Introduction
There are approximately six million Muslims in the United States. They come from a great variety of backgrounds. Among the few things they have in common are Islam as a religion and their American experience. The latter produces some previously unencountered consequences, including the rise of English as the language of Muslim ummah (community) and the reality of being a “minority” in a non-Muslim society. The American experience also raises questions of citizenship, identity, and integration.
Most studies of Muslims in America focus on the paths of immigration (Haddad and Esposito Reference Haddad and Esposito2000; Haddad and Smith Reference Haddad and Smith2002) and the challenges of civic and political participation (Bukhari et al. 2004; Moore Reference Moore1995; Cesari Reference Cesari2004; Bagby Reference Bagby2001). Rubrics under which the Muslim presence in America is typically studied include media and popular cultural representations of Islam and Muslims (Shaheen Reference Shaheen2001; Bilici Reference Bilici2005), stereotypes and racialization (Jamal and Naber Reference Jamal and Naber2008), post-9/11 backlash and discrimination (Bakalian and Bozorgmehr Reference Bakalian and Bozorgmehr2009; Cainkar Reference Cainkar2009, Howell and Jamal Reference Howell, Jamal and Ewing2008), the broader question of Islamophobia (Shryock Reference Shryock2010), dynamics of community formation (Schmidt Reference Schmidt2004; Abraham and Shryock Reference Abraham and Shryock2000; Metcalf Reference Metcalf1996), and gender issues (Read Reference Read2004). To these one can add works on Muslim slaves (Austin Reference Austin1997; Diouf Reference Diouf1998), converts (Abdallah Reference Abdallah2006), and the African American experience (Jackson Reference Jackson2005). As a result of 9/11, popular writing representing journalistic interest in American Muslims (Abdo Reference Abdo2006; Barrett Reference Barrett2007) shares the shelves with Muslim self-justification and apology (Safi Reference Safi2003; El Fadl Reference El Fadl2005). The existing literature on American Islam, however, seems stuck in the diasporic moment, still producing snapshots of individual ethnic communities. The post-diasporic moment and the process of cultural settlement remain to be explored. In other words, while attention has been paid to the ways in which Islam and Muslims are treated by American state and society as objects of securitization and exclusion, what has gone almost completely unnoticed is a parallel process taking place within the imagination of Muslims themselves: as important as the naturalization of Muslim immigrants in America is the naturalization of America in Islam.
Muslims who immigrate to the United States face a challenge unusual in the Muslim world: living as a minority in a non-Muslim society. This experience, which we in contemporary multicultural society take for granted, is a new situation for the majority of Muslim immigrants. It is not that Muslims never had minorities among themselves. On the contrary, there have always been non-Muslim minorities living in lands dominated by Muslims. But the reverse has not always been true. Muslim reluctance to settle permanently, as well as a lack of tolerance towards Islam in the Western world, have both contributed to this historical outcome. Muslim presence in and exposure to non-Muslim environments, particularly in the West, were historically “temporary” and justified within the legal framework of “necessity,” as due to exception and emergency. The rise of Muslim minorities in contemporary Europe and America is in many ways a new situation for both parties; it therefore poses a challenge to Islamic law and Muslim imagination as well as to Western society. The emergence of “permanent” Muslim minorities raises significant religious quandaries: Is it religiously permissible to live in a non-Muslim society? What should be the nature of one's relationship to such a social setting? These are questions Muslims interested in religiously justifying their new environment frequently ask, often turning to community leaders who respond in the form of sermons and fatwas. The answers they find, to employ the much-debated Muslim juridical terms, range from America as an abode of war/disbelief (Dar al harb) to America as an abode of Islam/peace (Dar al Islam). The evolution of the Muslim perception of “America as homeland” is an important cultural dimension of citizenship and constitutes an understudied aspect of Muslim cultural settlement in the United States. How do immigrant Muslims overcome their initial sense of “homeland insecurity” and begin to feel at home as Muslims in America?
To answer this and related questions, I introduce the notion of cultural settlement to describe the interplay between the habitus (Bourdieu Reference Bourdieu1990: 56–62) of immigrant and second-generation Muslims and their new habitat. My discussion draws on ethnographic data from my field research among Detroit area Muslim communities between 2005 and 2007. The data was collected through participant observation and in-depth interviews with community members. In addition to interviews and personal observations, I also use documentary archival material such as community publications. The greater Detroit area—and the city of Dearborn in particular—has one of the largest concentrations of Muslims in the United States and provides an excellent context for the study of community formation and the institutionalization of Islam. Methodologically, this is an interpretive study of Muslim experience, which employs ideal types to describe a multivocal reality. It shares in the Weberian (Weber Reference Weber, Gerth and Mills1946) reluctance towards making absolute claims. Using ideal types derived from fieldwork, it engages in a hermeneutics of immigrant experience.
In what follows, I provide a phenomenologically informed account of Muslim constructions of America as homeland. I start by articulating the concept of home and what it means to feel at home. This conceptual clarification is necessary for a proper understanding of cultural settlement. I then continue with a brief inventory of the cultural idioms or topoi with which early Muslim immigrants and Muslims in their initial immigration made sense of their presence in America. This diasporic moment and vocabulary changed over time as exposure and interaction led to a more nuanced understanding. In addition to these cultural idioms, there are crucial juridical tools by which Muslims religiously interpret America and produce an articulation of America as “home.” The fundamental question I will explore is this: how do Muslims make the transition from being “in” America to being “of” America?
Feeling at Home: What Does It Mean?
In order to explain the nature of the insecurity associated with displacement, we need to theoretically clarify what it means to “feel at home.” It is the experience of dwelling, as Heidegger defines it (Reference Heidegger and Hofstadter1971: 143), which turns any place into home. Individuals appropriate a given space by projecting onto it their subjective being, by pouring themselves out in things (Levinas Reference Levinas1969: 153). In so doing, they construct a subjective world that will become the ground for the production of the intersubjective world (Berger and Luckmann Reference Berger and Luckmann1966: 20). (It must be noted here that this order is correct only for heuristic purposes. Ontologically, the intersubjective world always precedes the subjective word.) For Pierre Bourdieu, people feel at home when there is an “ontological complicity” between their habitus and the world in which they find themselves (Reference Bourdieu2000: 135). Put in other words, it is the correspondence between habitus and habitat that makes it possible to feel “at home.”
Immigration is one way in which that correspondence can be lost. To regain it, the correspondence between home and homeland must be reasserted by extending “home” into the new homeland; that is, immigrants must come to feel at home not only in the privacy of their homes but also in the public culture of their society. Continuity between home and homeland thus requires the projection of the private and subjective (i.e., the household, what is Muslim, communal) onto the public and intersubjective (the city, what is American, national).
