangelical Christian preachers routinely
insult Islam and Muslims, making statements such as Pat Robertson's
comment that the Prophet Muhammad was "an absolute wild-eyed fanatic";
or Franklin Graham's comment—this is the son of Billy Graham—that
Islam is a "very evil and wicked religion."

Muslims are extremely sensitive to these types of statements. The fact
that these famous Christians, even if they are Christians who only
represent a particular limited slice of Christianity—they are
frequently cited as illustrations of how all of American society is
hostile to Islam, when clearly all of American society is not.

American Muslims—and Siblani would definitely fall into this
category—are very humiliated and frustrated by the so-called domestic
war on terror, the investigations and prosecutions of Muslims and
Arabs in this country since 9/11. Now, some of those investigations
and prosecutions have been entirely legitimate, and people have been
convicted and sent to prison for planning to go overseas to training
camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan, saying that they intend to bring
down the Brooklyn Bridge or things like that. There isn't a lot of
evidence that any of these people were anywhere close to actually
doing any of these things. Most of them are much more, I would say, in
the category of bunglers and "wannabes." But nevertheless, these
things are illegal and you're not allowed to plan to do them.

The majority of the activity that has taken place in the way of
roundups, interrogation, and the treatment of people as they are being
held, of course, has been very disappointing. The Justice Department,
sadly, has frequently made a huge deal over cases that turn out to be
extremely peripheral, and even cases that have resulted in acquittals.
This, as I say, is extremely frustrating to Muslims, who see this as a
campaign against their religion as opposed to a campaign against
criminals.

Finally, American Muslims are bitterly opposed to aspects of American
foreign policy. This brings us back to Mr. Siblani. There is no
gainsaying the gap between the majority view in American society
toward, for example, the state of Israel and the majority view among
American Muslims toward the state of Israel. There is a huge divide.
Most Muslims are hostile to the state of Israel and see it, not as a
beacon of democracy in the Middle East or a sanctuary for Jews in the
post-Holocaust period, but they see it as a force for evil.
Personally, I don't have any specific proposal for how that gap is
overcome. But in understanding why someone would be enthusiastic about
an organization like Hezbollah or Hamas, you have to keep in mind that
perspective on Israel, the idea of Israel as an invader, as an
interloper, and as a brutal regime, a view that I happen not to share
but that many otherwise very-well-assimilated Muslims do hold.

Finally, I would add that it's not that I think most Muslims, like
Osama Siblani, agree with all that Hezbollah or Hamas stand for. For
example, he's no fan of suicide bombing; he doesn't advocate
theocracy, a religiously ordered political system—in fact, he opposes
those things. But he is an enthusiastic for someone who can give
Israel a black eye, for a group that has stood against Israeli
occupation.

Those types of views have now migrated over to how Muslims view the
American military invasion, occupation—whatever you'd like to call
it—in Iraq. There is similarly a tremendous degree of alienation and
frustration over what the United States has gotten itself involved in.
Many Muslims view these things as being in the same category: once
again, the United States or its ally Israel are imposing themselves on
the Middle East and on the Muslim world.

I think I will leave my talk there and then answer questions, with the
final thought that we have a highly, for the most part, assimilated
population, but one that in certain specific areas has very different
views of the world, and we need to think about them with all of that
complexity rather than demanding that they fit into every single
category and agree with every single American point of view. If we
approach American Muslims in that light, we will see that there
actually is much more to agree with them on in terms of life in this
country, even if we have tremendous disagreements over some of
America's involvement overseas and events overseas.

So please tell me what I can tell you.

Questions and Answers
QUESTION: You didn't mention something that, of course, is in the
newspapers a lot, and that's Muslim schools in the United States and
the flow of money supposedly to terrorist groups in various parts of
the world. Is that just a red herring; and is that why you didn't
mention it? Is it insignificant or not?

PAUL BARRETT: Well, there are many things about Muslim life in this
country I didn't mention. No, I was not evading the point. Let's see.

There are a growing number of Islamic schools. Most estimates now run
roughly in the area of 300, maybe more. They are primarily primary and
secondary schools. There are no real full-fledged colleges. That is
actually an important point, because in terms of their clergy, Muslims
are still in 99 percent of the cases importing clergy from overseas,
and that is a big source of more extreme religious and political views.

There are problems with Muslim schools in this country in terms of
some of the religious literature they use. A lot of that comes from
Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the Persian Gulf and reflects the very
particular and extreme form of the religion that prevails in Saudi Arabia.

