Islam: An American Religion

A study conducted in 2008 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life depicts a diverse and dynamic religious landscape.¹ It leads one to question perceptions that are still too prevalent in Europe, of an evangelical, white, bigoted, aging America.² The United States in the Obama era is characterized by a high level of religious pluralism and a strong tendency for individuals to go from one religion to another or to change denominations. More than 25 percent of Americans over eighteen years old say they left the religion in which they were brought up for another. The cliché that says America is pious and hostile to secularism is also stripped away: nearly 25 percent of Americans age eighteen to twenty-nine say they are have no religious affiliation. Although 51 percent of Americans are members of a Protestant denomination, there is high fragmentation within this group. Today there are over one hundred denominations (26.3 percent of the population belongs to an evangelical church and 18.1 percent to “mainline” Protestant churches). Overall, 23.9 percent of Americans are Catholic, 1.7 percent are Mormon, 1.7 percent are Jewish, 0.6 percent are Orthodox Christians, and 0.6 percent are Muslims.

The research findings reveal important differences between age groups. Although more than 62 percent of Americans seventy years old and up are Protestant, only 43 percent of eighteen- to twenty-nine-year-old Americans are. Similarly, 25 percent of Americans age eighteen to twenty-nine declare no religious affiliation, whereas only 8 percent in the seventy and up age group do so. These statistics suggest that America is definitely undergoing a certain amount of secularization (especially among younger generations) and a diversification of the religious spectrum, with a notable decline over the long term of the numerical weight of Protestantism as compared with other religions. The study puts forward the hypothesis that “if these generational patterns persist, recent declines in the number of Protestants and growth in the size of the unaffiliated population may continue.”³

Among the striking characteristics of the American Muslim population are its relative youth, from the standpoint of both their age upon arrival in the United States and their average age: 63 percent of American Muslims are first-generation immigrants, and 45 percent of them arrived after 1990.⁴ However, even though they tend to be recent arrivals in the United States, a large percentage are American citizens: 37 percent of them were born in America, and 70 percent of Muslim immigrants born abroad are today American citizens.⁵ Nearly all Muslims who arrived before 1980 are now American citizens. This population is relatively younger than other religious communities: 29 percent of Muslims are between the ages of eighteen and twenty-nine (as against only 14 percent of mainline Protestants); 48 percent are between thirty and forty-nine years old. Only 5 percent are older than sixty-five (compared with 28 percent of mainline Protestants and 29 percent of Jews). Consistent with the overall youth of this community, 53 percent of Muslims have no children; 19 percent have two children. These figures give the lie to the idea of burgeoning families, a favorite myth among conspiracy theorists who spread fear of invasion.

Concentrated mostly in the Northeast (29 percent) and the South (32 percent), the Muslim population is composed of people who self-identify as white (37 percent, versus 91 percent of mainline Protestants), as black (24 percent), as Asian (20 percent), and as Hispanic (4 percent).

The socioeconomic standing and education levels of Muslims are comparable to national averages, with 16 percent having annual incomes of more than $100,000 (versus a national percentage at this income level of 18 percent, and compared with 16 percent of Mormons, 46 percent of Jews, and 43 percent of Hindus) and 35 percent reporting annual income of less than $30,000 (versus a national percentage at this level of 31 percent, with 47 percent of those belonging to historically black churches with this income). Fourteen percent of Muslims have an undergraduate university diploma, and 10 percent have either a master’s degree or a doctoral degree (compared with the national percentage of 11 percent, though the number is 35 percent for Jews and 48 percent for Hindus).

Another study conducted by the Gallup Institute in 2011 indicates that the political participation of American Muslims is lower than that of other large religious groups.⁶ Only 65 percent of them are registered to vote, compared with 91 percent of Protestants and Jews, although this may be partially due to the relative youth of the Muslim population since the average age is thirty-six. The study reveals that Muslims tend to deplore the numerous acts of discrimination they are subjected to but on the whole tend to be optimistic about the future, and 82 percent say they are very happy with their lives. This optimism is not shared by the rest of the population: “It is striking to see that Muslim Americans are considerably more satisfied with the way things are in the country (56%) than the general public.”⁷ This situation derives in part from the fact that Muslim Americans are generally happier about the political situation of the country since Obama’s election as president. They also seem to have suffered somewhat less, on average, from the economic crisis of 2008; 46 percent of American Muslims say they are in very good financial shape, compared with only 38 percent of the general population.

The study especially underscores the ordinariness of Muslim Americans and their high level of conformity in different areas of everyday life. Muslims answer in the same numbers as the general public when it comes to how much time they spend watching television, playing video games, or tending to the recycling of their garbage. Thirty-three percent say they have collaborated with neighbors to settle some community problem, compared with 38 percent of the general public who say they have. In other words, even if one can dispute the pertinence of certain questions or the criteria used in these studies, they paint a picture that is very different from what is suggested by a number of polemicists.⁸ American Muslims do not constitute a unified community of dangerous extremists turned in on themselves. They are a relatively young population who tend to be economically comfortable, Democratic-leaning though morally conservative, but not fundamentalist. The Muslim community is strikingly normal, in fact, and appears in many ways to be highly “American.”

A recent study by the Brookings Institution offers important information on the general state of relations between religions, ethnic communities, and age groups.⁹ The findings also overturn the distorting cliché that would see a sharp opposition between a homogeneous American society and a marginalized Muslim population. The study underscores the widely different attitudes among different generations. White non-Muslim Americans of the so-called millennial generation (those born between 1980 and 2000) have much more regular contact with African Americans, Hispanics, and Muslims than do those sixty-five years old and higher. A high percentage of whites of all ages say they have experienced discrimination just like minority groups, and six out of ten Republicans say that discrimination against whites is now as big a problem as discrimination against minorities. One can ask if there are adequate reasons and evidence for this claim, but the fact that so many white Republicans in the population make it suggests that the paradigm of an offensive, imperial white America at war against Islam (the paradigm frequently deployed in anti-Islamophobic arguments) is itself inadequate. According to the Brookings Institution study, 68 percent of millennials of all religious affiliations have a favorable opinion of Muslims (compared with only 47 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of people over age sixty-five). Similarly, 60 percent of the general population, all religions and political affiliations combined, regret that too many Americans consider all Muslims to be terrorists.