Simmel provided an early sociological account of the damage done by disequilibrium between subjective and intersubjective cultures (Reference Simmel1971; Frisby and Featherstone Reference Frisby and Featherstone1997: 55–75). His discussion of the crisis in culture is in many ways a pioneering study of homelessness in the general sense of the “homeless mind” of modernity (Berger, Berger, and Kellner Reference Berger, Berger and Kellner1974). The process of alienation from the environment—or in Simmel's own terms, the loss of equilibrium between subjective culture and objective culture—was for him a tragic consequence of modernity, the result of industrialization and urbanization. In the present case, a similar alienation arises from the displacements of globalization. The Simmelian crisis is the flipside of Bourdieu's observation about the complicity between habitus and habitat. The transformation of Muslim discourses on America needs to be construed in relation to the shifting sentiments Muslims experience as they overcome their initial sense of anomie.
For anomie—the loss of nomos—is the root cause of the immigrant's insecurity. In their treatise on the sociology of knowledge, Berger and Luckmann provided an excellent discussion of the way common sense—that is, reality, the world as we know it—is produced and maintained (1966). Any given society is an arena of reality construction where individual members share in the production of objective reality. This reality is sustained as long as the intersubjective realm of lifeworld that underpins it remains available. But any common sense or reality is precarious, because, “All societies are constructions in the face of chaos. The constant possibility of anomic terror is actualized whenever the legitimations that obscure the precariousness are threatened or collapse” (ibid.:103).
There are several themes here that need to be made explicit. First, a society produces its reality by introducing nomos (rule, law, regularity, sense) onto a realm that is otherwise chaotic. Nomos translates chaos into order and nature into culture. The idea of homeland is one such cultural construction produced on the surface of bare geography. Second, the reality to which nomos gives rise is historical, contingent, and fragile. The loss of nomos therefore has a terrorizing effect, causing anxiety and insecurity. This includes the anxiety one feels in prolonged separation from home, or the insecurity of an unfamiliar abode.
Third, that anxiety, normally repressed and swept under the carpet by intersubjective dwelling and everyday language, bursts in when either the protective shield is removed or those protected within it move outside it. Anomie, chaos, and bare nature all manifest themselves in marginal or liminal situations (Turner Reference Turner1969: 95). Outside the shield—or to use Berger's own term, outside the “canopy” (Berger Reference Berger1969)—all distinctions dissolve. In the words of a political philosopher, “man erects around himself an artificial netting which conceals from him the abyss” (Strauss Reference Strauss and Pangle1989: 36). The margins reveal the historicity of the structure. At the edges and on the frontiers, the nomothetic format (i.e., the constructed reality) ends and the unformatted surface (chaos) appears, or, to put it more precisely, what is beyond appears as chaotic. The relationship between nomos and chaos/anomie is crucial for a proper understanding of the experience of people who are displaced.
In the next section, I trace the experience of Muslim immigrants who find themselves either at the frontiers or outside of the juridical limits of Muslim homeland (dar al Islam). The question I consider is how Muslim communities can harbor such seemingly contradictory views about America. How is it that those Muslims who see America as the place of “chaos” or “war” and those who embrace America as Islamic both take Islam as their point of departure?
Muslims Outside the Islamic Canopy?
Medieval Muslim jurists developed a binary opposition to distinguish the legal status of Muslim-controlled lands from the rest of the world. They designated as dar al Islam (abode of Islam, abode of peace) the lands where Islam is dominant or has been naturalized as mainstream culture. By that classification, all other places fell under the category of dar al harb (abode of war, abode of chaos) or dar al kufr (abode of disbelief).Footnote 1 In this conception, dar al Islam becomes a spatial or geographic projection of the Islamic sacred canopy. Scholars have different opinions as to whether the canopy is held up by an Islamic political rule or by an Islamic mainstream culture even when the ruler is not necessarily Islamic (Al-Alwani Reference Al-Alwani2003: 28; Ramadan Reference Ramadan2002: 166). What is decisive in either case is whether a certain land has been subject to Islamic nomos and thus become conducive to an unrestricted, free practice of Islam. In short, dar al Islam describes a legal order (and not necessarily a political one) where geography is codified through the imaginary inscription of Islamic law. The remainder of that geography is mentally “nihilated” in order to create the sharp contrast that preserves “mental hygiene” (Zerubavel Reference Zerubavel1991: 37; Berger and Luckmann Reference Berger and Luckmann1966: 156). This spiritual appropriation of land finds still another abstract expression in the juridical order of things. Identification of qibla, the direction of Mecca, is yet another form of religious appropriation of land, an introduction of nomos.Footnote 2
As a juridical sphere, dar al Islam refers to the pacified, codified space enclosed within the canopy. Muslims living within dar al Islam are inhabitants of a familiar abode and members of a bounded community. This sphere that is under public law and familiar for jurisprudential purposes is surrounded by its constitutive other, dar al harb. What remains outside, therefore, becomes an extrajuridical, agonistic sphere. In that sense, dar al harb is similar to the Greek conception of “barbarian lands.” Muslims venture into this unfamiliar abode only at their spiritual peril.
Concerned with the protection of Islamic identity, the classical Muslim jurists saw no reason why Muslims should move to dar al harb permanently. They strongly discouraged people from leaving the abode of Islam unless their departure was due to darura (necessity).Footnote 3 This extrajuridical sphere was thus incorporated into the legal canopy through the state of emergency; stay in that sphere fell under the paradigm of exception.
The Significance of Darura
Darura, or necessity, occupies a special place in all legal traditions because it is the foundation of exception (Agamben Reference Agamben and Attell2005: 24). As a limit concept it is the borderline between juridical order and bare life, between facticity and norms (Habermas Reference Habermas1996). Where public law (in this case, Islam) ends, political fact (the agonistic sphere) begins. Therefore, law melts under the conditions of necessity, as implied by the ancient maxim necessitas legem non habet (necessity has no law) (Agamben Reference Agamben and Attell2005: 1). Necessity has the power to render the illicit (haram) licit (halal). But this is not generalizable: necessity justifies only specific, individual cases of transgression through exception.Footnote 4
The movement of Muslims from dar al Islam to dar al harb is a movement from inside legal order to outside of it, from law to exception. Law has two fundamental elements: norm and decision (Schmitt Reference Schmitt1976: 10). In the state of exception, that is in dar al harb, the decision remains while the norm recedes. The new environment does not lend itself to the applicability of the norm developed inside the canopy and demands (a new) decision, an act of construction. At that very moment the agency attributed to the law through reification falls back into the hands of the lawmaker. The movement from rule (norm) to exception (decision) shifts our attention from the law itself to the lawmaker(s). What had been given now becomes an explicit object of human construction. It is a shift from an already naturalized, habitualized reality to a reality that is witnessed at the moment of its construction by human subjects.
