Islam: An American Religion

One could be tempted to explain the appearance of these arguments as simply an offshoot of the memory of September 11, 2001. But even if the trauma provoked by those attacks counts for something, it could not alone explain the sizable malaise surrounding Islam. September 11, 2001, certainly marks a turning point. “On Sept. 10, 2001, nobody in America seemed to know anything about Islam. On Sept. 12, 2001, everybody seemed to know everything about Islam,” quipped Leon Wieseltier in a New York Times Book Review.¹ But it is certainly since the election of Barack Obama, the first African American president—who is considered a Muslim by 11 percent of the population according to a 2012 Gallup poll and whose nationality is doubted by a large contingent of right-wing conspiracy theorists—that controversies related to Islam have multiplied.² In a social context marked by a serious economic crisis, ferocious opposition by the Republican Party to President Obama’s plan to reform the health care system, the success of the Tea Party, and a noticeable tendency toward extremism of the American Right, Islam has become, like in Europe, a focus of questions and a source of discord. Unlike during the two terms in office of George W. Bush (2000–2008), the talk is no longer simply about how to halt the progress of radical Islam in the Middle East so as to safeguard the interests and security of the country. Now it’s about asking about the place of Islam in America and about the intentions of Muslims. What goes on in mosques? Is Sharia a religious or legal code? Is Islam a religion? Do Muslims deserve to be Americans?

The development of a fear of subversion or of an imminent Islamic invasion of America is apparently all the more enigmatic since Muslims barely represent 0.6 percent of the American population. Also, since they have very diverse ethnic and national origins, they are far from constituting a homogeneous, unified community that could pose any significant threat or hold political weight. On average, their socioeconomic standing is quite similar and slightly above the national average, and they tend to be conservative on moral and social issues—in other words, far from the myth of a marginalized, excluded population inclined toward seditious behavior. Moreover, in contrast to the European context, the figure of the Muslim in America is not clearly equated with “immigrant.” In the United States, that figure is first of all the “Latino,” who is Catholic—except when he converts to Islam, and that is occurring more and more often. Therefore, the American case is also interesting because even though Islam is not a metaphor for immigration, it provokes fears and arguments similar to those one hears in Europe.

The 2012 presidential campaign revealed the persistent mistrust and specific fear of Islam. Although when first announced Mitt Romney’s candidacy raised many questions about the plausibility of a Mormon president, in the end the religion of the Republican candidate caused less of a stir than some had thought it would. The campaign even contributed to a relatively speedy normalization of views about the Mormon religion in the American media. Even though many Christians on the right still refuse the idea that Mormonism is a part of Christianity, a majority of the population considers it a mainstream religion whose American-ness is not in question. But this is not the case for Islam, which is still widely perceived as irreducibly foreign and dangerous even if the Muslims living in the United States are, and proclaim themselves to be, resolutely American.

How is one to analyze the persistence and even amplification of this fear of Islam in a country that prides itself on its long history of acceptance and progressive assimilation of all religious minorities? To what extent are these public anti-Muslim incidents serving as substitutes for the expression of more fundamental anxieties and unhappiness about the very significance of liberal democracy? These questions are worth asking because what’s striking about the polemical debates that have occurred in the United States since 2008 on the subject of mosques, Sharia, and the sale of halal products is the systematic association between anti-Islam arguments and arguments hostile toward liberal secular democracy. Pointing out the danger of a certain mosque or of the hidden agenda of a certain Muslim association is always closely tied to antiliberal, populist reasoning. How is it, antiliberals decry, that these elite judges and these liberal civil rights organizations remain so blind to the “danger”? Why are liberals so stubborn about wanting to guarantee the same rights to all citizens, they continue, when it is so important to submit Muslims to an exceptional regimen? Judges, political leaders, and liberal activists have made every effort to denounce such remarks as contrary to law, the Constitution, and the principle of separation of church and state, yet it has quickly become clear that countering these statements with the language of law and the Constitution offers no satisfying full-proof comeback. Attempts to defend Muslim rights in the name of respect for liberal secular principles have failed to convince a significant portion of the population. The question that the controversies raise is therefore not just about the reasons for the persistent fear of Islam. Of more fundamental importance is the question of liberalism’s capacity (as a philosophical, political, and legal theory) to resolve current tensions and problems linked to the acceptance of Islam. What do arguments over Islam teach us about the widespread hatefulness toward liberal democracy and secularism? To what extent does the liberal tendency to put forward law as the principal instrument for resolving the current conflicts fittingly and effectively respond to the demands and unhappiness expressed in these controversies?

Since 2000, the theme of the encounter between “Islam” and “the West” has been the focus of a large number of studies in both academia and the popular media. One notes, however, that this debate has generally remained very normative—organized mostly around deciding if, yes or no, Islam is “compatible” with democracy, laïcité, women’s rights (and, more recently, the rights of children and animals), and if Muslims are capable of integrating into Western societies. One witnesses here the relentless opposition and confrontation between those who affirm that there is nothing about Muslims that would prevent their integration and those who maintain that Islam is fundamentally contrary to all liberal principles. Each of these two possibilities is put forward with more or less documentation and less or more polemically. The argument in favor of the unexceptional and unproblematic status of Islam can be developed along liberal, republican, or postcolonial lines of argument.³ The essentialist and culturalist thesis can be found in the writings of notable continuators of the work of the Middle Eastern specialist Bernard Lewis as well as, in more nuanced form, in the numerous analyses performed by authors who claim a firm attachment to the European Enlightenment tradition or to that of Islamic rationalism.⁴

