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Islam: The Next American Religion?

The U.S. 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. Everyone
stands equal before God.
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. Even book packagers are now rushing him
into print to meet and profit from mainstream demand
for this visionary. 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. In today's Iran, for example, more
women than men attend university, and in recent local
elections there, 5,000 women ran for public office.

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.