You then also mentioned the question of raising of money?

QUESTIONER: Yes, the raising of money for terrorists.

PAUL BARRETT: Right. I think that's in the same general neighborhood
as the schools, but isn't really related directly.

Through the 1990s, it was relatively common for money to be raised in
this country for organizations that are, at least now, defined as
terrorist organizations. I've mentioned a few—Hezbollah, Hamas. It's
not unusual for people to get together and raise money for those
organizations. That has become much, much less common, if it has not
been stamped out completely, by the post-9/11 prosecutions, a fair
number of which were specifically aimed at that activity and have
deterred it across the board.

There also were a number of charities that presented themselves as
humanitarian charities and allegedly funneled some of their money to
Hamas and Hezbollah. The argument that the officials of those
charities made was that Hamas and Hezbollah, of course, are more than
just paramilitary organizations; they are also in their respective
areas, Lebanon and the Palestinian Territories, social service
organizations, the sponsors of schools, and now substantial political
forces.

The American government in the form of the Bush Administration is not
at all sympathetic to that argument and those charities have all been
shut down. So there really are no more major Islamic charities
operating in this country. This is a source of tremendous frustration
and chagrin on the part of many Muslims. There are some very small
ones that have cropped up, but they don't take on any heft, in part
because people are afraid to deal with them.

This is a terrible situation. I mean this is a religion that has as
one of its five pillars the giving of a very specific amount of
charity. It is calculated by a percentage of your net worth. We have
made it very inconvenient for them to fulfill that, generally
speaking, quite honorable principle.

Muslim organizations have even gone to the Bush Administration, to the
Treasury Department in particular, and said: "Can you bless charities?
Would you make a list of ten charities that you audit and say they are
safe to give to?" The government has refused.

So we've had a problem in this regard. We have people serving prison
sentences as a result of that problem.

I write about one of the figures in my book, a guy who came to this
country from India, a relatively moderate-minded fellow, but who got
wrapped up with the Muslim Brotherhood while going to the University
of Tennessee, of all places, in Knoxville, Tennessee. He raised money
for extremist groups for a couple of years and then stopped. He has
now actually abandoned his more extreme views and circled back to a
much more moderate, open-minded view of the world. But he speaks quite
passionately about his frustration about the charity issue.

QUESTION: I am interested in knowing why it is that the American
Muslim community has been totally silent as far as their attitude
towards what this Administration calls "Islamic fascism" or
"fundamentalism," the activities of the Wahhabis and al Qaeda and so
forth. They really have made no statement in opposition of it. So I
can understand perhaps why some Americans, not really knowing how they
feel and not having heard any negative feelings coming from the
community, if you can call it a community, would suspect that they
might be supportive of al Qaeda.

And also, you said that of course they have an antipathy towards
Israel. Is that also manifested then as anti-Semitism in this country?
I know people who are anti-Israel but who are not anti-Semitic. I'm
interested to know whether in your experience you could tell me about
that.

PAUL BARRETT: Those are two big and important questions, which I hear
at each and every event I go to to talk about my book. It never fails.
I was wondering why you weren't first out of the gate. You probably
just didn't get chosen.

In fact, as a result of that, I have recently written Op-Ed pieces
addressing both questions: one that ran in the Los Angeles Times,
which was called "Reporting on Muslims While Jewish," because I am
Jewish; and one which actually just went up today on a very good
online magazine site called Salon.com. So if you want my full
treatment of these issues, you can retreat and find those. But I'm
happy to address them.

Let's talk about condemnation of terrorism. With all due respect, your
premise is entirely wrong. Muslim organizations, and certainly
individual Muslims, have condemned terrorism over and over and over
again, including on September 11th by 9:30 in the morning. This is
easily documented. You can go back online to places and news services
and find this.

So the interesting question is: Why don't we hear what they say? The
answer to that is complicated.

Part of the reason we don't hear, I suppose, is we may have such a
strong assumption that they don't condemn terrorism that we literally
just block it out.

A more sophisticated explanation would include the fact that some of
those statements include qualifications that I think tend to cancel
them out in the ears of non-Muslim listeners. The qualifications
frequently, if you listen closely or look at them, include assertions
about how Islam is a religion of peace; there is no such thing as
"Islamic terrorism" because there can't be because terrorism can't be
Islamic; that Muslims don't carry out terrorism because no real Muslim
would be a terrorist—you know, the perpetrators on 9/11 weren't
Muslims because no Muslims would ever do that; the Qur'an would forbid
it. These are all very sort of circular, tautological, unhelpful evasions.

