The political problematization of the American Muslim examined in this article is one current within a larger national discussion about whether Muslims can integrate into Western society as both religious adherents and citizens. Otherwise stated, are the values of Western advanced industrialized societies and the presumed univocal religion of Islam fundamentally irreconcilable? In the late twentieth century, the developed Anglophone world adopted a state multicultural model, which is now being contested (Modood Reference Modood2007) by other forms of political nationhood, particularly those of continental Europe. These debates rest partly on the distinction between jus sanguinus (citizenship by “right of blood”) versus jus soli (citizenship by “right of soil”). In recent months, with revelations of American Muslims being recruited into militant extremist movements in Yemen, Somalia, and Pakistan, the nation has renewed its examination of the extent to which Muslims in the United States have actually acceded to the values of the republic.
Can the American Muslim be religiously and racially written into “ascriptive Americanism” (Smith Reference Smith1999)? That is to say the normative popular definition of what it means to be an American sans qualifications, as it has come to be in the case of those of European lineage and “Judeo-Christian” heritage. The religions of previous waves of immigrants—various forms of Christianity, Judaism, and Eastern religions—posed little threat to the dominance of American Christianity. Islam remains the only global and civilizational peer competitor that espouses equally universalistic claims. Is the integration of the Muslim into American society fundamentally different from past integration experiences, and if so, where does the political difference lie?
BACKGROUND: RACE AND RELIGION
According to a dominant perspective within critical race theory, becoming an American is strongly linked to whiteness. The conception of whiteness has expanded over time from the limited notion of the American as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant to incorporate others such as the Italians and the Irish (Ignatiev Reference Ignatiev2008). The right side of the American political spectrum defines America as a “Judeo-Christian” nation and asserts that America is “a nation that professes to be a light unto the world, this self-styled God's Country” (Zelinsky Reference Zelinsky2001). Zelinsky further notes that this identification “suggest[s] a serious nervousness within the national community. It is something not limited to fundamentalist Protestants, this anxiety about identity and purpose, a restlessness and hunger no amount of material superabundance and technological bedazzlement can assuage” (Reference Zelinsky2001, 582).
The majority of first- and second-generation American Muslims tacitly followed the dominant white narrative of American integration. Because of the class, level of education, and professional status that it offered, the white narrative of American integration was seen as a model for both secular and religious Muslims. Indeed, prior to September 11, integration into this way of life was the community's most common path in terms of the evolution of its national political identity (Jamal and Naber Reference Jamal and Naber2008). The dominance of this trend often led to the marginalization of African American Muslims in the institutions built by first-generation American Muslims in the 1980s and 1990s, despite their older claim to a uniquely American form of Islam (Jackson Reference Jackson2005). Some first-generation American Muslims questioned the authenticity of existing forms of Islam and, in doing so, helped widen the rift between the mainstream African American Muslim communities (now represented by the community of the late W. D. Muhammad) and the first- and second-generation American Muslim communities (broadly represented by the Islamic Society of North America).
I would posit the theory that in our era, African American Muslims are now generally more readily accepted by the public as Americans and are perceived as being more loyal to the nation than first- and second-generation American Muslims. This perception was fostered during the civil rights movement, in which African American Muslims such as Malcolm X wrote themselves into the American narrative by contesting the place of their race within a hierarchy of privilege. It is thus not surprising that post-September 11 the first American Muslim elected to Congress in 2007 was Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN), an African American who was reelected in 2010. The second American Muslim, elected in the following year, Rep. André Carson (D-IN), is also an African American. These congressmen represent districts that are not Muslim majority, campaigned on local issues, and, despite anti-Muslim rhetoric from some members of the opposition, were elected and reelected irrespective of their religion. This unassailability in public does not, however, extend to private life. One 2009 Pew Center report on American Muslims found that in private life, African American Muslims feel a sense of double discrimination from being both black and Muslim (Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life 2009).