Muslims are hardly the only group that incites fear or skepticism. Forty-nine percent of Democrats and 56 percent of those aged eighteen to twenty-nine have a favorable opinion of atheists, but only 38 percent of Republicans and 35 percent of those over sixty-five also have a favorable opinion of atheists. Many people are either ignorant or doubtful about Mormonism. Twenty-seven percent of the population say they know nothing about Mormonism, and 41 percent do not think Mormonism is a Christian religion. Fifty-seven percent of evangelical Christians reject the notion that Mormonism falls within Christianity. Mormons are generally considered more negatively among younger adults, perhaps because of the Mormon Church’s opposition to gay marriage. The level of hostility toward Mormons is about the same among conservatives and liberals; 21 percent of conservatives and 22 percent of liberals say they have a negative view of Mormons: “Just as in the past there were Left and Right versions of anti-Catholicism; today there are two ideological currents against Mormons.”¹⁰

The study reveals the very clear difference between Democratic and Republican feelings toward Muslims. On the question of a Muslim teaching at an elementary school in their neighborhood, 66 percent of Democrats and only 44 percent of Republicans see nothing wrong with this. More than half of Democrats (57 percent) compared with 37 percent of Republicans say they would favor the construction of a mosque in their neighborhood, and 58 percent of Democrats and 45 percent of Republicans accept the idea that Muslims should be able to kneel and pray in airports.

By insisting on the integration and normalness of Muslim Americans, these studies reassure a nervous public. By doing so, they also reaffirm the glorious story of a tolerant, multicultural, multiethnic America still capable of surmounting its differences and being a source of hope and a force in favor of integration and moderation. By seeking to show the exemplary integration of Muslim Americans, the studies reformulate indirectly the theme of America’s exceptional destiny. The 2007 study by the Pew Institute already insisted on the difference between Muslims in America and those elsewhere in the world, notably in Europe: “Generally speaking, the 2007 study showed that Muslims living in the United States are middle class and moderates, largely assimilated, satisfied with their lives, and moderate on international questions, especially compared to Muslim minorities in several European countries that were studied by the Pew Global Attitudes Project.”¹¹ The 2011 study confirms this gap between American Muslims and other Muslims around the world.

It is thus within this religious landscape characterized by high levels of pluralism, a great fluidity of membership, and a tendency toward a certain standardization of practices and even doctrines that I analyze the present-day controversies over Islam. These are political disputes that oppose Democrats and Republicans but that also divide the Republican Party. These debates also reveal radically divergent ways of conceiving of and living out daily political life. They suggest a clear face-off between a liberal sensibility and reactionary, populist feelings. But there is absolutely no way one can reduce them to, as one often hears it repeated in Europe, a war between a united, white, evangelical majority and a Muslim minority. Evangelical Protestantism is certainly an important part of the American religious landscape, but its power is not hegemonic. What’s more, it does not hold a clear set of positions regarding Islam.¹² Insofar as proselytism and political engagement are essential aspects of this type of Protestantism, Islam could certainly appear as a threatening competitor religion; but in fact it occupies a relatively moderate place in its social and cultural agenda. Even among fundamentalist evangelicals—and Sébastien Fath underlines that not all evangelicals are fundamentalists—Islam is not a central preoccupation.¹³ Of course, from a theological point of view, many fundamentalists consider Islam to be a false religion, and the members of these churches are more inclined to have an unfavorable opinion of Islam. Some fundamentalist pastors have joined activist movements opposed to the construction of mosques or to Sharia. But a fight against Islam is far from being the main battle of these groups. First, not all fundamentalists engage actively in politics. Second, among militant causes, stopping abortion, gay rights, and the Obama administration’s health-care reform and promoting prayer in schools and the teaching of creationism are all much more important to them than mosques, head scarves, and Sharia. Evangelical fundamentalists may not be big admirers of Islam, but secular humanism remains their number-one enemy.¹⁴ Therefore, I shall not be analyzing the controversies over Islam based on a simplistic paradigm of “culture wars.” Stereotypes, ignorance, and fear of Islam do exist across a large portion of the population. But the scale of recent debates and activism cannot be explained by an Islamophobic predisposition that would be culturally determined among a majority of Judeo-Christians. It is the political will of a minority of activists and organizations that is at the origin of the leading controversies, and these conflicts are precisely political more than they are religious or cultural.

Even if it did not always have the visibility that it acquired starting in 2001, Islam was at the heart of the principal battles that forged the American republic and its democracy. Muslims have not been mere extras or passive victims within a Protestant, white, racist culture. They have actively contributed to the transformation or the destabilization of that culture. To a great extent, the history of Islam in America is the history of America itself. However, an exhaustive retelling of this history is not the object of this study. It suffices to say that starting in the seventeenth century, Islam was perceived as an unusual religion. Its very status as a religion was regularly doubted, but it was also credited with a particular capacity for mediation, resistance, transformation, and even redemption within the nation. Numerous historical studies have insisted on the idea of the Americanization and progressive normalization of Muslims. But in fact these Muslims are represented less as individuals of an exotic culture who little by little “integrated” but instead as liminal, transitive figures, thanks to whom America has undertaken a reconciliation with itself on several occasions.

Despite the near total lack of sources that would relate the life of Muslim slaves in their native Africa, historians have been able to produce a relatively precise image of the way these first Muslims were perceived. The survival of Muslim slaves imported from Africa was made possible by a double process of what historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri calls “denegrifiction” and “reislamization.”¹⁵ Starting in the seventeenth century, a form of hierarchy was established that considered the Muslim slaves as less “Negro” than the other slaves. Racist observations by white masters about a given skin color, hair texture, or education level contributed to the development of the semicivilized figure of the “Moor.” Similarly, Islam, although considered inferior to Christianity, seemed more respectable than pagan beliefs and other forms of spirituality. A number of Muslim slaves participated in this construction, as is illustrated by the itinerary of Ibrahim Abdulrahman, the “Prince of slaves.” Born in Timbo in West Africa in 1762, this soldier’s son went to study in Mali in 1774. Upon his return in 1788, he was captured and sold to slave dealers and later turned up in Natchez, Mississippi. Thanks to the quality of his work and his education, he rose rapidly to become overseer on the cotton plantation of Thomas Foster, where he started a family and cultivated his own plot of land. Cyrus Griffin, the editor in chief of the local newspaper, the Southern Galaxy, offers this description: “That Prince…is a Moor, there can be but little doubt…. The Prince states explicitly, and with an air of pride, that not a drop of negro blood runs in his veins. He places the negro in a scale being infinitely below the Moor.”¹⁶