My guess—and this is only a guess—is I know that they have irritated
me and my ear, even though I'm aware that Muslims have condemned
terrorism generally, and I think they just tend to cancel out the
condemnations unintentionally.

Then, you come to a question of: Why, beyond just general-purpose
defensiveness and embarrassment—because, of course, put yourself in
American Muslims' position when it comes out that 19 Muslims have
undertaken the greatest attack on American soil ever. You're
humiliated, you're frustrated. "I'm a law-biding citizen. Why are they
asking me? Why do I have to defend them?" One should have some
sympathy for those feelings.

But there is a very specific reason, I would argue, that a lot of
those evasions have been built on, and that takes us back,
interestingly, to Siblani and Hezbollah and Hamas. Muslims condemn all
across the board—you have to go very far out to the tiny extreme to
find Muslims who will try to evade responsibility for what happened on
9/11—but many Muslims do not want to be backed into a corner where
they feel they might be condemning Hamas and Hezbollah. The degree of
loyalty to and attachment to those organizations—not their literal
programs, not their—

QUESTIONER: What about al Qaeda?

PAUL BARRETT: They'll condemn al Qaeda quite readily. I'll mail you a
stack like this.

QUESTIONER: I'm not questioning it. I can empathize with them and
their feelings, the American Muslims. But continue. I didn't mean to
interrupt.

PAUL BARRETT: It's my feeling that Muslim attitudes toward Israel, and
particularly toward Hamas and Hezbollah, the desire not to compromise
there, the sense that "we have a right to say that we favor the cause,
if not the methods, of the Palestinians and the militant Shiites in
Lebanon," inhibits some Muslims from stronger, clearer, unqualified
condemnation of all terrorism all the time perpetrated by anybody, no
footnotes; no ifs, ands, or buts.

Also, since mid-2005, the premise of your question really is faulty.
Since 2005, Muslim organizations have issued some extremely adequate,
laudable, across-the-board condemnations.

The bombings in London in July 2005 were devastating to American
Muslims. Why? Because those were not foreign Muslims. Those were not
distant crazy people from the Persian Gulf who we don't understand
where they come from or their Wahhabi ideas. The bombings of the
London Underground were perpetrated by Muslims born and bred in
England. They prompted some serious introspection on the part of
Muslims in this country. Statements made since then have been stronger
and more across the board.

QUESTIONER: And are they published?

PAUL BARRETT: Yes, absolutely, all over the place. You've just got to
look. I'll leave to you the question of why you haven't seen them, but
they are there.

QUESTIONER: I don't know. I read extensively. But anyhow, what about
anti-Semitism?

PAUL BARRETT: I brought my own faith up in all of my interviews (1)
because I didn't want anyone to feel sandbagged, and (2) because
frequently when you're having a long interview it's often good to
throw a catalyst like that into the mix and see how people react to
it. I found a good deal of anti-Semitism among American Muslims. I
found many American Muslims who were quite sophisticated and able to
separate out Jews from Israel and were not anti-Semitic at all. And I
found the proportion to be roughly similar to the proportion I find
among Jews who I know who are reflexively biased against Muslims and
Arabs, who just reflexively assume that all Muslims and Arabs are
evil. So that's my layman's assessment.

QUESTION: I would like to know what you think about the difference of
integration between Muslims in Europe, which is a big problem, and in
the United States.

PAUL BARRETT: An excellent question. It follows very directly from my
discussion of assimilation.

Very, very different situations, beginning with the reasons why
immigrant Muslims are present in these Western societies to begin
with. Muslims in Western Europe primarily—and, of course, I'm
generalizing some here; this is not everybody—primarily began showing
up in Western Europe at the invitation of Western European societies
after World War II to help rebuild destroyed cities. They were mostly
menial laborers, and they were viewed as such. They were viewed
basically as guest workers with the assumption that they would go back
home sometime in the not-too-distant future. Well, a lot of them
didn't go back home. Life there compared to life back home was better.

And then, interestingly, European societies implemented social service
systems that allowed people to live somewhat on the periphery without
necessarily even learning the language, and certainly without being
integrated. So you ended up with fairly insular, marginalized
communities on the peripheries of big cities like Amsterdam, Paris,
and so forth in relatively large numbers. I mean ten percent of the
people living in France now are Muslims, so it's a very significant
minority.