Arab Americans, the majority of whom are of Christian descent and come from the Levant (U.S. Census Bureau 2003), have also been successful in national politics, partly as a result of their long history of assimilation over the past century. More recent arrivals of Arab Muslims from other parts of the Middle East have demonstrated higher levels of political participation than South Asian and African American Muslims, perhaps because for Arab American Muslims, “mosques are directly linked to political activity, civic participation, and group consciousness” (Jamal Reference Jamal2005, 537). National policies after September 11 helped motivate Muslim Arab American voter registration and “appear … to be acting as an accelerant to political activism in many Arab American communities” (Gimpel, Cho, and Wu Reference Gimpel, Cho and Wu2007, 349).
THE POLITICAL RESPONSE TO SEPTEMBER 11: AMERICAN EXCEPTIONALISM
In reaction to September 11, first- and second-generation American Muslims of South Asian and Arab extraction were placed in the political category of the racial “other.” International perspectives and critiques of US foreign policy have not yet entered national public debate or forced a reevaluation of national policy, despite calls for such action as early as the days immediately following September 11 (Milne Reference Milne2001).
Americans generally, excluding the indigenous population and minorities, are a people cut in history. To be “cut in history” is to engage two popular American perspectives on culture and history. First, American culture, in our age of rapid telecommunications and travel, has become increasingly defined by an ephemeral popular culture that accounts for the vitriolic “culture wars.” Take as counter-example, the Scotsman in Edinburgh. He is Scottish by virtue of clan and his claim on the land that can go back a millennium or more. His perspective on contemporary cultural or political issues is ancillary to his sense of Scottish identity. Second, telecommunications technology has allowed many Americans to have instant news feed that focuses on sensational news in microbursts of time. Deep reflection on a single idea or a comprehensive historical background on a contemporary issue is more likely to be found in academia than on a cable news network. This, in part, accounts for the benighted state of many Americans, unable to connect the foreign policy decisions of their government, covert and overt, to the negative externalities that inevitably follow. The link between cause and effect is severed through an unshakable belief, religious in fervor, of American exceptionalism.
Gellner writes (Bloom Reference Bloom1987),
America's fabulous wealth and its relatively wide dispersal, the wide (of course not complete) participation in the national cultural ideal, the egalitarianism and stress on mobility, and above all the absence of any real recollection or even haunting smell of any ancien régime—all these traits make Americans absolutize their own culture, and to equate it with the human condition as such, and hence unconsciously to treat other cultures as perversions of the rightful human condition.
(Reference Gellner1992, 52)The dominant political class in America cherishes an unshakable belief in American exceptionalism, which I define as an ahistorical perspective on the role of American power and the role of cause and effect in the history of American foreign policy in the Middle East and South Asia leading up to September 11. American exceptionalism visualizes a world in which the rightness of the American cause is helped by Providence, and in which America lies outside of history and can even defy it (Haberski Reference Haberski2010).
The narrative of colonization also plays a complex role in the American self-perception. The United States' founding narrative is that of a colony resisting the ties of the colonizing nation in the pursuit of liberty and self-determination (Bellah Reference Bellah1975). But in the intervening years since the Declaration of Independence, the nation has transformed from a relatively minor agrarian and mercantile economy to an advanced postindustrial global hegemon—and yet the narrative of the “underdog” continues to be invoked against the criticism of neocolonialism. Because America's role in the chain of events leading to September 11 was invisible to the majority of its population, the only explanation for these events that the public could produce was that Islam and Muslims had attacked the United States because of their irrational hatred of democratic values and freedom (Gottschalk and Greenberg Reference Gottschalk and Greenberg2008, 1–12). The subtle distinctions within the world of Islam were initially considered irrelevant as the United States created the civilian Department of Homeland Security and the military U.S. Northern Command Headquarters. And so began political action to “deter, prevent, defeat, and mitigate” transnational terrorism. These events constitute the beginning of the national political problematization of both the American Muslim and global Islam. As with previous national enemies, from the Japanese and Germans to the Communists, Islam and Muslims became the new national security threat that the government aimed to attack both within and beyond the country's borders (Jackson Reference Jackson2011).