Before Abdulrahman was liberated by order of President John Quincy Adams in 1828, a number of those in favor of his emancipation attempted to demonstrate that he was practically Christian. Afterward, during his travels through the North, as he tried to raise money with the help of the American Colonization Society to buy the freedom of his children, he was presented as a Christian convert and said to have been baptized in a Baptist church. Abdulrahman left some doubt about the truth of his conversion, all the while understanding the advantages that a Christian identity could give him, as one sees in his reply to the Reverend Thomas Gallaudet, who had sent him a copy of the Old Testament in Arabic as well as an Arabic translation of Hugo Grotius’s On the Truth of the Christian Religion: “After I take this book home, I hope I shall get many to become Christians. I will show them the path of the Christian religion.”¹⁷

As shown by GhaneaBassiri, in pre–Civil War America, the Islamic religion of the African slaves played an important role in debates about the condition of slaves. While numerous defenders of slavery insisted that it was something positive that had contributed to improve the Africans’ condition, others point to the Muslim slaves as proof of a kind of civilization among Africans. The abolitionist Theodore Dwight pointed to the examples of slaves such as Abdulrahman, Umar Ibn Said, and Job Ben Solomon to show that blacks could be educated and civilized. The abolitionists’ interest in Islam was purely strategic. They did not have any true admiration for Islam comparable to what one can witness, for example, in France around the same time among the Islamophile followers of Auguste Comte.¹⁸ The praise of Islam was a rhetorical tool that allowed them to score points in polemical arguments about humanity and black culture. Like all of his contemporaries, Dwight thought that Mohammad was a false prophet, and the abolitionist bishop Benjamin Bosworth Smith claimed that the Quran was simply plagiarized from the Old Testament. Other critics of slavery insisted that it should be possible to use Muslim slaves in the efforts to evangelize Africa: “These [Arabic-speaking people] would appear to be superior in culture and civilization to surrounding people…. The way is open for evangelizing them through the Arabic language, by means of men who should be trained for the purpose in an Arabic department of the Liberia College.”¹⁹ The Muslim African slaves were thus perceived as transitive, ambiguous, borderline figures who constitute simultaneously both a separation from and a link between different entities: “As liminal figures, African Muslims provided an avenue by which some Anglo-Americans advanced a very different understanding of an English or American community in which the existing boundaries between races and religions were temporarily blurred, mainly, for commercial and missionary purposes.”²⁰

In post–Civil War America with slavery now abolished, Islam continues to play a role that is both central and paradoxical in debates about America’s civilization, identity, and progress. In a context influenced by the evolutionary thinking of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer, ideas of Protestantism’s superiority compared with other religions and of America’s exceptional status take hold. The pastor Josiah Strong affirms in his successful publication Our Country: Its Possible Future and Its Present Crisis (1885) that America’s triumph was founded on two principles that date from the Reformation and the Age of Reason—Christian spirituality and civil liberty. For him, other religions were not only inferior but dangerous for the progress of humanity. Catholicism was considered an authoritarian religion consistent with a lesser-evolved stage of humanity. By the end of the nineteenth century, the practice of comparing religions became commonplace in both academia and among the general public. Another successful publication, this one by the Unitarian minister and professor of theology at the Harvard Divinity School, James Freeman Clarke, is a good example of this enthusiasm for comparing religions. In Ten Great Religions: An Essay in Comparative Theology (1871), Clarke asserts that Protestantism is the single truly whole and universal religion, the other religions being what he calls partial religions because they are intimately linked to an ethnic community. For him, Islam cannot be characterized as a universal religion, because even if it has expanded beyond the borders of a particular ethnic community, “Mohammedanism has never sought to make converts but only subjects, it has not asked for belief, but merely for submission.”²¹

The Parliament of the World’s Religions, organized in 1893 in Chicago as part of the World’s Columbian Exposition, furthers the mainstreaming of these ideas of a hierarchy of religions and their common but unequal relationship to humanity. In his inaugural discourse, Charles Carroll Bonney, a leading organizer of the exposition and president of the World’s Congress Auxiliary and a layman in the Swedenborgian church, made the following declaration: “While the members of this Congress meet, as men, on a common ground of perfect equality, the ecclesiastical rank of each, in his own church, is, at the same time, gladly recognized and respected, as the just acknowledgment of his services and attainments. But no attempt is here made to treat all religions as of equal merit. Any such idea is expressly disclaimed.”²² His defense of Christianity is not a call to establish a Christian theocracy but rather a vision of a secularized world characterized by faith in America’s exceptional status.²³

Starting in the twentieth century, Islam plays an essential role in black American nationalist movements while still retaining the same ambiguous, semireligious status. The first prophets and founders of Afro-American Islam made it an essential tool in the struggle for equality. But this strategy led to the development of the idea that Afro-American Islam was necessarily part of a language of resistance more than a “true” religion. In a study titled Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), Edward Wilmot Blyden presents Islam as essential to the progress of Africa and Afro-Americans but says little about Islam as a religion. Although a severe critic of Christianity, Blyden never converted to Islam but was convinced that the emancipation of blacks could only come via Islam: “Nowhere can one find any community of Negro Christians who are autonomous and independent. Haiti and Liberia, the so-called Negro republics, are struggling simply to survive…. However, there are numerous communities and Negro Mohammedan states in Africa that are autonomous, productive, independent and dominant.”²⁴

Along the same lines, the principal mission of the Moorish Science Temple of America, created in 1925 by Noble Drew Ali, and the Nation of Islam (NOI), created in 1934 by Wallace Fard, was to offer African Americans an organization, a place, a style of life, and a vocabulary that would permit them to make sense of their past and alter their status as second-class citizens.²⁵ As shown by Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, the rewriting of black American history and the imagination of a more promising future would pass through Islam: “While black Muslims in the antebellum period played a passive role, for the most part, in the processes of their ‘de-negrofication,’ in the interwar period, the prophetic founder of the Moorish Science Temple…actively appropriated Islam in a ‘de-negrofying’ process that was designed to ascribe his followers a positive national identity.”²⁶