Therefore, as will become evident later in this article, the analogies made by Muslims themselves to the time of the Prophet Muhammad are not in vain: there are very real similarities between the contemporary frontiers (margins) of Islam and its center, its beginning. The similarities are both temporal (hijra, the early migration of Muslims and the first establishment of Islam)Footnote 5 and spatial (choosing qibla and operating on a land that is not yet dar al Islam). Therefore, stepping outside the canopy is a return to the pre-history of the canopy. At the frontiers, where nomos is absent, there is an originary indistinction (chaos, anomie). Here, exception reveals the historicity and contingency of the law. At the spatial margins of Islam, Muslims have to reenact what those who codified Islam in Muslim lands did many centuries ago. As Michel de Certeau has observed, “Other lands restore to us what our own culture has seen fit to exclude from its own discourse” (Reference De Certeau and Rendall1984: 50).
There are two possibilities for those who find themselves outside the canopy: they can either extend the canopy to cover their spot or engage in the construction of a new one. Extending the canopy under the paradigm of exception (darura) may be done for individual necessities, but if a large number of people take up residence not temporarily but permanently in what early jurists designated as dar al harb, can they still rely on darura as a paradigm?
The paradigm of darura enabled Muslims to make brief forays into dar al harb. Now that Muslims have permanently settled in what used to be seen as dar al harb, they have to transform necessity into law—bare life into canopy—and cultivate nomos on an anomic space. As the examples I give later will clarify, the movement from canopy to anomie is always temporary: it inevitably ends with arrival at a new canopy. Canopy construction, which is the construction of new reality, is similar to dwelling and has a temporal character. In plain terms, a guest who stays for too long is no longer a guest but a lodger. Whether temporal or spatial, the anomic liminality of darura expires either with a return to the canopy or the emergence of a new one.
So far, in my discussion of darura, the zone of exception, I have touched upon the relationship between darura and law and its manifestations in time and space. Before concluding this section, I shall briefly explain the reason why it came to prominence, and the type of ethos darura engenders. As a space of unenforceability of law or dispensation from the application of law, darura implies the impossibility of experiencing a given place as a fully justified home. Thus it works as a temporary protective juridical shield (like a raincoat) for limited exposure to dar al harb. Darura gained jurisprudential prominence in modern times as a result of the processes that caused (dis)placement of Muslims into non-Muslim lands. These processes include colonialism in the past and globalization and Muslim immigration in the present day.
A juridical term designating the condition of “crisis times” and “unhomely places,” darura has a particular ethos. This ethos is a “deficient mode of care” in the Heideggerian sense (Heidegger Reference Heidegger, Macquirre and Robinson1962: 83). The ethics of darura is negative. It demands avoidance, minimal involvement, and unsettlement. In a more strict sense, this ethos is a diasporic ethos, where home/land is elsewhere and the heart is there. In the next section, I give a quick overview of some prominent topoi of Muslim diasporic culture. Each topos reveals a certain aspect of the experience of Muslim immigrants.
Topoi of the Muslim Diasporic Imagination
Under the conditions of immigration, Muslims are displaced and disembedded from their original national environments. Diasporic conditions trigger the release of some Muslim idioms from their otherwise marginal status and pull them to the surface of the Muslim imagination. There are several prominent root-paradigms (Turner Reference Turner1974: 67) that immigrant Muslims in America employ in making sense of their experience. These include
(1) hijra (the Prophet Muhammad's migration from Mecca to Medina)
(2) ummah (the universal Muslim community)
(3) dawah (mission or propagation of Islam)
(4) jihad (struggle, just war)
Hijra
When the Prophet Muhammad and his followers were persecuted in Mecca, he migrated to the nearby city of Medina in the year 622 CE. This event occupies such a central place in the Muslim imagination that it marks the starting point of the Muslim calendar (called the Hijri calendar). Hijra as a movement from Mecca to Medina represents a flight from chaos and oppression to a place of freedom that represents “the city” and “civilization” all at once. The Prophet's hijra thus constitutes the primary referent for the Muslim topos of hijra, migration. There is also a second event from the early days of Islam that contributes to the term's symbolic meaning: the migration of Muslim refugees to Abyssinia (present-day Ethiopia) in 615 CE.
Hijra is the primary idiom for Muslim immigrants who seek to frame their displacement—voluntary or not—in religious terms. It is not only the movement from one place to another or departure from one's native land that makes these historical events relevant to contemporary migrants, but also the fact that the destinations were in both cases non-Muslim. Thus, hijra gained prominence among Muslims in the United States as a way of providing a framework for their contemporary experience as immigrants (Haddad and Lummis Reference Haddad and Lummis1987: 156). African-American Muslims even interpret their experience of slavery with reference to hijra and call hijra “The Greatest Migration” (Dannin Reference Dannin2002). At the other end of the spectrum, a fringe radical group of Muslim immigrants based in Britain employs the self-identification Al-Muhajiroun (the emigrants) (Wiktorowicz Reference Wiktorowicz2005).
Ummah
This concept designates the global community of Muslims (Mandaville Reference Mandaville2003; Roy Reference Roy2006). It also refers to the community of followers of any prophet. Some Muslim scholars link ummah to the concept to shahada (witnessing). “The greatness of the Islamic ummah is to be understood in the fact that it is a community of the middle path which must bear witness to the faith before all mankind” (Ramadan Reference Ramadan2002: 158–59). A non-territorial concept, it allows Muslims to transcend their ethnic, linguistic, and racial differences. In this imagined community, the members of which are tied to each other through exposure to the scripture and belief in one God, Muslims relate to each other across time and space. In the words of Benedict Anderson, “The strange physical juxtaposition of Malays, Persians, Indians, Berbers and Turks in Mecca is something incomprehensible without an idea of their community in some form. The Berber encountering the Malay before the Kaaba must, as it were, ask himself: ‘Why is this man doing what I am doing, uttering the same words that I am uttering, even though we cannot talk to one another?’ There is only one answer, once one has learnt it: ‘Because we … are Muslims’” (Reference Anderson1991: 54).
Muslim experience of America is often compared to the Muslim experience in Mecca because Muslims discover and feel the extreme diversity within the Muslim community both during their pilgrimage in Mecca and upon their arrival in America. It is at that moment that the concept of ummah gains prominence as a way of acknowledging and overcoming differences. The appeal of the concept of ummah comes from both the diversity of Muslim communities and their minority status vis-à-vis non-Muslim majority society and consequent need for solidarity.