THE POLITICAL PROBLEMATIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MUSLIM: STATE TO CITIZEN
As the focus of this article is political identity, this section examines the American Muslim as citizen in the post-September 11 era as a figure whose isolation by religion and race is partly produced by American exceptionalism. To be more precise, I offer here an overview of the political identity of first- and second-generation American Muslims as seen through two relationships. The first is the citizen and his or her institutions in relation to the state. The second is the relationship of citizen to citizen and focuses more generally on civil society.
The first dimension of the political problematization of the American Muslim can be seen in the relationship between the state and the citizen/institution. The national security policies produced by Washington after September 11 had profound impacts on American Muslim political identity. The irony is that the collective effect of these policies was to strengthen the same religious component of American Muslim identity (Peek Reference Peek2005) that had been problematized.
The most direct impact that the state had on individual Muslims can be seen in the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA) policies and execution in the wake of September 11. The haphazard securitization of US airports and the absence of systematic oversight of TSA employees produced a very challenging experience for all airline passengers. However, Muslims encountered targeted racial/ethnic profiling and disempowerment through the creation of the special security lines with additional intrusive searches and the inability to question the manner and rationale of the searches. Any signs of resistance were categorized as “creating a disturbance” or “being uncooperative”—serious charges in an environment where the mere accusation of terrorism could authorize indefinite detainment, especially for noncitizens. As a result, for Muslims, the act of air travel physically reinforced a feeling of social exclusion (Pew Research Center 2007). The no-fly list is still not subject to transparent review, and there is little recourse for people challenging their inclusion on it—a situation that many American Muslims and liberal advocates in the American Bar Association (ABA) view as basic violations of Fourth and Sixth Amendment rights.
National laws changed drastically in the aftermath of September 11. The Patriot Act (H.R. 3162) passed quickly through Congress without much debate and granted extraordinary powers to law enforcement. Mosques were monitored, and charitable institutions closed on the basis of suspicion and circumstantial evidence (Al-Marayati Reference Al-Marayati2004).
Extrajudicial actions were also taken, with the most notable being the expansion of the detainment center at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, to accommodate detainees suspected of being terrorists. The new legal category of “enemy combatant” was created to avoid the legal restrictions on treatment of prisoners of war that were established in Common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. Reports of torture at the facility leaked out and were later confirmed to have been authorized by the administration (The New York Times online). As time has passed, it has become clearer that the Bush administration directed Americans officials to engage in extrajudicial conduct against Muslim terrorism suspects. The extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects to CIA black sites and the events that unfolded at Abu Ghraib Prison in 2004 were just a few points in the greater trend of Muslims being characterized as a security threat so extreme that neither military nor civilian judicial processes would suffice to deal with them. The American extrajudicial approach can be contrasted with Indonesia's approach to a home-grown terrorist organization, Jemaah Islamiyah. In the same decade that the American security bureaucracy has expanded, the Indonesians have had a more successful approach in controlling militant extremists.
Jakarta has arrested more than 450 radicals since the first Bali attacks. All have been prosecuted transparently rather than being detained indefinitely without charge. More than 250 have been released. Only a few militants are thought to be at large. Brigadier General Tito Karnavian, the head of Detachment 88, the Indonesian police anti-terror unit, believes the secret of the nation's success is the use of “law enforcement, prosecution and the judicial process.” He added: “We do not use the military approach.”
(Aglionby Reference Aglionby2009).The Indonesian case illuminates an indigenous Muslim response to the threat of militant-extremism as form of criminality rather than categorizing it as an existential threat to the nation and thus inadvertently bolstering the claim of these extranational entities. If the Obama administration were to chart a similar course, it would serve both the purpose of partially delegitimizing the “Islamic” narrative of these groups as well as advance the integration of Muslims into the American political mainstream.