The prevailing view in the historiography of Afro-American Islam is that of a slow evolution from heterodoxy toward orthodoxy. Afro-American Islam at the beginning of the nineteenth century was said to be heterodox and syncretic, taking inspiration from both Judaism and Christianity, from African customs, and from Hinduism. Born from a mixture of intellectual sources and a variety of religious models, it supposedly remained heterodox with respect to the Sunni orthodoxy until Warith Deen Muhammad—the son of Elijah Muhammad, who had directed the NOI starting in 1934—took over the direction of the NOI in 1975 following the death of his father. After renaming the temples of the NOI “mosques,” replacing the title of “minister” with that of “imam,” and eliminating the NOI security forces known as the “Fruit of Islam,” the son changed the name from Nation of Islam to the American Society of Muslims. Thus it is said that the arrival of Warith Deen Muhammad as director of the NOI marks the beginning of the normalization of Afro-American Islam and of a rapprochement between Afro-American Muslim communities and Muslim communities of Middle Eastern origin.

Researchers have lately put into question the implications of such a narrative. For example, doesn’t the insistence on aspects of heterodoxy and fantasy within the sources of Afro-American Islam contribute to discredit black Islam? Certain authors thus reject the thesis according to which a deformed, heterodox Islam was introduced by self-proclaimed prophets to credulous blacks in search of a messiah within the ghettos of midwestern America.²⁷ They talk instead about the first contact between African Americans and Islam taking place within an international context of exchange with orthodox Muslims. They insist especially on the important role played by the encounter between black soldiers and European and North African troops during the First World War and how this led to the discovery of orthodox Sunni Islam. Thus it is said to be a network of intellectuals and not dishonest door-to-door salesmen who introduced Islam into black neighborhoods.

Outside this historiographical debate, the prevailing image throughout the United States of black Islam is that of a religion of resistance whose role is primarily social and political. African American communities excluded by the white, Protestant majority are said to have found in Islam a language and an ideal institutional vehicle to protest against racism, poverty, and lack of recognition. This is why Afro-American Islam is associated with and sometimes reduced to an Islam of prisoners and prisons. It was in prisons that Afro-Americans gradually converted to Islam starting in the 1920s and then massively starting in the 1950s—just as they would also sympathize with Che Guevara or Marxism. The centrality of the figure of Malcolm X in the historiography of Afro-American Islam not only expresses a widely shared admiration for his role in the civil rights movement. It also reinforces the rarely questioned assumption that the Islam of black Muslims has more to do with politics than with faith.²⁸ Perceived as a religion of the disadvantaged or disenfranchised, Afro-American Islam comes sometimes to seem like a second-class religion, and the sincerity and authenticity of the faith of Afro-American Muslims seems often to be doubted.²⁹

The same paradoxical process of rendering Islam invisible as a religion can be observed among the immigrant Muslim populations originating from Southeast Asia and the Middle East that began to settle in the United States starting around 1900. In order to integrate into society, they insisted first on their national and ethnic origins rather than on their religious affiliation. It is not until the end of the 1980s that a discourse develops to deliberately affirm and promote an American Islam that would transcend differences of national and ethnic origin. Initially, many immigrants underwent or freely engaged in a process of de-Islamification analogous to what was experienced by Muslim African slaves. To avoid discrimination, many of those who arrived at the beginning of the twentieth century even took Christian names and remained very discreet about their faith.³⁰ Immigrants from India and Syria fought to be recognized as belonging to the racial category “white” so as to gain easier access to American citizenship that foreigners of color were denied. Through the 1960s, immigrant Muslims mostly accepted the dominant paradigms that defined American identity as white and Protestant. Rather than putting them in question, they tried to blend in and remain quiet about their religious and ethnic characteristics:

In the many studies published starting in the 1980s about the religion of these immigrants, a paradoxical form of religion is evoked. The practices of Muslims of Arab or Asian origin are analyzed mostly from the standpoint of questions about relations between ethnic and cultural communities. Filled with good intentions, this multiculturalist approach aims to show that Muslims are capable of integrating into American society. But by presenting Islam as exclusively an ethnic and cultural attribute of certain minorities, it comes to ignore once again the fact that Islam is a religion. Those who take more interest in the precise doctrinal content of Islam develop the idea of the “reciprocal enrichment” of both Islam and America. Muslims would supposedly help or even save an American society in crisis that has lost its way and forgotten its own values. From this point of view, Muslim values not only are compatible with American values but actually represent the quintessential version, while American society is on the verge of falling into decadence. Others put the accent on the fortuitous opportunity that democratic American society represents for Islam because in this context true Muslim values will be able to fully express themselves. Researchers sympathetic to the school of John Esposito and the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University insist therefore on the correspondence and dialogue between Muslim and Christian values. Although provocative and counterintuitive, this approach remains faithful to the teleological narrative of Muslim integration and the American idea of progress.

In the years following the attacks on the World Trade Center, those in government, think-tank experts, and the foreign policy establishment all share roughly the same idea that it’s necessary to promote “moderate Islam” in Muslim countries in order to neutralize the advance of “radical Islam.” The experience of the Cold War serves as a point of reference: the strategic aid given to anti-Communists within Europe’s civil society, especially in Eastern Europe, is cited as the example to follow.³² With radical Islam posited as the equivalent of Communism, moderate Islam must play the role of the non-Communist Left. Numerous experts offer up criteria to differentiate moderates from extremists. The authors of a report published in 2004 by the Rand Corporation establish a correlation between the theological conceptions of Muslims and their attitude vis-à-vis American politics.³³ To distinguish “true” moderate Muslims from duplicitous ones, it is important, says the Rand report, to take into account both the political preferences that Muslim leaders express in public and their conceptions of the Quran. The only “true” moderates are those who have a nonliteral view of this sacred text. Thus the Rand experts are entirely closed to the idea of distinguishing between an “intransigent” believer’s attitude toward sacred texts and a “fundamentalist” attitude toward the society and the world. For them, intransigence implies or is a necessary concomitant of fundamentalism.³⁴

