The many faces of American Muslims

Author Paul Barrett deftly upends the stereotypes that Westerners harbor about Muslims -- and shows why militant Islamism is less likely to take root here than in other countries.

By Laura Miller

Read more: Books, Laura Miller, Islam, Reviews, Book reviews

Stephanie Keith/WPN

Participants in the 19th annual Muslim Day Parade attracted Muslims from many ethnicities to New York's Madison Avenue.

Jan. 15, 2007 | "American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion," by Paul Barrett, is the ideal book to enlighten a whole host of people who don't realize they need it. That includes everyone who claims that moderate Muslims haven't spoken up against fundamentalist militants or that all Muslim women go around veiled or that the religion is inherently warlike. It also includes everyone whose only response to Islamist terrorism is to talk about the sins of Israel, those who claim that Islam doesn't have a growing problem with violent fanatics or the role of women, and those who insist that it is purely a religion of peace.

Barrett, a former reporter and editor for the Wall Street Journal, has done a nearly miraculous job of writing thoughtfully, clearly and sensibly about a subject that usually stirs up a viper's nest of prejudice, defensiveness and paranoia. Yet "American Islam" isn't, strictly speaking, objective, newspaper-style reporting -- even if it has some of the characteristics of that school of journalism. In this collection of portraits of American Muslims, all struggling with their religion and its place in their world in one way or another, Barrett doesn't forgo all judgment. He has his own firm notions of right and wrong when it comes to the issues his book raises, and he's not afraid to challenge his subjects. But he keeps himself in the background and doesn't make a spectacle of his own role in researching their stories, as a showier (or greener) journalist might be tempted to do. "American Islam" is above all a scrupulously fair book.

This, unfortunately, makes it unfashionable at a time when many confuse incisiveness with leaping to an opinion and defending it fiercely, whether or not you know what you're talking about. All those people who falsely believe that they're already well enough informed about Islam to merit their fiery conclusions -- as well as those who don't really care whether they are or not -- will probably never crack open a copy of "American Islam." True, those are the people who need it most, but readers with curious and open minds will still find a lot that's intriguing and revelatory in Barrett's book.

The topic is especially important now, after the discovery of the plot to smuggle explosives on transatlantic flights this past summer and the successful London transit attacks of the summer before. That conspirators in both plots included British natives shocked many observers; previously, the Islamist terrorism directed at Western civilians had mostly been perpetrated by the disgruntled citizens of Middle Eastern nations. If Britain was producing homegrown Muslim terrorists, what about the United States? So far, U.S. citizens have been rare among the ranks of militant Islam (Jose Padilla, a prison convert, is the best-known exception), even though America ranks right up there with Israel as the Great Satan in the Islamist worldview.

Few of the American Muslims that Barrett profiles match any stereotype that Westerners are likely to harbor about Islam's faithful. In truth, he leans a little toward the unconventional and even progressive members of the religion, but he aims to give all sides their due. What he gets across is the remarkable diversity of Islam in America, pointing out that Muslims are no more all alike than Christians are. He profiles a prosperous middle-class publisher, an African-American imam working out of a shabby mosque in Brooklyn, a Saudi student on trial for volunteering as the webmaster of a organization that published some anti-Semitic and anti-American materials, a white Sufi couple and their spotlight-loving, celebrity-schmoozing guru, a Pakistani-American feminist staging a campaign to allow women to worship alongside men in her neighborhood mosque, and a hard-working husband and father who dabbled in militancy before rejecting it in favor of leading "a normal American life."

A section of Barrett's introduction offers the best concise overview of Islam in general and American Islam in particular that I've encountered. He explains that "most American Muslims are not Arab, and most Americans of Arab descent are Christian, not Muslim. People of South Asian descent -- those with roots in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh and Afghanistan -- make up 34 percent of American Muslims ... Arab-Americans constitute only 26 percent, while another 20 percent are native-born American blacks, most of whom are converts. The remaining 20 percent come from Africa, Iran, Turkey and elsewhere."

As a group, Muslims are "more prosperous and better educated than other Americans." Almost 60 percent of them have college degrees, compared to 27 percent of American adults overall. The median family income among Muslims is $60,000; the national median is $50,000. Eighty percent of them are registered to vote. Compared to the larger, and largely poor, Muslim populations of Western Europe, who are often concentrated in slums where the opportunities for education and advancement are few, American Muslims show, in Barrett's words, the traits of "a minority population successfully integrating into a larger society." This, as many commentators pointed out after the London transit attacks and the 2005 riots in Paris, is one reason American Muslims are less likely to turn to militant Islamism than their less-assimilated and more disgruntled co-religionists in Europe.

The rest of Barrett's section on the differences between Shiites and Sunnis and the maverick role of Sufis within the faith ought to be recommended reading for those lawmakers, media professionals and military personnel who seem to be chronically baffled by the divisions. The differences among Muslim sects mean much less here than they do in Iraq, though -- largely because in America, Muslims have more in common with each other than they do with the culture at large. The success of the Shiite Iranian revolution of 1979, for example, usually gets viewed as a victory for all Muslims over the Western powers who push them around; in that, Sunnis and Shiites are united. Sufis, as longtime targets for fundamentalists who regard them as heretics, are much more likely to go their own way.

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