For many Muslims in the United States, the experiences of detained and expelled foreign Muslims took on a new urgency with the case of the detention of Army Chaplain Captain James Yee, an American Muslim convert and West Point graduate who was serving at the naval base at Guantánamo Bay in 2003. Yee was accused of being an operative in an alleged spy ring passing information to al-Qaeda from suspected terrorists at Guantánamo. On the basis of these accusations, Yee was arrested, blindfolded, manacled, and placed in solitary confinement for 76 days on a Navy brig (Parker Reference Parker2004). All charges were later dropped, but Yee's military career was over. For American Muslims, this case symbolized the limits of religious and ethnic integration. This experience begs the question on the minds of many American Muslims: If a person so loyal and committed to the United States could be mistreated and his career destroyed on the mere suspicion of disloyalty based on his religion, then what could happen to the average American Muslim (Yee Reference Yee2005)? If a person who has committed his life to public service and the loyal defense of his nation is not beyond suspicion, what is necessary to prove one's loyalty to the United States short of dying for it? As in the immortal words of Wilfred Owen, “… that old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (it is sweet and proper to die for one's own country) (Owen Reference Owen1983).
THE POLITICAL PROBLEMATIZATION OF THE AMERICAN MUSLIM IN CIVIL SOCIETY: CITIZEN TO CITIZEN
The second dimension of the political problematization of the American Muslim can be seen in the relationship between citizen and citizen that occurs in civil society. The reaction of the American public to September 11 generally followed the lines of political orientation (conservative to progressive/liberal), with independents shifting in the conservative direction. This section seeks to outline how civil society interacted with the Muslim as religious other.
After September 11, a desire arose in the United States to understand Muslims and the world of Islam. Progressive and liberal American religious groups worked to connect with American Muslims on both the individual and the community level through various efforts such as interfaith dialogue (Takim Reference Takim2004), expanding interreligious communication. On the American Muslim side, tremendous efforts were made in this direction, with one notable example being Eboo Patel's Interfaith Youth Core, which aims to articulate a pluralist American Islam and promote interfaith dialogue in the United States (Patel Reference Patel2007).
In academia, religious studies and the demand for university courses related to Arabic and Islam also exploded in much the same way that Slavic and Russian-language studies experienced a surge during the Cold War. Washington's perspective of Islam became binary, identifying Wahabism as bad and Sufism as good, and a push for reformation began within the largely Protestant nation. This idea of “reformation” would naturally emerge from a society that saw the Protestant Reformation as beneficial in the history of Western civilization. Many of the proponents of the idea of an “Islamic Reformation” outwith the Islamic tradition, see Islam and particularly the sharīʿa as medieval, incompatible, and irreconcilable with the values of a modern society, such as the United States (Palmer Reference Palmer2008).
With the aid of federal funding from the 2002 Homeland Security Act, a dubious multidisciplinary academic category of “homeland security” emerged. This area of study was organized to directly support the federal government's counterterrorism efforts. Of course, credentialed scholars had published scholarly work on terrorism and militant extremism among Muslims before September 11; groundbreaking examples are such works as Mark Juergensmeyer's Terror in the Mind of God (Reference Juergensmeyer2000) and after September 11 such as Olivier Roy's Globalized Islam. But the rapid proliferation and dubious credentials of “terrorism experts” in both the new field of security studies and the popular media, especially on cable news channels, meant that a low-quality level of scholarly analysis exacerbated popular stereotypes of Muslims and Islam.