With the arrival of President Obama in the White House in January 2009, the containment strategy with regard to radical Islam gradually yielded to a new tactic—engagement with the Muslim world.³⁵ This idea rests on a particular conception of the Muslim world as one with a distinct political culture largely influenced by religion. Insofar as the political behavior of Muslims can be explained as reflecting or following from religious values, the American strategy should aim to restore Islam’s “true” values. The theory of engagement takes up a culturalist and idealist presupposition but translates it positively: because certain religious and cultural values may alter behaviors, the proper thing is to try to shape those values so as to foster social and political attitudes that are deemed desirable. In his June 4, 2009, speech in Cairo, President Obama expressed his wish to break with his predecessor’s paradigm of containing radical Islam: “This cycle of suspicion and discord must end. I’ve come here to Cairo to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world, one based on mutual interest and mutual respect.”³⁶

Obama insisted that Americans and Muslims belong to a common humanity defined by the same hopes and the same fears. The unilateralism and the imperial ambition to transform the Muslim world in a few months that were characteristics of the Bush administration’s “Greater Middle East Initiative” were rejected as unrealistic. Islam was now considered as a resource to be used to improve relations between the United States and the Muslim world, and was no longer considered simply as a threat. In the June 4, 2009, speech, Obama defined Islam as the comprehensive category that ought to be actively kept in mind for fashioning solutions to a variety of conflicts in the Middle East and Central Asia. The president underscored with several quotations from the Quran that the “true” Islam promotes tolerance and freedom, and he criticized a minority of extremists for having betrayed the true values of Islam. Finally, he underlined the similarity of values and interests between the Muslim world and the United States: “America and Islam are not exclusive and need not be in competition. Instead, they overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings.”

The rhetoric of the Obama administration is positive, friendly, and pragmatic in contrast to the public discourse of his predecessor, which appeared more offensive and idealistic. However, the goals are the same: defend the nation’s domestic security and its exceptional role in the world. Obama’s declaration represents more a courteous translation of the realist’s paradigm—the containment of radical Islam—than a true political and theoretical alternative.

There is no doubt a wish to break with an earlier period by establishing calmer relations with Muslims thanks to several indirect initiatives to build an official, moderate American Islam. But one can observe today, as under President Bush, a certain blurring of borders between domestic policy and foreign policy, between civil liberties and national security, and between governance and theology. A discourse that favors combating the radicalization of American Muslims has developed—a discourse that takes inspiration from theories used within foreign policy projects in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, and Saudi Arabia as well as in Europe.³⁷ General Douglas Stone began a program of “religious enlightenment” in Iraqi prisons that includes organizing meetings between moderate imams and radicalized prisoners in order to point the way to another conception of their religion. To further these efforts, American officials created a sort of comparative glossary that presents radical and moderate verses from the Quran “in order to refute detainees when they use certain passages to support a radical interpretation of Islam.”³⁸ In 2010, the independent, nonpartisan, federally funded United States Institute of Peace published a report, Countering Radicalization in America: Lessons from Europe, that claims the United States “must be prepared to intervene in ideological and theological matters.”³⁹ The program Prevent, implemented in the United Kingdom in 2007 to counter “domestic” radicalization, was an important source of inspiration for the United States. The British program aims both to correct deviant behavior thanks to a variety of educational and socializing initiatives and to disseminate among “at-risk” populations the necessary arguments and analyses in favor of moderate Islam. The American attempts to imitate the model of Britain’s Prevent project are initiated at precisely the moment when modifications to the program are being considered in response to widespread criticism and doubts about its actual effectiveness. Muslims are not a passive target in such projects to establish a moderate Islam. Certain religious leaders, such as the imam Mohamed Magid, the executive director of the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, have become quasi-official representatives of American Islam.⁴⁰ The recent history of leading Muslim organizations also confirms these attempts to construct an American Islam. Since the end of the 1980s, these organizations, unlike those started in the 1960s, are not satisfied with simply providing a Muslim-friendly space and theological teaching to its members.⁴¹ Their purpose is no longer simply to provide immigrant Muslims with services related to daily religious practice but to defend their civil rights and encourage them to participate in local and national political debates. This is the explicit mission of two current organizations that are the most engaged in controversies relating to Islam: the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).⁴²

Even if these initiatives are motivated by good intentions and aim to improve relations between governing bodies and Muslims, they represent a rather curious form of governance where theology is blended with national security concerns.⁴³ Expert in national security law Samuel Rascoff argues that “counter-radicalization, puts the government in the position, vis-à-vis Islam, of serving as a kind of official theologian, taking positions on the meaning of inevitably contested religious concepts and weighing in on one side of debates that rage within a particular faith tradition.”⁴⁴

If Islam has appeared throughout American history as a paradoxical sort of religion, how do Americans define a “true” religion? Independent of the prejudices and feelings of the nation’s different religious communities, what are the criteria that legally distinguish a true religion from a nonreligion? Lawmakers, judges, and other civic leaders have tried to answer this question since the nineteenth century in order to deal with the claims of numerous religious minorities. Mormons, Catholics, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Amerindians, and Jews have regularly called into question, through the courts, a certain normative definition inspired by Protestantism of the true religion in order to have their rights recognized. The questions that revolve around Islam are not fundamentally different from those asked about all these other religions. Since the nineteenth century, American courts have had to resolve conflicts about religious freedom and determine the meaning of the two clauses of the Constitution’s First Amendment—the establishment clause and the clause of free exercise—as well as the relationship between these clauses: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”⁴⁵ Because the Constitution does not define what a religion is, it has been necessary to develop over time criteria that allow a line to be drawn about what constitutes acceptable religious behavior, while refraining to give a positive definition of religion. To properly understand today’s debates about Islam, one must keep this long tradition of legal discussions about the First Amendment in mind.