Dawah
Dawah means religious propagation, fulfillment of the religious obligation of representing the faith to outsiders. Dawah is the primary mode of relating to the outside of the Muslim community. Dawah is not limited to proselytizing, but can include charity work and participation in community service. As much as it targets outsiders, the more immediate motivation for its deployment in the foreign setting is the protection of the identity of insiders. As such it becomes a means of preserving religious identity and authenticity. It is an internally articulated means of engaging with the social environment. This sense of dawah is particularly relevant, for instance, for members of Muslim Student Associations on university campuses. A female undergraduate Muslim student on a college campus once told me: “I am Muslim. I wear my Muslim identity wherever I go. Every action I make publicly is an act of dawah. It is especially important to me because I know that everything I do, every stance that I take, reflects the entire Muslim ummah whether I want it or not.”
Jihad
Of all the terms discussed here jihad looms largest in the American psyche. It is a contested concept for both Muslims and non-Muslims. Jihad refers to the constant structuration of the self and the world along the lines of Islam. It literally means struggle; it is the equivalent of self-discipline in Protestant cultures. The concept covers a variety of struggles, ranging from spiritual self-restraint to the collective execution of a just war. Recent uses of the term in ethnic nationalism and global terrorism have, however, undermined its legitimacy in the eyes of non-Muslims.Footnote 6 Muslims themselves, in turn, employ the term increasingly reluctantly and uncomfortably. Yet they cannot do away with it, since it is part of Islam.
These key idioms have almost nothing to do with America per se as a destination for Muslim immigrants. They are root-paradigms that help Muslims make sense of their mobility/movement. The prominence the terms enjoy here is absent in Muslim majority lands. The exception would be places where colonialism has had a disproportionate impact and thus induced the feeling of being a minority. Although American Muslims use these topoi from early on, they are like a certificate that authorizes their departure but does not deal with their destination. These topoi are extensions of old homelands; they hardly touch America.
To clear the ground for our discussion of Muslim discourses on America and the ideal types associated with them, we first need to recognize how ideal types are grounded in experience. On the surface, the notion of ideal types may seem to run counter to the whole enterprise of ethnography: are ideal types not mere stereotypes, hopelessly ineffective at capturing the full complexity of human interactions? In The Phenomenology of the Social World, Alfred Schutz provides a rich framework for the study of the relationship between experience and ideal types. According to Schutz, we experience other people through their immediate physical presence, but our comprehension of them is based on ideal types (Reference Schutz1967: 177). The social reality of everyday life is apprehended in a continuum of typifications, which grow ever more anonymous as they are removed from the “here and now” of face-to-face interactions. To my direct encounter with another person, “I bring a whole stock of previously constituted knowledge.… My idea of him undergoes continuous revision as the concrete experience unfolds” (ibid.: 169).
As Karl Mannheim's sociology of knowledge and Bourdieu's field theory imply, one's relational location in a network of positions delimits the horizon of one's perception and ideal types. Therefore, phenomenologically speaking, where Muslims are in relation to America will inevitably shape what they know and how much they can know about America.
Changing Muslim Discourses on America
Immigrant Muslims’ encounter with America starts well before their arrival in America, because America has already entered their minds as a phenomenon. The portrait that Muslims have of America is usually not based on direct experience, but on powerful images or ideal types. When the question is posed from a religio-juridical point of view, the status of America becomes even more problematic. America is a non-Muslim, arguably a Christian country. Is America dar al harb? And if so, is it religiously permissible to stay in America for an extended period of time or even permanently? Some Muslims ask these questions, others do not. Not all Muslims are interested in religious justification of their presence in America. Some might not even be aware of the juridical terms discussed below. Moreover, some of them might be aware yet choose to ignore them in the face of some incongruity between the terms’ implications and the reality of their own lives. People can choose to place themselves outside this particular juridical question by rejecting its relevance or avoid it altogether as a theoretical nuisance. Whether they embrace the relevance of the question or not, however, all Muslims engage in interpretation and produce a certain perspective on America (Haddad Reference Haddad2004: 32; Leonard Reference Leonard2003: 154). That this question might not be an issue at all for some Muslims of course shows the limits of religious discourse in the lives of individuals. For some people, even self-professed believers, Islam as a religion or Islamic law as a source of normativity carry little weight in determining the ways in which individual lives are deployed in their worldly settings. However, given my focus on the legitimation or justification within religious discourse of Muslim presence in America, I limit my discussion to those who at least recognize the existence of the juridical terms analyzed here.
These questions have come to occupy a central place in American Muslim discourse. Especially after 9/11, according to an American Muslim pundit, such questions create a moral dilemma that needs to be resolved: “Many Muslims who see Islam and the United States in a state of conflict have enormous problems in beginning to think of themselves as American Muslims. They want the prosperity and the freedom of America, but not its foreign policy or its liberal culture.… There are no simple solutions to this moral dilemma. The theological discussion will have to take American Muslims beyond the dar-al-Islam (house of peace) and dar-al-harb (house of war) dichotomy” (Khan Reference Khan2002: 10).
Early Muslims considered living in American society a dangerous venture. It meant the risk of assimilation and moral decay. The students who constituted the kernel of American Muslim identity in the 1960s and 1970s wanted only to avoid the negative influence of American society (Schumann Reference Schumann2007: 11). This perception changed over time (Mattson Reference Mattson, Haddad, Smith and Esposito2003: 03). The terms, or rather juridical tools available to Muslims for making sense of American space have outflanked the binary of dar al Islam versus dar al harb. The dichotomy, sustainable so long as it was not challenged by direct experience, becomes problematic and insufficient when Muslims are actually in America. Reality interferes. The alternative or complementary concepts that were historically marginalized in the production of this binary are remembered, re-appropriated, and even re-invented by Muslims. Therefore, in addition to dar al harb and dar al Islam, Muslims in minority settings have brought back several notions, the most important of which are dar al dawah (abode of call, propagation) and dar al ahd (abode of treaty, contract). In place of the dar al harb—dar al Islam dichotomy, we now have a continuum.
The Continuum of Abodes: Dar al harb—Dar al dawah—Dar al ahd—Dar al Islam
This continuum, of course, implies no teleology. It is rather a spectrum of juridical terms providing religious meaning or justification for different discourses Muslims develop with respect to America. In this part of the article, I highlight what is specific to each of these categories and the relationship between them as phases of a possible process of cultural settlement. This process or spectrum can be both temporal and spatial.
There are two broad paradigms under which we can classify the major juridical tools. They are either mobilized under the paradigm of darura or they are construed as part of an existing legal order or products of a newly articulated code that caters to the needs of Muslims in minority contexts. The first two categories, which fall under the paradigm of darura, are diasporic with respect to the American setting. The last two come under the paradigm of law and are employed by Muslims in their post-diasporic moment, by those who see or want to see America as home. A more comprehensive juxtaposition of the four categories is provided in Table 1.
Stages and juridical tools of Muslim cultural settlement in the United States.