While liberal and progressive elements of American society sought forms of interfaith dialogue and understanding, some mainline conservative and almost all evangelical denominations (who constitute “slightly more than one in five” of all Americans [Winesman Reference Winesman2005]) promoted the image of Islam as the enemy of Christianity and the embodiment of evil, echoing the rhetoric of medieval Christendom (Tolan Reference Tolan2002). In 2002, the Reverend Jerry Falwell said in a 60 Minutes interview, “I think Muhammad was a terrorist.” According to Cimino, for most American evangelicals
This polemic against Islam takes three forms: apologetics to prove the truth of Christianity against Islam; prophetic literature linking Islam as the main protagonist in end-times scenarios; and charismatic literature applying “spiritual warfare” teachings to Islam…. The greater and more visible pluralism in American society is challenging evangelical identity, leading to the erection of new boundary markers between evangelicalism and other religions.
(Reference Cimino2005, 162)According to 2009 national data compiled by the Council on American-Islamic Relations, hate crimes against and civil rights complaints by American Muslims have increased every year since 2001 (Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR] 2009). This phenomenon has been termed “Islamophobia,” or fear of Islam. The multicultural context of contemporary America assumes that fear can be overcome with knowledge of the other—but what about the people who do not wish to engage intellectually with Islam and understand it beyond its stereotype? Islamophobia is too benign a term to describe the more extreme hatred directed toward American Muslims; rather, these sentiments are a form of anti-Islamism. I assert that this perspective views Islam as the existential other, and as a stream of religio-political ideology that must be publically delegitimized for American Muslims to achieve a mainstream political identity.
THE CORE OF CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN MUSLIM POLITICAL IDENTITY
Having briefly outlined how race and religion are tied to the political problematization of the American Muslim, the following sections present four markers of integral components of contemporary American Muslim political identity in the post-September 11 era.
Democrat
In the 1980s, significant discussion occurred among first- and second-generation American Muslims about whether involvement in the American political system was halāl, or religiously permissible in Islamic jurisprudence. A generational debate ensued that was in part based on self-identity. Did first-generation American Muslim in the United States consider themselves to be visitors who would return home after retirement, engaging in what Nyang termed the “myth of return” (Reference Nyang1999, 18), or did they see themselves as “here to stay” permanently? The majority of post-1965 American Muslim immigrants to the United States, excluding asylum seekers, came not as political or religious refugees, but as economic migrants who became acculturated to the norms of American society and, owing to their children's future in the country, made return to their homelands impractical if not impossible. The shift in self-identification has been generational, but September 11 also catapulted the American Muslim community into political activism as the costs of political quietism increased exponentially.
Observant Muslims are more socially conservative than the average American owing to religious restrictions such as communal gender segregation and adherence to strict dietary codes. As such, one might conclude that the Republican Party would be this group's natural home. Indeed, in the 2000 election, first- and second-generation American Muslims formally endorsed the Republican Bush on October 23, 2000, through a new national umbrella organization called the American Muslim Political Coordinating Council (AMPCC). This endorsement was partly due to a slight tilt, as the release states, “Bush challenged the use of ‘secret evidence’ at the second presidential debate” (Rose Reference Rose2001). This is in contrast to the Gore campaign, which refused to meet with leaders of the Muslim community and did publically acknowledge the constitutional concerns shared by the American Muslim community. Simultaneously, however, African American Muslim organizations refused to endorse Bush through the AMPCC and voted overwhelmingly for Al Gore.
In the 2004 elections, after what was perceived as four years of increasingly negative policies against Muslims both domestically and internationally, the AMPCC overwhelmingly voted for John Kerry (Fernandes and Skerry Reference Fernandes and Skerry2004). It is clear, especially with the 2008 election, that the Democratic Party has secured the American Muslim vote as a permanent constituency for a generation.
Pro-Palestinian, Internationalist (Foreign Policy)
Unlike Christianity, Islam and Judaism share a common view of community. Religion and ethnicity bind the Jews in a worldwide community (Denny Reference Denny2011), and for Muslims, the importance of umma (the worldwide community of believers) has only increased in the postcolonial period as innovations in communications technology have been made and pan-Islamic ideology has expanded (Roy Reference Roy2006). As such, US foreign policy toward the Muslim world is of special interest to American Muslims.