In 1878, the Supreme Court specified for the first time the meaning of the “free exercise” clause in the case of Reynolds v. United States. George Reynolds, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—that is, the Mormons—was convicted of bigamy in violation of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act (1862), which declared the practice of having multiple spouses illegal. Reynolds attempted to argue in his defense that the law violates the free exercise clause of the Constitution and that “plural marriage” was for him a religious obligation. The Supreme Court justices rejected his argument and ruled that Reynolds’s religious liberty was not infringed by the Morrill Act. In effect, the Court’s decision established a distinction between religious beliefs and the actions that follow from them. If the free exercise clause protects beliefs, it does not authorize all actions committed in their name. Since the Constitution provides no definition of religion, the justices are left to inquire into what the Founding Fathers may have meant by the term. They refer notably to the Virginia Statue for Religious Freedom and in particular to a letter from 1802 written by Thomas Jefferson to the leaders of the Danbury Baptists. In this letter, Jefferson makes a clear distinction between actions and religious opinions:

Winnifred Sullivan, an authority on religion in American courts, notes that the Reynolds affair is also significant because it is one of the first cases where the Supreme Court justices make use of an expert’s testimony to help them define what a religion is. Justice Waite cites the views of the jurist and political philosopher Francis Lieber, who associated polygamy with a savage mode of life proper to “Asian” and “African” peoples: “Polygamy has always been odious among the northern and Western nations of Europe, and, until the establishment of the Mormon Church, was almost exclusively a feature of the life of Asiatic and of African people.” The judge refers to Lieber’s testimony to argue that polygamy is contrary to public order: “Professor Lieber says, polygamy leads to the patriarchal principle, and which, when applied to large communities, fetters the people in stationary despotism.”⁴⁸

The restrictive approach adopted in the Reynolds case has since been put into question on several occasions. In Sherbert v. Verner (1963), the Supreme Court chose a more flexible interpretation of the free exercise clause. Adele Sherbert, an employee in a textile mill in South Carolina and a member of the Seventh-day Adventists, was fired after she refused to work on a Saturday, a day on which, according to her religion, it was forbidden to work. She sued her employer, who was refusing to grant her unemployment compensation. This time, Justice William Brennan rendered a decision in Sherbert’s favor, affirming that to deprive the employee of unemployment benefits because she had respected a religious precept was in violation of the free exercise clause: “[T]o condition the availability of benefits upon this appellant’s willingness to violate a cardinal principle of her religious faith effectively penalizes the free exercise of her constitutional liberties.”⁴⁹ The Supreme Court makes use of this case to define the criteria of a superior interest of the state (a “compelling state interest”), which asserts that, before adopting a measure that limits the free exercise of an individual, the government must be able to prove that the protection of a compelling state interest (such as the safety of a given population) is at issue.

Nevertheless, in 1990, with the case of Employment Division v. Smith, there is a return to the more restrictive approach that prevailed in the Reynolds case. This case opposes two members of the Native American Church (NAC) to the human resources department of the employment board of the state of Oregon. Alfred Smith and Galen Beck, who were employed as psychologists at a drug-rehabilitation center, were fired for having consumed peyote at work. The state of Oregon refused to grant them unemployment benefits on the grounds that they had been fired for misconduct. An appeals court reversed the first decision by accepting the argument of the two members of the NAC for whom the consumption of peyote was said to be a religious obligation, and therefore the denial of benefits was a violation of their religious freedom. The Supreme Court rejected this argument and asserted that the free exercise clause could not be invoked to justify infractions of generally applied neutral laws such as the prohibition of certain drugs by the state of Oregon. The law in question applied to everyone and did not specifically target members of the NAC. Judge Antonin Scalia referred to the reasoning applied by the Supreme Court in the Reynolds case and underlined that even though the First Amendment prevents the government from regulating beliefs by law, it is under no obligation to protect any and all practices. Accepting the reasoning of the two employees would have had dangerous consequences, says the Court:

The goal here is not to retrace the complete trail of jurisprudence on the First Amendment but to underline with this brief review of some of the most important cases the long-standing and complex history of the debates about religious freedom that date from long before the question of Islam occurs. The general question of what exactly is to be protected by the First Amendment—beliefs or practices—has been argued over since the nineteenth century.

Another matter that has been debated for a long time in American courts is what criteria are to be used to define practices and symbols as religious or cultural. In Lynch v. Donnelly (1984), the Supreme Court had to rule on whether the presentation of a Nativity scene in a public space represented a form of indirect establishment of a religion or if it was simply an acceptable cultural practice. A group of residents in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, lodged a complaint against the city, claiming that exhibiting the usual scene of Christ’s birth in the business district of the city constituted an official establishment of the Christian religion. A district court and a court of appeals ruled in favor of the plaintiffs, but the Supreme Court overturned the decision. In a 5 to 4 vote, the Court ruled that the presence of the Nativity did not aim to promote a particular religious message but had “legitimate secular purposes.”⁵¹ Justice Warren Burger, author of the opinion of the Court, underscored that the symbol of the Nativity had been part of Western culture for a long time. It was simply a part of the celebration of a public holiday, not of a religion. It was said to have a symbolic value comparable to references to God in American courts or to the words “In God We Trust” printed on American currency: “Those government acknowledgments of religion serve, in the only ways reasonably possible in our culture, the legitimate secular purposes of solemnizing public occasions, expressing confidence in the future, and encouraging the recognition of what is worthy of appreciation in society. For that reason, and because of their history and ubiquity, those practices are not understood as conveying government approval of particular religious beliefs.”⁵² It is worth noting that the most ardent opposition to this decision came from a Catholic judge, William Brennan, who refused to see the Nativity reduced to a religious symbol: “The crèche retains a specifically Christian religious meaning…. The nativity scene is clearly distinct in its purpose and effect from the rest of the Hodgson Park display for the simple reason that it is the only one rooted in a biblical account of Christ’s birth.”⁵³ The Catholic judge, by his attachment to a religious interpretation of the Nativity’s symbolism, proves to be the one most in favor of a strict separation of religious space and public space.

