I thank the authors—Welborne, Westfall, Çelik Russell, and Tobin (Welborne et al.)—for their thoughtful comments regarding my book and this journal for giving me the opportunity to respond.

I address first their comments on research methodology, specifically on how my qualitative data relate to my findings. As laid out in the introduction, the central findings of my study are based on nationwide, nationally representative surveys of Muslims and non-Muslims living in the United States. I provide color to these findings by including details from interviews, focus groups, and case studies throughout, but do not attempt to make generalized empirical claims based on this qualitative data, given its limitations. Instead, the representative survey data allow me to systematically examine relationships that have previously only been theorized and to examine how features—such as gender, age of migration, time lived in the United States, generation, and race—can shape Muslim Americans’ experiences and views of the post-9/11 environment. Their second point—that the complete list of survey items is not included in the appendix—is fair but is fundamentally a stylistic critique: a full description of each survey item, its coding, and model specification appears in each relevant chapter, with additional information in the appendices.

Next, I challenge Welborne et al.’s suggestion that I assume integration to be a linear process. Rather than attempting to make a theoretical claim about Muslim American integration, I empirically observe that Muslims reflect their non-Muslim counterparts increasingly across generations, with a diversity of experiences within various segments of the population across race, gender, age, and naturalization, which I discuss at length. The abundance of theories on the contested and complex models of integration, incorporation, and assimilation also means that scholars lack a common empirical measure for these concepts (though see my colleagues’ and my efforts to establish a common metric: Niklas Harder et al., “Multidimensional Measure of Immigrant Integration,” PNAS, 2018). In an effort to address the prevailing assertion that Muslims refuse to integrate into Western society and are somehow fundamentally distinct from other Americans, I compare how survey respondents are distributed across dimensions that are believed to be associated with various models of integration—economic, social, civic, cultural, and psychological. It is in assessing the psychological dimension of integration that I use measures in line with the work of Amado M. Padilla and William Perez and several others—such as my collective threat index —to capture the degree to which Muslims express generalized feelings of identification with US society and whether they feel accepted and respected within the host society.

Per the authors’ preference for more specified measures that identify the source of discrimination, in my chapter focusing on Muslim Americans’ relationship with law enforcement, I use a measure specifically designed to capture respondents’ expectations for whether law enforcement will treat a criminal suspect fairly, mirroring the work of Tom Tyler on procedural justice. With a randomized experiment, I assess how these expectations of fairness differ depending on whether the suspect is a Muslim or a non-Muslim; I again find that negative expectations increase significantly across generation (and likewise with time in the United States and naturalization), with variations depending on country of origin and race. Based on my observations related to Muslim integration, I do point to connections between these parallel findings, as well as to other literature that similarly finds that higher levels of integration among second-generation immigrants can reduce trust in government institutions (for example, see Melissa Michelson, “The Corrosive Effect of Acculturation: How Mexican Americans Lose Political Trust,” Social Science Quarterly 84 (4), 2003).

Finally, the authors note that my findings as they relate to Black Muslims deserve further investigation, especially in light of the Black Lives Matter movement. I could not agree more. My book explores Muslims’ varying experiences by race and ethnicity, including the Black Muslim community, a group that is often overlooked in studies of Muslim Americans. I find that Black Muslims, consistent with their non-Muslim counterparts, are significantly more likely than Muslims of other races to distrust the police. However, despite this shared distrust among Black Muslims, I observe differences in approaches to addressing inequities. For example, those who identify with the Nation of Islam express more adversarial views toward and actively avoid US law enforcement, which is unsurprising given the group’s history. In contrast, Blacks who identify with some form of “mainstream” Sunni Islam appear to prefer more direct engagement to address grievances.

Consistent with my survey findings, mainstream Black interviewees felt their “know-how” and history of political activism could be helpful to immigrant Muslims under federal scrutiny, whereas immigrants, especially noncitizens, were more fearful of engaging with law enforcement due in part to their more vulnerable status in the country. Looking to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020, we see parallels regarding the differing strategies groups employ to address police misconduct, as well as concerns over the use of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and other federal officers to control protestors, creating fear especially for those with immigrant backgrounds. Black Muslims, like their non-Black and non-Muslim counterparts, are not a monolith, and we should expect that these complex histories and experiences will shape attitudes and behavior toward law enforcement.