Historically, American Muslim political engagement has taken the form of pro-Palestinian activism. For Muslims, the Palestinian question is the most symbolic issue of the twentieth century and is tied to fundamental questions of self-identity, power, and postcolonialism. Much of early first-generation American Muslim political organization focused on foreign policy and this issue in particular, arguing against what they perceived as the power of the “Israel lobby,” in Walt and Mearsheimer's terminology (Mearsheimer and Walt Reference Mearsheimer and Walt2008).
With regard to major recent foreign policy decisions, the majority of American Muslims opposed the invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. In terms of overall foreign policy orientation, they tend toward internationalism. That is to say, among this group, US national security is not seen as exclusive from the interests of international community; rather, international political cooperation and adherence to the rule of international law is considered to be important, placing American Muslims closer to the progressive position on the political spectrum.
Progressive/Liberal (Domestic Policy)
In the summer of 2002, American Muslim leaders of various organizations including the Muslim Public Affairs Council, the Council on American Muslim Relations, and the American Muslim Council, among others, observed the marginalization of Muslims within the American political system. One response to this state of affairs was to push for recognition of the “Americanness” of first- and second-generation American Muslims by focusing on domestic issues as opposed to exclusively foreign policy. This suggestion provoked an initial divide between African American Muslims and first- and second-generation American Muslims. The Islamic concept of working toward social justice has been highlighted by the Council for American Islamic Relations (CAIR) so that the American Muslim community now promotes Muslim immigrant and civil rights in addition to its foreign policy platforms. The focus on civil rights cases by other organizations, such as the Muslim Public Affairs Council and National Association of Muslim Lawyers, signifies a larger trend within American Muslim political and professional organizations toward curbing a perceived tilt toward security by successive presidential administrations in lieu of liberty.
Since September 11, American Muslim commentary on domestic events has also become more important in promoting a positive image of the American Muslim. A major critique by the conservative base of the Republican Party is that Muslims do not condone terrorism (Peña Reference Peña2009). “Where are the moderates?” they ask. As a result, American Muslim organizations like CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America now regularly release press statements condemning terrorism both abroad and within the United States.
One common sentiment that American Muslim political leaders have expressed since September 11 is succinctly stated by Bayoumi:
Frankly, it's beleaguering; like living on a treadmill, and exhausting condition. University of Michigan anthropologists Sally Howell and Andrew Shyrock succinctly describe the situation when they write that “in the aftermath of 9/11, Arab and Muslim Americans have been compelled, time and again, to apologize for acts they did not commit, to condemn acts they never condoned, and to openly profess loyalties, that for most U.S. citizens are merely assumed.” Yet despite the apologies, condemnations, and professions, their voices are still not heard.
(Reference Bayoumi2008, 5)This form of silencing stems from credibility judgment. Muslim organizations engage regularly in group testimony (Tollefsen Reference Tollefsen2007) against terrorism and are not heard. If this situation is due to anti-Islamism, as I suspect in part it is, then this form of group preemptive testimonial injustice constrains the political freedom of American Muslims as a group to contest events and to be knowers in defining their own experience (Fricker Reference Fricker2009; Fricker Reference Fricker2010). This is to suggest that in mainstream American media outlets a bias exists in which American Muslim voices voicing opposition to militant-extremism or trying to articulate a nuanced definition of Islam are actively not heard.
Conservative (Religious)
Despite their support for domestic civil rights and liberal or domestic foreign policy positions, American Muslims' political progressivism does not generally extend to contested social issues such as gay marriage or abortion rights. Islam is evolving quite rapidly as a result of the high level of assimilation that is possible in the United States. The Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform orientations found within American Judaism can be applied to American Islam as well, although the boundaries are less defined and not yet codified as seen in the Shīʿa community (Takim Reference Takim2009). Secular Muslims do exist, as do Muslims who self-identify as “progressive,” but their collective numbers appear to be small, their religious ideas are largely confined to elite academic discourse, and they are not as politically organized as followers of the more conservative and orthodox orientations. Furthermore, some American Muslim conservatives espouse progressive ideas such as interfaith dialogue and religious pluralism, revealing the difficulty in establishing strict delineations (Safi Reference Safi2003).