The story in the United States is entirely different. Looking at that
slice of the population that is the highest-achieving slice, the
immigrants who have come since the 1960s, when the American
immigration laws were changed so that it was easier to get to this
country from places like South Asia, people came here not to rebuild
walls but to go to college and to go to graduate school in subjects
like engineering and computer science. Some of them stayed too. But
they stayed in a society where there isn't in fact a very generous
social service safety net for immigrants. Once you're here, you either
go illegal, or if you're legal you actually have to work; you can't
just subsist. So I think you ended up with a population in this
country of people who were better educated, quickly became more
prosperous, and were more ambitious.

It wasn't only students who came here. It was often people who had
substantial sums saved by their families and came here to invest them
in businesses such as—it's a cliché, but it's a cliché that
fits—7-Eleven's and small motel chains and so forth, all throughout
the country, as well as gas stations, absolutely. On balance, they
have been extremely successful in the traditional American way of
being successful. Our self-image is that if you come here and you work
hard, you can make your way.

It's easier to get a job in this country. Labor regulations are less
onerous. It's easier to get hired because it's easier to be fired. As
a Turk or someone from Egypt who lives in Holland, because it's more
difficult to fire people, a lot of employers are more hesitant to hire
you in the first place.

Europe is hostile to religion generally. The secularism of Europe is
much more strongly felt than it is here. I think in an interesting way
we respect religious people, even if we are sort of biased against
them at the same time. I think Muslims are aware of that. I think
that, while many of them do feel somewhat alienated, they also have
the sense that there is this thing called the First Amendment and
there is protection of religious expression. They see religious people
are accorded respect. They have respect for other religious people in
many cases. I think that makes them feel somewhat more integrated.

Finally, there is just the different national senses. If you're honest
about it, most French people think that other people from abroad are
never going to become "really French." This is less common here.
There's plenty of nativism, there's plenty of bias; but once you've
got a couple of cars in the driveway, people think twice—"Hey, that
guy's okay."

QUESTION: I was wondering about their objectives between religion and
politics, which in their culture are not separated. Are they following
the injunctions of the Qur'an to stay alienated and not say hello to
the infidel, and eventually sort of hope that the crescent flies over
the White House? Or are they wanting to become American and less
religiously extremist and just blend in and assimilate?

PAUL BARRETT: Again, there are several premises built in there.

One, that the Qur'an obviously enjoins believers to reject secular
rule and so forth. I'm sure there's an interpretation of the Qur'an
that says that, because there's an interpretation of almost every holy
book that says almost everything. But I don't know many Muslims—and I
know quite a few—who interpret the Qur'an as commanding them to stay
separate from secular society.

QUESTIONER: [Inaudible]

PAUL BARRETT: Right. But as I say, there are injunctions in the
commands. You can find lines in the Qur'an, as you can find lines in
the New and Old Testaments, that make sharp distinctions between the
believers and the unbelievers, and say we should basically smite the
unbelievers and rally the believers. That can be done with the Qur'an
too. We could have a whole separate discussion as to interpreting
scripture, but, as most people agree, the meaning of scripture is very
much determined by the moral sense of the reader and what they bring
to it. The books themselves, particularly books written 1,500 or more
years ago, are subject to lots of different interpretations.

The short answer to your question is I don't think that there is a
significant number of Muslims in this country who believe as a
practical matter, or who desire as a practical matter, to see, as you
said, the crescent to fly over the White House versus the American flag.

What you do find is some fundamentalist rhetoric. You can go to
mosques and you can hear the imam preach on Friday afternoon that the
Qur'an is superior to all books, including the Constitution. You can
hear that Islam is more important than democracy and one day Allah's
law will reign supreme worldwide. It actually is rhetoric that is very
similar, if you line it up, two pieces of paper like that, to the
rhetoric you hear in fundamentalist Christian churches about how the
Day of Judgment will come and everything will get sorted out, the good
people will be here and the bad people will be there, bad people will
go up in smoke and the good people will rally around Jesus, and so forth.

An important thing, I think, to keep in mind is that fundamentalisms
have a lot in common. The most basic thing in common is the separation
out of the world of peace versus the world of war, or the believers
versus. the non-believers. Absolutely you find that strain in Islam.
It's very powerful overseas. It is present in this country, but it
doesn't predominate in this country.