In the following sections, I discuss the specifics of each of these categories. What are the consequences of perceiving America as an abode of war (dar al harb)? Who sees it as such and when? Such questions will be answered for each of the four categories used by Muslims as juridical tools or, to put it in Ann Swidler's terms, as part of their juridical “toolkit” (Reference Swidler1986). These juridical terms can be interpreted as symbolic stations in the cultural settlement of Muslims or moments of their internalization of America as a habitat.
Abode of War: An Impossible Homeland
For the perspective that sees America as abode of war (dar al harb), America is external to Islam, and, as such, it is a source of anxiety and cultural threat.Footnote 7 This perception is based on a lack of knowledge about what goes on inside America. America, in this view, is a monolith—completely profane and without legitimately perceptible nomos; it is, to use Heidegger's terminology, an object “present-at-hand,” not yet “ready-to-hand.” America is a black box that can be treated only in its totality since it can be grasped—in this understanding—only from without. The ideal type for this conception is a visitor; it can be said to represent the common understanding of Muslim immigrants in the 1970s.
Changing immigration policies in the 1960s and Cold War politics opened the door for Muslim immigrants and students. Interestingly enough, the students from Muslim countries who came to America to study not only created the nucleus of a Muslim community, but also laid the ground for the formation of a number of major organizations, including the Muslim Students Association (MSA) and later the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA). Those Muslims who happened to be in America during this period believed they were there under darura. They saw themselves as an outpost of Islam inside American space. They were geographic and cultural orphans, people out of place. Their plans to go back home kept them always in a precarious position, unsettled. Dar al harb (abode of war) characterized the perception of those Muslims, mostly students from Muslim countries, who were either religious to start with or became religious due to diasporic pressures during their studies at American institutions of higher education in the 1960s and 1970s. They set out to acquire America's science and technology without getting contaminated by its culture. Their plan to return home after the completion of their studies and their desire to avoid the influence of American culture defined their attitude toward American space. These students relied on funding from their home countries and were oriented towards their homelands.Footnote 8
America was simply a meeting ground for Muslims from various countries. Thinking in Heideggerian terms, their “American space” did not fully exist. To the extent that care and involvement produce space (the world) for the situated subject, their American space was very small; their primary concern was political and cultural solidarity with the Muslim world and its rehabilitation through the acquisition of American scientific knowledge. The institutions built in this era catered to students and were concerned almost exclusively with the preservation of Islamic identity against the corrosive influence of American society. Publications of the time, such as MSA News and later Islamic Horizons, depicted the American environment as an undifferentiated culture having nothing to do with Islam (Schumann Reference Schumann2007: 16). America was technologically superior but morally bankrupt, a perception that echoed Sayyid Qutb's image of America.Footnote 9 In the eyes of these identity-centric, diasporic Muslims, America was at worst an impure place, at best a neutral space for the encounter and education of Muslim activists from Islamic countries.
Their American location gave them room for maneuver and allowed them to mobilize technical and ideological resources for what Benedict Anderson calls “long-distance nationalism” (Reference Anderson1998: 58), which in this case meant long-distance Islamism. Even the notion of dawah that was activated in response to displacement—its temporariness notwithstanding—was an introvert dawah directed at students themselves. The purpose was to have “an impact on homelands by educating Islamic activists and preparing them for their future return” (Schumann Reference Schumann2007: 18). Inspired by the Islamic revivalist movements in Muslim countries, they interpreted their own experiences in terms of mobility, movement, or mobilization. The idea of returning home turned their stay into a prolonged transit. America was not a place to dwell; it was not home.
Today, most Muslims would reject the idea of America as abode of war and might even contest the applicability of the term altogether. As the community gains literacy in American culture and politics, such questionable concepts are removed from public display, an interesting phenomenon that Andrew Shryock observes among Dearborn Arab and Muslim communities and analyzes under the rubric of “cultural intimacy” (Reference Shryock2004: 10–11). The culture of “America as dar al harb,” survives, therefore, mostly in old community literature and biographical narratives about “Muslims then.” One would expect the culture of dar al harb to have disappeared entirely over the last couple of decades, since today almost every Muslim sees Muslim presence in America as permanent. But it has not. I discovered this persistence when I talked to the imam of a mosque in Detroit in 2007.Footnote 10 This mosque, which has an Arabic name, identifies itself as Salafi.Footnote 11 In terms of congregation, it appears to be predominantly Yemeni. Imam Talib, also from Yemen, is on a long-term visa and has been here for the last few years. One of the striking things about this mosque is that the imam does not speak any English at all and delivers his sermons only in Arabic. He does, however, use a translator. I interviewed him through one of the people who help translate his sermons and weekend classes. The following exchanges are selections from the interview.
I started by asking his opinion about the English language, since we were not able to communicate in it.
Question: When one immigrates to America, a lot of things change. For example, here all the Muslims speak English. What do you think about the English language?
Answer: English is good for giving dawah. When I came here there were some brothers who could speak both languages [English and Arabic]. That made it easy for me to do my own Islamic studies. If I go to English language classes, it will take a lot of driving. Also you know classes are mixed, men and women.… Muslims should learn this language, of course. If you do not know the language, it is going to be hard. We should give dawah.
Kids in this country get very little Islam. Here in this masjid we try to focus more on Islam so that kids don't get shirkiyat and khurafat [violations of monotheism and deviation]. We want them to stay away from shirk [worshipping things other than the one God]. This is our focus.
Q: What do you think about the dar al harb and dar al Islam distinction? What is America in your view?
A: America is a kuffar country [the land of disbelief, dar al kufr is synonymous with dar al harb]. It is a matter of who is dominant. The dominant identity in this country is kuffar. If we can have dawah, that is the most important thing. We need to show the people what Islam is. We should teach them.
Q: But Muslims have more freedoms here than in Muslim countries. Think of hijab, for example.
A: It is true we have more freedoms but it does not mean this country is better than the Muslim countries.
Q: Since you have plans to return to Yemen and won't stay in this country, what do you say to Muslims here, those who are going to stay.
A: I say, if they can go back, it is better for them. The future seems very hard here. It is hard to live as a family. It is hard. If something happens that will be good: if the government puts all the Muslims in one place, that will be good. Then we can live without mixing.
I left the mosque somewhat bewildered. I thought I had observed the whole spectrum of Muslims in the American context, but this was a truly extraordinary case: although many American Muslims believe that they live in “electronic internment” since 9/11, I had never met one who considered internment—be it electronic surveillance or physical imprisonment like what happened to Japanese-Americans during the second World War—to be desirable. Here was a Muslim who was “in” America and believed that the best thing that could happen to Muslims living in this country was to be placed in a ghetto or camp. Interestingly enough, the Detroit-Dearborn area is currently the only place in America that could approximate a ghetto (Abraham and Shryock Reference Abraham and Shryock2000). Yet the significant concentration of Arab Muslims in the area still seemed insufficient to this imam, as far as the protection of Islamic identity was concerned. The only justification for Muslims to stay in this country was dawah; otherwise, America was a kuffar (infidel) country, dar al harb (an abode of war), and to protect their religion, Muslims should leave as soon as possible. America was an insecure place and could never qualify as a homeland. This insecurity was not so much about civil rights and liberties—concerns shared by many Muslims—but about preservation of the faith and spiritual purity.