To help determine which characteristics are pertinent for defining a religion, there has often been recourse to the opinions of experts, including theologians, sociologists, and historians of religion. But this use of expert testimony raises numerous questions. This can be seen from the experience of Winnifred Fallers Sullivan, a religion scholar who has been asked to testify many times in court. Of particular note was her participation in the case of Warner v. Boca Raton, which concerned a family whose relatives were buried in the municipal cemetery of Boca Raton, Florida. Despite a city ordinance that authorized cemetery decorations up to a certain size, certain families had placed objects of a larger size on graves. When the city council suddenly decided to have these decorations removed, the families filed a suit on the grounds that the removal was a violation of their right to free exercise. The question debated by the court was whether the decorations placed on the graves corresponded to a true religious practice that merited protection. Five experts, three for the plaintiffs and two for the city of Boca Raton, where invited to state their views. In the opinion of the two experts for the defense, the funerary decorations did not constitute an essential part of the religious practice of the plaintiffs but was merely a folkloric custom. Sullivan asked whether it is even possible to arrive at a legally neutral definition of religious freedom and about the usefulness of turning to this type of expert testimony. What is the value of these testimonies? In what way do they allow one to arrive at a fairer decision? How can one think that consulting religion specialists can help arrive at a consensus when one knows how divided the academic field of religious studies is? “If each American is entirely free to make her own decision about her religious standpoint and activity, in what sense can religious expertise be legally ‘scientific,’ or even ‘assist’ the trier of fact [judge or jury]?”⁵⁴

Given the complexity of the question (How shall religion be defined, and who shall do the defining?), Sullivan was led to the hypothesis that religious liberty is quite simply impossible. She was not claiming that freedom of conscience and practice should not be protected but that it is impossible to satisfactorily solve the dilemma that, for the judge, consists in trying to protect religious freedom without relying on some standard of what’s religious. Any judgment will inevitably be based on some theological or philosophical conceptions or on cultural presuppositions of a judge or experts. A neutral legal definition is impossible—it is always influenced by dominant conceptions within a given society about what constitutes a “true” religion. Religious minorities will thus have more trouble convincing others to consider different conceptions of the category “religion” as normal and acceptable. This imbalance is not necessarily the result of conscious intentions of some cultural majority to dominate minorities. It is more the result of the inherent ambiguity of the First Amendment. If today Muslims are particularly targeted, similar questions have been asked about all religions. In the Boca Raton case, it was Jewish and Catholic families that brought the suit. The judge and experts for the defense asserted that the cemetery decorations were simply a nonessential form of folklore. Most American religious communities have, to varying degrees, been forced to resist this attempt to construct a hierarchy between what a judge considers to be of essence to a religion and what he or she dismisses as simply a popular custom. Thus when constrained to judge between a religion’s essence and its incidental features, the judge is obliged, despite everything, to tread into the territory of theology. Therefore, when Sullivan speaks of the impossibility of religious freedom, she means the impossibility of a perfectly neutral, fair, secular treatment of individuals. For her, the challenge of interpreting the First Amendment is made all the more difficult by the fact that American culture is both separationist and evangelical.

For all these reasons, Sullivan questions the usefulness of the specifically legal concept of religious freedom. She proposes that it simply be thought of within the category of individual freedoms: “What is arguably impossible is justly enforcing laws granting persons rights that are defined with respect to their religious beliefs or practices. Forsaking religious freedom as a legally enforced right might enable greater equality among persons and greater clarity and self-determination for religious individuals and communities. Such a change would end discrimination against those who do not self-identify as religious or whose religion is disfavored.”⁵⁵ This brief look at legal debates about religious freedom proves that today’s controversies about Islam cannot simply be understood as expressions of hostility toward Muslims since September 11. They are, rather, part of a long and complex history of questions and debates over the First Amendment.

To explain the increase in the number of controversies, leaders of Muslim organizations along with their liberal allies turn mostly to the paradigm of Islamophobia. After first appearing in the 1980s, this paradigm became even more popular after 2001. CAIR and MPAC, for example, publish every year a series of notices and reports denouncing the many aspects of this phenomenon. In its 2009/2010 report, CAIR condemns Islamophobic declarations and actions while at the same time recognizing that all religious minorities have been the object of exclusionary reactions.⁵⁶ The study’s title, Same Hate, New Target, captures the main idea—that “virtually every minority in our nation has faced and in most cases continues to face discrimination.”⁵⁷ CAIR defines Islamophobia as “close-minded prejudice or hatred of Islam and Muslims. An Islamophobe is an individual who holds a close-minded view of Islam and promotes prejudice against or hatred of Muslims.”⁵⁸ The report does specify, however, that not all criticism of Islam can be characterized as Islamophobic: “It is not appropriate to label all, or even the majority of those, who question Islam and Muslims as Islamophobic.”⁵⁹

In May 2011, an exhaustive report was published for the first time by a non-Muslim organization, the center-left think tank Center for American Progress. The report, Fear, Inc., defines Islamophobia as “an exaggerated fear, hatred, and hostility toward Islam and Muslims that is perpetuated by negative stereotypes resulting in bias, discrimination, and the marginalization and exclusion of Muslims from America’s social, political, and civic life.”⁶⁰ This phenomenon is said to be the work of a small number of organizations, foundations, intellectuals, and media outlets linked together by common financial interests and possessing considerable power to harm. This network constitutes what the report’s two main authors call the “Islamophobia Megaphone.” It is made up of three types of actors: rich foundations that fund different projects, such as the Richard Mellon Scaife Foundation, the Russell Berrie Foundation, and the William Rosenwald Family Fund; “misinformation experts”; and the “Islamophobia echo chamber.” Among the experts cited are Frank Gaffney and his think tank, the Center for Security Policy; Robert Spencer and his website, Jihad Watch; and Steven Emerson and his Investigative Project on Terrorism. The echo chamber of Islamophobic misinformation is constituted by certain media outlets, the Christian Right, some politicians and grassroots organizations such as the American Congress for Truth (ACT! for America), the Tea Party, and the group Stop Islamization of America.