But, as your question suggests, I think it should be a source of
concern. Muslims are actually debating over this in mosques and in
their communities themselves, which is something that I tried to
illustrate throughout my book. My book's subtitle is "The Struggle for
the Soul of Religion." It's about actually mostly the conflicts within
Islam, because these subjects are being hotly debated between more
moderate, more secularly oriented Muslims verusu more fundamentalistly
oriented Muslims.

But I don't think that there is any realistic worry about a mass
Muslim movement that literally wants to impose Shariah on the United
States the way you have quite potent such movements in some
predominantly Muslim countries. There's a difference.

QUESTION: I have been trying to think of a way to ask the question
that is less simplistic. I can't find it, so I will just ask the
question. So far America has not confronted the kind of struggle—and,
indeed, violence—that Britain has faced with their Muslim community.
What are the primary reasons for that?

PAUL BARRETT: I think that's just an extension of the answer to the
question from our friend here. You have a much more assimilated
population that is, relatively speaking, much better off, doesn't feel
that it has been excluded and kept separate, and feels much more in
every sense invested in American society, both in the literal
sense—the percentage of American Muslims who own stocks, bonds, and
mutual funds either independently or through 401(k)'s is very, very
high. Those are people who are settling in. They are not making plans
to make trouble. I mean you don't waste your time investing in a
401(k) if what you're really planning to do is blow things up. So I
think the reason is no more or less complicated than that.

Muslims in Europe feel that they are excluded from society, and that
provides a very fertile ground for fundamentalists and extreme ideas.
If you then have someone come in and preach about "Islam must
prevail," "non-Muslims are all infidels and God hates them," someone
who begins the day feeling completely frustrated and excluded is going
to be a more receptive audience to that than will the guy who's
getting his Ph.D. in computer science at MIT, who's thinking: "As soon
as I get this Ph.D., I'm really in the money. Things are going well."

QUESTION: I guess I could call this "what came first, the chicken or
the bush?" I'm trying to see a kind of picture—going back to the
genocides that we were kind of indifferent to and didn't get involved,
and the frustration and the anger worldwide because we didn't; then
coming to panic and witch-hunting almost, it seems to me—at least I
have a perception of it happening here in so many ways—and in the
ambience in general; at the same time, withdrawing, indifference and
the terrorism now in the East. Do you see all of this in a way
connected and really needing to be addressed to begin to solve the
problems that you are addressing in the book?

PAUL BARRETT: I guess my overall cast of mind is more optimistic than
yours. I think that, remarkably, the Muslim-American assimilation and
success story has actually continued in the wake of 9/11. We didn't
have mass violence in this country. There have been instances of
crimes against people who attackers thought, accurately or
inaccurately—sometimes inaccurately—were Muslims. But the numbers,
while too many if the number was only one, have not been astronomical.

Our government has been very ham-handed in pursuing investigations and
prosecutions, by which I mean, not that the investigations should not
have been launched in the first place, but we have prosecuted some
people who were peripheral, unimportant figures and basically were
turned into martyrs and the cases broke down and turned into
embarrassments for the prosecutors. We need an FBI that is extremely
aggressive, extremely agile, and a Justice Department that knows when
not to prosecute and when to just keep the file and watch.

But I don't think—and this is not a view that cannot be disputed; you
can have a different point of view—but my perspective is that the vast
majority of Muslims in this country, though they may feel frustrated
at the moment, terribly extrinsic events notwithstanding, will be back
on-track and have not left track.

I mean you just go to a Muslim students' association meeting at the
campus of any major university, and you see 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 young
people who tend to major in relatively pragmatically oriented
subjects, and their plans are to launch careers right now the middle
of American society and get a house in the suburbs. I mean to me
that's not a signal that doom is on the way.

QUESTION: This is just taking up a small piece of what you referred to
about the frustration among American Muslims that they are not able to
contribute to Muslim charities, because of the problems you referred
to, and a lot of them have not been allowed to continue in business.
But, especially if they are so well assimilated here and involved in
American life and making the money and so on and so forth, there are
tens of thousands of charities that are not necessarily Christian,
they are just sort of all of us. It sounds like they are not thinking
in terms of contributing there as an alternative, contributing to
other standard charities that benefit all.

PAUL BARRETT: That's an interesting point. I suppose my response is
that in the same way that my family might think first of a Jewish
cause, even if we then move on and contribute to Heifer International,
I think Muslims will tend to think first about Muslim causes. I think
it is particularly the case, since many people are first- or
second-generation immigrants, that what is going on in the home
country is still very much on their mind.