Most of the previous decades’ Muslim immigrants (and some in the early stage of their immigration today) held a slightly tamer view of the American environment and the role of Muslims, perceiving themselves as an outpost of Muslim geography in an alien land. As long as their presence is temporary, they comfortably continue to hold the view that America can be abode of war. This ideal typical perception of America as abode of war/chaos changes only under the influence of direct experience, interaction, and the recognition of dwelling that is usually outside the control of the subjects. The concept of dawah (mission, call to Islam), which together with darura (necessity) is one of the two justifications for being in America, eventually outgrows the juridical category of abode of war and becomes the point of reference in itself. Limited engagement in the form of dawah ultimately leads to a perception of America as an open field for unlimited dawah. Dawah is no longer directed at other Muslims but the non-Muslim other. This change of orientation also marks the transition to the next stage, where America is perceived as a land of mission.
Abode of Mission: An Outpost in “The Land Of Possibilities”
As abode of war, America represented the absolute outside, the anti-homeland. As abode of mission, while still external to Islam, America is recognized as an adjacent space. It becomes a frontier. It is a target of concerned interest or a destination of risky spiritual venture. In this conception, America is a field of exploration that is at once dangerous and potentially beneficial. The most significant change this new perception entails is that America is no longer a monolith. The first, weak signs of differentiation emerge as the newcomer either reserves judgment about America or approaches it with caution. His presence is most likely temporary or in its early stages.
In the stage of abode of mission, the notion of dawah (mission) undergoes a shift in terms of orientation: now it explicitly targets non-Muslims. The introvert conception is replaced by an extrovert one as some involvement with America becomes possible. The primary concern is still the preservation of identity through a narrowly defined engagement with American society. Even though America is still in moral decay, Muslims are now seen as capable of contributing to its positive transformation: their reluctant involvement comes to designate a desirable partial participation. A shift also occurs from activism which targets Muslim students to activism aimed at contributing to an otherwise threatening environment. In this transformation, the Qur'anic idea of “promoting good and preventing evil” becomes a touchstone.
If previously the Muslim world and America were polar opposites, this time around, even though they are still largely monoliths, they each acquire negative and positive aspects—the problems of the Muslim world and some virtues of America are acknowledged. The Muslim world or past homelands now lose their sharpness and complexity in the mind's eye of the immigrant, and this distancing from the past homeland is compensated by the development of a comparably limited “nearness” to the American environment. In terms of community development, this approach characterizes the 1980s. Early signs of recognizing America as a “nation of immigrants” emerge and the possibility of somehow fitting in becomes imaginable for the Muslim immigrant.
Yet even though the beginnings of settlement are observed, America's Muslims are still diasporic: their settlement has not yet fully disengaged itself from a movement that began elsewhere. Muslims who were in transit are now settled into “mobility” and outreach. In the process, darura (exception) becomes a conditional “stay.” One can stay, but only to perform dawah! That is, a shift occurs from conditional visit to conditional stay. A necessity-based risk has become an opportunity-based one.
As a consequence of this shift, calling America abode of war becomes increasingly difficult and the term itself is seldom employed. As Mustapha, a young Muslim I interviewed, stated, “If America is dar al harb [abode of war], what does that add to you? What matters more is whether you as a Muslim change yourself and your environment.” The formerly monolithic and impure surface of America is now seen as receptive to the inscription of Islam. Along the same lines, an essay published in 1985 in Islamic Horizons claims, “We cannot continue to throw out the baby of dawah with the bathwater of our disaffection towards this government and society. For clearly we have been placed here with a purpose.… If we plan to leave tomorrow, we still have today to work, to do our share…” (Omar quoted in Schumann Reference Schumann2007: 21).
So Muslim institutions either change their orientation, or institutions with a new orientation emerge in their stead: institutions oriented toward “non-American” Muslims in America and the Muslim world are replaced by a “global Muslim” discourse with some localization. The Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), established in 1982 in response to the fact that more and more of the students who planned to return ended up staying and forming families in the United States, is a perfect example of this new transformation. As the Muslim community ceased to be identified solely with university students, ISNA would cater to a population still diasporic in outlook but now inclined toward settlement. Its institutions begin to engage the American environment, but only on the grounds of ideology and self-interest aimed solely at the dissemination of Islam. Still, this reluctant settlement and narrow involvement transforms the nature of the Muslim community from being a thin “outpost” of Muslims in an alien land to a “thicker” extension of the global Muslim community at large. To sum up, the ideological transition from the 1970s to the 1980s is one from students to families, from MSA to ISNA, from avoidance to protectionism through partial involvement.
Though this mindset had its heyday in the 1980s, it survives among American Muslims to this day. I saw it reflected in some of my conversations with community leaders. One such example was Imam Haroon of “Masjidun-Nur” (Mosque of Light) in Detroit.Footnote 12 Established in 1978, this inner-city mosque is at present predominantly African American. Although he was very conservative and introverted, his views about the American setting were more nuanced than those of the previous imam. When asked about the distinction between abode of war and abode of Islam, he preferred to avoid the binary and emphasized instead the perception of America as “a land of possibilities” in the following manner:
I have been able to pray at the airport, at the mall or at the bus station. Since I've been here it has been very easy to live Islam. I don't know what category America fits but we are free to live Islam and do dawah. Sometimes people are more welcoming.
[America] is Allah's country. We are here to invite people to Islam. We are here for guidance. Some scholars say it is not permissible to stay in a non-Muslim land. But what about those who are from here? Where will they go? The earth is vast and for making a living anywhere is okay. Some sahabas [companions of the prophet] did both living and dawah.
One can see in Imam Haroon's sentence, “But what about those who are from here?” the beginning of a possibility of Muslims being “from” America rather than merely “in” America. This nucleus of localization of Islam will soon blossom into other conceptions of America, but at this stage it remains an early sign of Americanness finding a foothold inside Islam. Despite the relative openness to and appreciation of the American environment, his response to my question on interfaith activism, which I use as an index of involvement with the social environment, revealed the striking ambivalence produced by the perception of America as abode of mission: “No, we don't do interfaith activities. My personal opinion, I don't feel the need for it. We respect but don't talk.… The main thing is dawah, it is an imperative for us.”