While American Muslim attitudes toward social issues tend toward the conservative (explaining the initial political inclination toward the Republican Party in the 2000 presidential election), the anti-Islamic rhetoric that is common within the Republican Party and on the conservative Fox News is profoundly alienating. In the same way that black and white evangelicals share similar perspectives on social issues yet fundamentally disagree on political orientation and thus are in opposing political camps along racial lines as in the South, so too do American Muslims tend toward functional institutional secularism as the practical issues of civil rights and public policy outweigh symbolic cultural and religious debates over private morality.
CONCLUSION: SECOND-GENERATION LEADERSHIP AND THE FUTURE
The previous sections attempted to outline some of the major forces that have created the core of the American Muslim constituency. The majority of American Muslims, like most Americans, generally tend toward political apathy and ambivalence, except at those points in history that excite their spirit, such as the election of President Barak Hussein Obama. The minority political class is driving the redefinition of the American Muslim on behalf of the community. The American Muslim constituency is evolving rapidly because of the efforts of its political class, and its future lies in the hands of its second-generation leadership.
A bifurcation naturally emerges between first and second generations in a diaspora context. Many first-generation American Muslims who come to the United States are searching for a better life and are willing to bear higher levels of discrimination and hostility, because they perceive these burdens as less important than what they can achieve. Second-generation American Muslims, in contrast, are thoroughly Americanized, generally adopting the civil religion and the civic ideal of equality. When confronted with perceived discrimination, they react negatively and viscerally. It is with this passion that many second-generation American Muslims have entered the various parts of the political establishment to help the larger society achieve its stated ideals. Such political engagement is significant, because it depends on the internalization of and commitment to the American experiment.
The pioneering organization for the political mobilization, education, and networking of second-generation American Muslims is the Muslim Public Service Network, formerly the Muslim Student Network. Established by Marghoob and Renae Qureshi in 1994, the program has graduated summer alumni yearly since its inception. With its motto of “Engaging American Muslims in Public Service and Public Policy,” the Network runs an intensive summer program that allows American Muslim university students to intern in various political offices in Washington, DC, from the White House to the Council of Foreign Relations, and attend lectures on Islamic civilization by university lecturers and prominent Muslim leaders in the evenings. On completion of the program, the network of alumni is assiduously maintained through online communities. Prominent alumni have created many important networking institutions, such as the Congressional Muslim Staffers Association and the National Association of Muslim Lawyers.
One of the major accomplishments of the American Muslim political class is the ongoing development of these institutions. First-generation American Muslims have come to many of the same conclusions that their African American coreligionists have reached. Two clear trends can be seen in the evolution of American Muslim political identity: the redefinition of a racial narrative and the expansion of the Judeo-Christian definition of American identity to include an Abrahamic definition.
As the leadership of American Muslim political institutions transitions from first- to second-generation hands, the primary question that needs to be unequivocally answered in the mind of Americans is: Can American Muslims be loyal? If testimonial injustice exists because of anti-Islamism, making American Muslims unable to assert their loyalty, the causes of this prejudice must be identified and contested. In addition, the assumed connections between race and religion, and Americanness will need to be reconsidered. The 2010 controversy over the Park 51 project in New York City revealed an underlying national unease with Muslim identity in public spaces and took a decidedly political tone when local, state, and national politicians weighed in on the ability of the project to proceed. The primary challenge for the American Muslim political class in the new decade will be to promote a mainstream image of the unquestionable loyalty of the American Muslim so that a shift can take place to organize the American Muslim constituency from a fragmented political liability on the defensive to an allied asset on the offensive.