Finally, I guess I would point out that in many cases, sadly and for
very complicated reasons, the predominantly Muslim world is extremely
troubled and in great need of aid. I think that Muslims in this
country who come from that part of the world feel a sense of
responsibility.

But it's an interesting point you make, that there are other ways to
do good.

QUESTION: I'd like to ask you two questions, going back to the support
for Hezbollah. I know it is hard to generalize, but what percentage
would you say in the Muslim community would be more in the camp of
Avumas [phonetic] and wanting to make peace, getting the settlements
back, but not agreeing with Hezbollah and never Hamas?

The second is if you could say something—again, it's a
generalization—about the role of women in the Muslim community.

PAUL BARRETT: My experience is that the majority of the people who I
came in contact with recognize that Israel is not going away. My
strong guess is that most of Hamas recognizes that Israel is actually
not going away, even if the organization's position remains one where
they are not officially recognizing it.

I think the thing that needs emphasizing is it's not so much that
American Muslims approve of everything that Hamas or Hezbollah
actually does on a day-to-day basis, but it's their refusal to be put
in a position where they feel they need to rebuke those organizations
or condemn them. It's largely symbolic, I think, more than it is a
sense of their own membership in the groups, although there are people
who here are directly associated with the groups.

I don't have hard percentages. I don't think many American Muslims
have the illusion that Israelis are going to be driven into the sea,
or the desire for that. I think many American Muslims, like many
Americans generally, would love somehow for that conflict to be
resolved so people could move on and deal with other matters. But,
sadly, it has proven extremely hard to resolve that.

What was the second part of the question?

QUESTIONER: How about Muslim women in this country?
PAUL BARRETT: Not something that can be dealt with in a minute and a half.

One of my chapters deals with that explicitly. There is a ferocious
debate going on within American Islam, to a lesser degree in certain
other parts of the world, about women's literal and figurative place
in the mosque. A lot of these debates have to do with seemingly minor
issues of choreography and head covering and so forth, but those are
really proxies for much larger collisions between old-world traditions
and more Western traditions.

What you have within American Islam is a huge range of people: at one
extreme, those who think it is entirely irreligious for women to
appear in public without various types of coverings; on the other
side, women who think that's just not the case, who want to know where
in the Qur'an it says you have to do that—and, in fact, there isn't a
place in the Qur'an that clearly says you have to cover in a certain
way—and who, if they presented themselves to you, you would have no
way of knowing whether they were Muslim or not Muslim, although you
might have a sense that they were from India or Pakistan or what have you.

There are debates over, as I say, clothing; there are debates over
where people can pray in the mosque; there are debates over whether
women should be allowed to be on mosque boards. And then there are
more amorphous debates, just over how men treat women generally;
whether women should be allowed to seek out their own husband, or
vice-versa. These are similar to debates that have taken place within
other immigrant religious groups as they move from a more traditional
old-country setting to a more pluralist setting where the rules and
regulations get a little more diluted, more secular, more materialist,
a more materialistic society.

Muslims right now, I would say, are in a state of flux on all of this.
But there is a large number of Muslim women who are very disturbed by
this because they would like to see basically more Westernization of
their own culture.

The one thought I'd leave you with on this is that I think more of
this has to do with culture and place of origin than it does with the
actual dictates of the religion. I have looked very closely at the
verses in question—I actually wrestle with some of this in the
book—and you can find a verse to support your point of view. You can
find a verse that supports a very progressive point of view, that has
Muhammad welcoming the council of women, and his wives and daughters
being hugely influential in the original Muslim society, that
indicating that 1,400 years later women should be able to do anything
and everything. And you can find people who look at just the very next
verse, that women should never come outside the house.

So what do you make of that? It's a group of people struggling with a
holy text. It's a group of people struggling with a presence in a new
society. My guess is that things will continue to move, roughly
speaking, in the direction of Westernization.

But at the same time, interestingly, things don't move all in the same
direction at one time. There is actually movement in both directions
right now. You have women who are moving away from the traditions, but
you also have some mosques where things have gotten more conservative,
because only in the last ten years some of the more extremely
conservative ideas of the Persian Gulf have come to predominate in
those particular mosques. So it is actually very, very hard to generalize.

JOANNE MYERS: I thank you very much for shedding light on Muslims in
America.

*********************************************************************

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