Dar al dawah basically takes Muslim immigrants to the threshold of settlement and as such marks the limits of diasporic orientation. The negative connection with the environment (through the juridical device of darura [necessity]) is now replaced by a narrowed yet positive connection (based on a redefinition of dawah [mission]). At this point, the neat division “anything Muslim is good, anything American is evil” starts to erode. Yet the Muslim subject is still mentally located in another homeland and has only a limited justification for his presence in America.
Abode of Accord: From Mission to Dialogue
As dar al ahd (abode of accord), America is neighbor to Islam and a party to an accord; it is a source of mutual benefit. America is religiously justified and protected by religious laws such as the injunction that Muslims must obey the law of the land wherever they live. America thus becomes even more differentiated and emerges as a peaceful opportunity space for Muslims, but one that has not yet been fully internalized or naturalized. The benefits and opportunities now supersede the risks. This conception's ideal type is a resident: his presence is permanent with the reservation that it might one day be possible that he will have to leave. Abode of accord represents a cautious embrace and the early stage of settlement. Many Muslims interpret abode of accord with relative comfort due to its resonance with the social contract theories of American society. Abode of accord, therefore, symbolizes the first cultural encounter of the immigrant Muslim with American citizenship. While for abode of war and abode of mission, the Muslim just happens to be in America, in the conception of abode of accord he begins to see himself as part of a larger society in which he, too, has a stake. It thus allows Muslims to imagine a place of their own inside American society, creating the possibility of an American Muslim cultural “ghetto”—in the positive sense of the term—within a liberal society. More specifically, abode of accord represents a communitarian understanding of membership in American society, where private autonomy is slightly expanded and buttressed as an adequate domain for the survival of Islamic identity. The sense of belonging that abode of accord generates is located in the spectrum between a protected subject and a full citizen.
Muslims who see their new environment in this way no longer hold themselves apart from majority society, but still preserve their distinct identity. They share with the rest of the society a culture in which Islam seeks a place. The idea of abode of accord therefore lends itself to a spectrum of existence from reluctant participation to hopeful and safe engagement with the American environment.
In 1999, the Mauritanian sheikh Abdallah Bin Bayyah was invited by the Zaytuna Institute, a neo-traditional center of Islamic learning in California, to speak to American Muslims in the Bay Area. He delivered his lecture in Arabic, translated by American convert scholar Hamza Yusuf. Interestingly enough, the sheikh begins his lecture, a series of juridical recommendations for Muslims living as a minority in non-Muslim lands, with the recognition of this fact: “In contrast to Muslims living in the dominant Muslim world at large, you are, in many ways, strangers in a strange land. The Messenger of Allah said that the conditions of the stranger are blessed conditions. It also means ‘they have paradise’ for bearing the burden of alienation. An Arab proverb is, ‘oh stranger in a strange land, be a man of courtesy and cultivation.’ The meaning of estrangement [is not that] you should not work with others or that you should avoid the dominant society and distance yourselves completely from it” (Bayyah Reference Bayyah1999).
After examining the needs and conditions of Muslims in diaspora, the sheikh discusses the problem of the status of lands where Muslims are minorities. He criticizes the dichotomy of abode of war and abode of Islam: “Most people think that the world is divided into two abodes, the abode of peace and the abode of war. The abode of peace is the land of the Muslims, dar al-Islam, and the abode of war is everywhere else.… This idea is wrong. There are three abodes: there is the abode of peace, the abode of war, and then there is the abode of treaty where there is a contractual agreement between two abodes.” The sheikh thus explains the relationship between immigrant Muslims in America and their country of immigration by referring to his entry into the country. His personal border crossing becomes an illustration of entry into abode of accord/contract:
For instance, when I came into this country, they issued me a visa, and I signed something. In the issuance of the visa and my signing of it, a legally binding contract occurred. It was an agreement that when I came into this country, I would obey the laws and would follow the restrictions that this visa demanded that I follow. This was a contractual agreement that is legally binding according even to the divine laws. In looking at this, we have to understand that the relationship between the Muslims living in this land and the dominant authorities in this land is a relationship of peace and contractual agreement—of a treaty. This is a relationship of dialogue and a relationship of giving and taking.
As far as Muslim community leadership is concerned, the idea of abode of accord appears to have been the dominant conception in 1990s. Since 9/11, it has been criticized by Muslim public intellectuals who urge a complete transition to the conception of America as an abode of Islam. Muqtedar Khan, a Muslim professor of political science who became prominent after 9/11, finds the idea of abode of accord an inadequate and morally problematic position for Muslims in the United States (2002: 8). From another perspective, Tariq Ramadan, a European Muslim intellectual, finds the same term untenable due to its dependence on the old dichotomy of abode of war/abode of Islam. Instead, he proposes dar al dawah (abode of call)—using a sense different from my own discussion above—and he even calls for a total abandonment of the idea of abodes: “At a time when we are witnessing a strong current of globalization, it is difficult to refer to the notion of dar (abode) unless we consider the whole world as an abode. Our world has become a small village and, as such, it is henceforth an open world” (ibid.: 147).
Abode of Islam: “Thinking without Accent”
Encouraging Muslim political participation, Agha Saeed, Muslim political activist and president of the American Muslim Alliance, wrote that Muslims need generations who “not only speak without accent but also think without accent” (Reference Saeed, Haddad and Smith2002: 55). To him, “thinking without accent” means changing the orientation of Muslims in America from preoccupation with the Muslim world to taking an interest in American domestic issues. Criticizing immigrant generations for being too much invested in goings-on in their countries of origin, Saeed finds hope in new generations of Muslims who would instead regard America as both home and homeland.
In the conception of abode of Islam or abode of peace, the ideal type is a citizen, a person who feels at home in America, thereby achieving equilibrium or symmetry between the subjective culture (Muslim identity) and the objective culture (American culture). America no longer remains a mismatched habitat for a Muslim habitus developed elsewhere. Rather it becomes an American Muslim habitus in an American habitat. As such, even immigrant parents who might not consider America their homeland would not hesitate to call it the homeland of their children.
When I asked a Bangladeshi community leader in Hamtramck, Michigan, what he thought of America as a new home for Muslims, he replied, “There is no return, we have settled here.” When I said, “But you know there are Muslims who have reluctance because of the distinction of two abodes…,” his response came very quickly: “Oh no, no. I take one poet, he said: [quotes first in Bengali, then translates freely] ‘China is mine. Arabian Peninsula is mine. Japan is mine. America is mine. I'm a Muslim. All the world is my country.’ That is my understanding. I decided to live over here, I'm a citizen of this country; this is my country. It is my children's country.”
In the three previous perceptions of America, Muslims remained outside the fray where American politics was concerned. It is only with the conception of America as abode of Islam/peace that membership in American society begins to translate into active citizenship and political participation. If abode of accord (dar al ahd) designated an American environment not incompatible with Islam, abode of peace (dar al Islam) designates an American environment that is actually perceived as Islamic. Muslims who regard America as abode of peace (dar al Islam) actually consider American values to be lost or alienated Islamic values. As Ingrid Mattson, the current president of ISNA, notes, “Among the most interesting efforts to permit Muslims a full embrace of American identity is the attempt to show that the constitutional democratic structure of America is almost equivalent to the political structure of an ideal Islamic state” (2003: 207).