Independently of the way in which each participant positions himself in this debate, the very terms of the discussion are problematic insofar as they presuppose an overly large homogeneity both when it comes to Islam and when it comes to what constitutes liberal democracy. The longer the debate is pursued, the more one notices it being uncritically accepted that the only pertinent question is what are the conditions of possibility for the encounter between an ensemble of practices, norms, and discourses vaguely associated with Islam and an ensemble of rules and behaviors that are associated with liberal democracy and secularism. There is, however, a third line of analysis that aims to go beyond the binary opposition of the essentialist thesis and the anticulturalist approach by showing the multiplicity and similarity of fractures and transformations that have taken place both in Muslim communities and societies and in Western societies.⁵ By adopting this perspective, this book seeks to contribute to a reformulation of the problem by asking not about “Islam and democracy” but instead about liberal secularism’s confrontation with itself. The antagonism in need of understanding is not the conflict between Islam and America but a dispute that America is having with itself. The question of interest here is not to know “what failed” in Islam or in the Muslim world. I am more interested in taking the occasion of these specific debates about Islam to inquire into the unhappiness and misunderstandings that are surfacing with respect to liberal secularism as a political theory and legal regime.

Despite the fundamental differences that exist between Europe and the United States when it comes to the history of religious freedom and the sociology of Muslims, one can observe a paradoxical convergence of Euro-American argumentation on Islam. It is this paradox that my book underlines by questioning the presupposition of a radical opposition between American and European models for the protection of religious freedom. According to this presupposition, it is generally agreed that since September 11, 2001, the United States has, to say the least, tense relations with the Muslim world. Yet it is continually stated that American Muslims are considerably wealthier and better educated than their lumpenproletariat Muslim counterparts in Europe, and generally live in peace in the United States without provoking arguments and affairs on the scale one observes in Europe. Also over the same period, an entire media machine in America got started with the aim of explaining why Europeans detest Muslims so much, and of course France remains the favorite target of American commentators. It’s hard to keep track of the number of scholarly or general studies that demonstrate—often by means of disturbing historical shortcuts and despite obvious ignorance of the history of French laïcité and of the operation of the country’s political institutions—that Muslims in France are essentially all discriminated against, excluded, and under suspicion. These writings offer exhaustive lists of the judged and the judges, such as “the Jacobin State,” “the Republican model,” “authoritarian secularism,” “postcolonialism,” and “intransigent feminism.” Even if in certain of these publications one can find pertinent and detailed critiques of French policies toward Islam, these concepts have become the bass notes of a dominant refrain, the common labels that American researchers and public intellectuals use to perpetuate, often with a patronizing tone, an idea of American exceptionalism and a corresponding European malediction in the treatment of Islam. But if Americans like to caricature Europeans, the latter are no less capable of slinging it right back. A large majority of European peoples, with perhaps France in the lead, continue to describe the United States as a homogeneous society composed of white, racist, Islamophobic evangelical fundamentalists ready to bomb any troublesome Muslim country, large or small.

The aim of this book is therefore to understand how these two models, supposedly so diametrically opposed, arrive at the same crux—the incompatibility of Islam with “Western values.” Could it be that beyond the large differences between the Muslims of Europe and those in the United States, and between the types of arrangements between the religious and the political on each side of the Atlantic, these so-called models are not so different after all? In other words, is it possible to claim that these “models” are becoming increasingly similar not just because of a shared malaise about Islam but also because of an expanding reexamination of the very political principles that they are founded on? How is it that the European and American debates on Islam offer a distorted image, a parodic representation of the ideal of rational collective deliberation over theories of liberal politics, an ideal that continues to play a decisive normative role in the way Western democracies see themselves and represent themselves? Surely nothing is further from this ideal than the way debates are conducted, in Europe and the United States, about mosques, minarets, burkas, public prayer, Sharia, or the condition of Muslim women. Instead of the liberal ideal of an exchange of reasoned arguments, we find streams of absurd reasoning founded on burlesque analogies and speculation. Resentment and bad faith take the place of the famous “agreeing to disagree,” while the tone of exchanges fluctuates between violence and buffoonery. Rumors and revelations posted on any website are accepted as proof. The testimony of counterfeit intellectuals with dubious qualifications is taken as seriously as the statements of legal or academic experts and theologians. The controversies over Islam amount to a cacophony of the deaf and represent exactly the inverse of the ideal situation of rational communication and collective deliberation as stipulated by normative liberal theory. And yet, as absurd, burlesque, and shrill as they are, these polemics also produce positive effects. The parties reach ways of mutually adjusting, learn to get to know each other, and develop new rules for living together. The controversies divide but most of all they go in circles. However, after going in circles long enough, the conflicting sides learn more about each other, even if the upshot may be to detest each other all the more.

Chapter 1 recalls the principal historical and sociological characteristics of Muslims in America, and shows that from a legal point of view, what they seek is no different from what other religious minorities request.

Chapter 2 analyzes the different controversies surrounding the construction of mosques and examines the opposition between, on the one hand, the legal logic and, on the other, the repertoire of emotions and moralizing that is central to the arguments of a large portion of the public.

Chapter 3 considers the anti-Sharia movement, which seeks to banish from the courts all reference to Islamic law and asks about the particular conception of democracy that underlies this exceptional and unconstitutional treatment of Muslims.

Chapter 4 examines the way the Tea Party seized on the Islamic question starting in 2010 and how its tactics operate within a long-standing rhetorical tradition of populism and a form of paranoid rationality that expresses an illiberal conception of democracy.

Chapter 5 looks at how the treatment of Islam as a matter of foreign policy reveals less clear distinctions than those observed in domestic quarrels between moral registers, law, and security. The policy of exporting the principle of international religious freedom is founded mostly on a culturalist approach that opposes an intolerant Muslim world to a persecuted Christian world.