In a report published in June 2012, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization dedicated to defending civil rights and combating racist white supremacist groups, also denounced the proliferation of Islamophobic declarations and deeds. This phenomenon is thought to be not simply the product of activism by rich right-wing foundations but a symptom of a changed attitude of the American Right: “The last decade has seen major changes in the American radical Right. What was once a world largely dominated by a few relatively well-organized groups has become a scene populated by large numbers of smaller, weaker groups, with only a handful led by the kind of charismatic chieftains that characterized the 1990s.”⁶¹ According to the SPLC, this evolution is in part attributable to the context of economic crisis and the growing malaise among a portion of the white population that is fearful about the erosion of its majority status. The U.S. Census Bureau predicts that by 2050, the category “non-Hispanic white” will constitute less than half of the country’s population. The proliferation of anti-Muslim behavior coincides with a radicalization of right-wing, antigay religious groups as well as an unprecedented multiplication of “patriot” groups whose first target is the federal government. The SPLC claims that in 2008, only 149 such groups existed, but the number has reached 1,274 today. Among the new leaders of this radical Right—less charismatic than those of the 1990s but more numerous and extreme in their views—one finds leading figures of anti-Muslim movements such as Frank Gaffney, Brigitte Gabriel, and David Yerushalmi. Another “megaphone” person listed is Joseph Farah, the executive editor of WorldNetDaily, a news website of the radical Right. Farah, a specialist on conspiracy theories and a leader in the “nativist” movement, has been determined to show since 2008 that Barack Obama is not American and that Muslims are preparing to take over America. John Weaver, a pastor in Georgia’s Freedom Baptist Ministries and a member of the racist neo-Confederate movement, was a long-time member of the Council of Conservative Citizens, an extremist group known for inciting racial hatred throughout the southern United States. Weaver has described African Americans as an inferior race and openly declares his opposition to interracial marriage. There is also Alex Jones, the radio host of the Alex Jones Show, who explains to his listeners five times a week that rich corporations aided by the United States are plotting to dominate the world; that the federal government was behind the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building and the September 11 attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C.; and that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the government organization charged with responding to natural disasters and terrorist attacks, is in the process of building concentration camps.

Even though use of the term “Islamophobia” has spread in recent years among liberals and Muslims, it is heavily criticized by their adversaries. The British American journalist Christopher Hitchens rejected the term, calling it a “stupid neologism…which aims to promote criticism of Islam to the gallery of special offenses associated with racism.”⁶² Similarly, David Prager, a conservative columnist and radio host, has often protested against this term, whose sole aim, he believes, is to intimidate Americans and prevent them from articulating the slightest criticism of Islam. The defenders and opponents of the term regularly face off in the American media. Prager, Hitchens, and Ibrahim Hooper, the spokesman for CAIR, held a debate on November 13, 2010, on CNN that took up the following question: What is the proper name to describe the actions of a student of Ukrainian origin who several times threw the Quran in the toilets of his university? For Hitchens and Prager, this was simply a case of the exercise of free speech; for Hooper, the student’s action was an expression of hatred aimed to intimidate Muslim students and destroy their self-esteem.

Whatever one thinks of the term “Islamophobia,” the number of public controversies over Islam has clearly grown since 2008. It was especially in 2010—coincidently, the year of the electoral success of various Tea Party groups and individuals—that local movements in opposition to the construction of mosques were the strongest. In 2010, the Department of Justice published a report assessing the ten years that had passed since the implementation of the Religious Land Use and Institutionalized Persons Act, a law protecting the freedom to build religious edifices as well as the rights of prisoners.⁶³ The report notes that since 2000, 7 percent of the investigations into the application of this law concern violations of the rights of Muslims. The latter, however, represent only 0.6 percent of the population (3 percent of the cases concerned the rights of Buddhists, who represent 0.5 percent of the population; and Jewish rights violations concerned 6 percent, and they are 1.7 percent of the population). Following the controversy surrounding the construction of an Islamic community center in Manhattan, a number of disputes of the same kind broke out in a kind of domino effect across several states including Tennessee, Florida, and North Carolina, where Muslims make up less than 1 percent of the population. Starting in the summer of 2010, a group of lawyers, right-wing think-tank experts, and foundations launched a legal battle to gain passage of a law that would prohibit reference to Islamic law in American courts. In March 2011, Representative Peter T. King (R-N.Y.), already active in the Manhattan controversy, organized in Congress a day of public hearings specifically about the radicalization of Muslim communities and the alleged lack of cooperation by Muslims to oppose it. In the spring of 2012, the revelation by two journalists that a very anti-Islam film was being used as part of a training program by the New York Police Department also provoked a storm of controversy. In all these cases, one finds nearly the same individuals and organizations turning up. It strongly suggests that there is indeed a coherent network of actors and institutions that have similar material interests, the same vision of the world, and considerable power of nuisance.

But the history of American Islam is not only about this fight between networks of Islamophobes and Muslims. One reason is that many youth activists, grassroots organizations, interfaith coalitions, professors, public intellectuals, experts, think tanks, and media liberals are firmly opposed to such campaigns. Besides the groups Center for American Progress and SPLC, media celebrities such as Jon Stewart, Keith Olbermann, Stephen Colbert, and Rachel Maddow have regularly used their shows to ridicule the arguments of Gaffney and Gabriel and their followers. Media Matters for America, a watchdog group founded by the journalist David Brock, and the blog Loonwatch also regularly expose the factual mistakes that underlie the alarmist analyses of the opposing camp. Finally, important political figures also oppose Islamophobic attacks. They include the Muslim representative Keith Ellison but also Republicans such as Senator John McCain and the former mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg.

Moreover, if Islamophobia is effective in stirring up militant action, it does not adequately explain why the anti-Muslim actions and declarations are on the rise, or the effects that these actions have on the individuals concerned. Analyses based on Islamophobia explain the present conflicts in essentially two points: the imperial project of the United States and a feeling of fear. In one study from 2011, Islamophobia is defined as an American ideology that developed after the Cold War by means of which the United States seeks to keep its domestic populations tame while projecting its force abroad. The Islamophobic ideology would thus reflect the imbalance of international forces and America’s hegemony over the Muslim world. In this view, a multitude of individuals from neoconservatives to hawkish Democrats to Christian evangelicals and even certain cooperative Muslims constitute “a systematic structure” that is almost impossible to break.⁶⁴ Another study from 2012 also defines Islamophobia as the ideology of an imperial project. But here the genealogy of the phenomenon dates from long before the Cold War: from the time of the Crusades to the Obama administration, the same Islamophobic “spirit” is said to have traversed the West and permitted Western powers to defend their interests both abroad and at home.⁶⁵

For others, Islamophobia is not a symptom of a politics of power but of a general sentiment of the West’s decline, of a sort of inward turn and fear of the other. Thus, for example, the philosopher Martha Nussbaum explains the controversies in Europe over burkas and minarets as well as the Manhattan mosque affair as resulting from the spread of fear of the other and an unsettled identity.⁶⁶ Nussbaum repeats a well-established presupposition in Western research on Islam, particularly in American university discourse, while also affirming that America remains more tolerant than Europe, which is considered to be attached to a Romantic ideal of the nation that combines religious tradition and culture.