The legal structures of democratic society become an extension of Islamic political order, if not an unnoticed embodiment of it. “Implementing the Sharia [Islamic law], for a Muslim citizen or resident in Europe [or America], is explicitly to respect the constitutional and legal framework of the country in which he is a citizen” (Ramadan Reference Ramadan2002: 172).
The perspective identifying Islam with American values tends to emerge among American-born children of immigrants (i.e., second and third generations) and convert Americans seeking harmony in their double identity. For example, Robert Dickson Crane, a former advisor to President Nixon and convert to Islam, argues, “The basic principles of Islamic law are identical to the basic premises of America's founding fathers, but both Muslims and Americans have lost this common heritage” (Crane Reference Crane1997). This was the implicit theme of the keynote speech that Hamza Yusuf of Zaytuna Institute delivered in 2007 in Chicago at the annual convention of ISNA. He argued that not only are Muslim and American values aligned, but also American Muslims are the true inheritors and present-day bearers of “old-fashioned American values” which otherwise have been lost in the modern world.
A land of freedom (especially religious freedom) and democracy, America is a heterogeneous arena of good and bad, right and wrong. Just like historically Muslim lands, America also has its share of bad things. But it is up to Muslims to live Islam. They can contribute to its culture and society not only by their faith but also through their hard work and service. America is no longer an opportunity space or a land of possibilities; it is a privilege for Muslims. As such it places them in a special status with regard to both America and the Muslim community at large. American Muslims see themselves as having a special location and a historical responsibility—indeed, a number of contemporary Muslim intellectuals have called it a “manifest destiny” (Khan Reference Khan2002: 1).
Muslim writers publish articles with such titles as: “Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness are Islamic Values.”Footnote 13 The pursuit of happiness—which had been regarded by Sayyid Qutb, under the paradigm of abode of war, as antithetical to Islam—is now seen as part of Islam. Islam becomes an American religion, part of the landscape of American civil religion in the minds of Muslims themselves as interfaith consciousness matures and interfaith activism intensifies.
Now America is home and the Muslim world is the target of outreach. At the stage of America as abode of Islam, the shift of perspectives is complete. Muslims see things from the “point of view” (i.e., the location) of their new home/land, America. They are now set to make strategic incursions into the Muslim world, seeking to derive benefits from it (in the form of cultural resources) while avoiding its problems (corruption, authoritarianism). Whereas previously only converts had behaved in this way, it now becomes a common practice among the children of American immigrants. New generations of Muslims often criticize the “cultural Islam” of their parents, which they see as immigrant confusion of culture with religion. What had once been approached with suspicion (i.e., America, the abode of war) is now naturalized, and what was natural for their parents (i.e., overseas culture) has now become an object of suspicion.
As American Muslims gain relative autonomy vis-à-vis other Muslims, America becomes in their eyes an increasingly complex entity. America presents manifold eidetic appearances, while the Muslim world shrinks to a few ideal types. The process of autonomization of American Islam is accelerated by the arrival of second- and third-generation American Muslims who make fun of their immigrant parents and Islamophobic non-Muslim compatriots. The rise of Muslim comedians, especially in the post-9/11 era, amply attests to this transformation. Another less noticeable yet normatively crucial symptom of autonomization is the effort to generate a “minority fiqh (jurisprudence)” that is sensitive to the conditions of Muslims living in America. Worthy of special mention here is the work of American Muslim jurist Taha Jabir Al-Alwani (Reference Al-Alwani2003). The emergence of an American Muslim ethos and the development of a sense of being at home in America reverse the relationship between the abode of peace and the abode of chaos. America becomes the land of order and pure reality, while the homeland of immigrant parents retreats into chaos and anomie.
Conclusion
This article has examined the way in which immigrant Muslims eliminate their sense of homeland insecurity and gradually come to see America as a new homeland. As Muslims begin to dwell in America, either the American nomos becomes legible to them or they introduce a new Islamic nomos onto the American surface. Often the two possibilities converge.
Phenomenologically speaking, our situatedness creates nearness and distance. Muslim views of America are shaped by their relative exposure to American space and the degree of their involvement with it. This article has traced the transition from the paradigm of exception (darura) to the construction of legal order on a previously anomic space. As we have seen, the abode of chaos/abode of peace binary faces an irruption of experience and is shattered into a plurality of new categories—and, as a consequence, the Muslim lifeworld in America becomes religiously legitimate and meaningful. Examination of the stages of this process reaffirms that there is no such thing as a blanket Muslim perception of America, a salient reminder at a time when Muslim loyalty to the American nation is viewed with increasing skepticism.
This discussion of the juridical tools that help immigrant Muslims feel at home rests on the concept of “cultural settlement,” which highlights the dynamic relationship between habitus and habitat. Bourdieu's notion of habitus is often construed as a tool for understanding the persistence of past forms of symbolic violence in the body. My study shows the dialogical re-articulation of habitus through settlement, that is, through the inhabitation of a new cultural environment. The gradual character of this process, which entails a “digestion” of the new environment on both the politico-communal and psychic levels, requires attention to issues of temporality and space. Furthermore, unlike legal inclusion and naturalization, which focus on the role of sovereign or disciplinary apparatuses of power in integrating the newcomer, cultural settlement pays attention to the agency of the displaced subjects, who are seen to appropriate their new homeland, even as it appropriates them.
Taking a phenomenological approach to the immigrant experience sensitizes us to particular aspects of the settlement process: the way displacement causes disequilibrium between the subjective culture of the individual and the objective culture of their environment; the terror and anomie they experience at this loss; the way their dwelling in a new space generates, over time, a new canopy, a new ethos, and a new common sense. The human being and the world he or she inhabits are much less dissociable than our liberal conceptions of citizenship tend to suggest. In an important sense, the immigrant does not move from one part of the world to another. He moves from one world to another. Truly “being” in that new world, as Heidegger reminds us, demands an unmaking and remaking of self, a shift from the deficient mode of care which is a disposition of non-attunement toward the new environment to an attitude of involvement, openness, and attunement. A proper phenomenology of the immigration experience—that is, of the processes of dissociation from the past and there and re-sociation with the now, the here—reveals a transformation from chaos and confusion, from life as a constant state of exception, to attention, receptivity and nomos. This is creative work, both on the part of the immigrant and on the part of the society that receives him. Immigration, with its discordance between habitus and habitat, ceases to define a person only when concordance is established between habitus and new habitat in a gradual process of mutual appropriation.
