By Joyce M. Davis

      Dr. Akbar Ahmed’s latest work, Journey into America: the Challenge of Islam, may be one of the most important books ever written about the Muslim experience in America.  Having spent years living and working in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. , Ahmed is clearly at home with American culture, knowledgeable about American history and current affairs, and comfortable being  Muslim, as well.

      Having also served as Pakistani ambassador to Great Britain, studying in European schools and traveling throughout the globe, Ahmed is a perfect bridge between the Islamic world and the West.   Ahmed’s natural appreciation of the best of both worlds, and his frank acknowledgment of their flaws and deficiencies, is what makes Journey into America stand out among all of the books that attempt to fathom the depths of the Islamic-Western divide.

      Journey into America is a compelling and forthright exploration into the Muslim communities in the United States, documenting Islam’s impact on American history and modern life.  To provide a fitting context to his interviews, Ahmed offers a chillingly candid overview of the history of the founding of the United States, and an analysis of the nature of some of the white people who settled the country. He frankly examines the often brutal relationships of the “Plymouth Rock” early settlers with the people they conquered and enslaved, including Native Americans and African Americans, many of whom were Muslims.

      With that background of American history, Ahmed takes the reader into Muslim communities throughout the country, speaking directly to people in mosques, in homes, in shops, in prisons and even on street corners, to try to gauge their experiences in modern America. Traveling with a team that included male and female assistants, Ahmed compiled an extraordinary collection of interviews with a diverse group of Muslims, from African Americans, to Latino converts, to immigrants still struggling to meld an American identity with Muslim traditions.  He and his team also take the temperature of non-Muslims to determine their attitudes, interviewing people of many  races, religions and socio-economic classes, including journalists, soldiers, prisoners, businesspeople, and, yes, even a stripper.

      As if that weren’t a diverse enough group, Ahmed spent an afternoon with the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan, who likened African Americans to dogs, better off being cared for as slaves. Muslims were not a problem for the Rev. Thomas Robb, although he had no desire to bring Muslim communities into the mainstream of American society.  Muslims have no right, he told Ahmed, “to dictate our national policies, to construct our national personality.”

      One thing Journey into America makes clear, few Muslims in this country find fault with the philosophical roots that guided the founding fathers.  Mirroring the views of many Muslims I have interviewed around the world, there is no valid Islamic argument against freedom or democracy. The argument some Muslims have is against the perceived injustice and hypocrisy of American foreign policy and the persistence of poverty and racism within American society.

      In the eyes of Muslims that Ahmed interviewed, the Constitution and the values of America’s founding fathers are Islamic through and through.  Najah Bazzy, one of the Muslim women interviewed, even described Thomas Jefferson as “a Muslim at heart.”  In fact, several of the imams and activists Ahmed and his team interviewed ranked Thomas Jefferson in their list of great leaders, just after the Prophet Muhammad.

      Echoing the sentiments of many of the hundreds of people Ahmed and his American team interviewed.  Bazzy lauded the Declaration of Independence as wholly Islamic because of “its emphasis on the universal values of equality, justice and tolerance.”

      Despite the overall agreement that American and Islamic human values are compatible and that many Muslims can practice their religion in the U.S. unfettered, Ahmed’s research confirms great and growing tensions around Muslims in the United States.  These tensions are within the American Muslim communities, as well as between Muslims in the U.S. and the American majority who view the religion with suspicion, if not dread.

      Ahmed divides Muslims in the U.S. into three main classes: mystics, modernists and literalists.  Mystics accept America as it is and try to right things through example; modernists are “attracted to pluralism,” Ahmed says and embrace the multiculturalism and interfaith aspects of American society.  The literalists have a harder time with American life, and Americans have a hard time understanding and accepting them, as well.  But literalists are not necessarily violent, although terrorists are most likely to come from this group than from the other two. 

      These three categories are a brave attempt to try to bring some order into the diversity of philosophies and theologies of Muslims living in the United States, but they can hardly capture the extensive differences among people of such disparate ethnic groups, languages, cultures and histories.

      Ahmed takes pain to document that most Muslims in America are decent, law-abiding people who just want to pursue their own forms of happiness in a free country, he does not shrink from the scary reality of immigrant militants and the threat of homegrown terrorism. 

      There are Muslims within our midst who are dangerous and are indeed a threat, Ahmed’s work acknowledges.  Chief among them are the Salafis, literalists who want to live exactly as the Prophet Muhammad did in his time.  The Salafis stay disdainfully outside of the mainstream and avoid the media and mixing with people of other faiths.  Ahmed and his intrepid team found a way even into to this community, however.  What they discovered were people angry at the hypocrisy and immorality they see in American society, and disgusted with fellow Muslims who they believe try to compromise too much to be accepted as American. 

      The divisions that Ahmed found among Muslims in the United States parallel those I observed around the world, even in the heart of the Middle East.  The fact is that Islam is in the middle of its own internal battles, whether in the United States or abroad.  Shias are pitted against Sunnis, Wahabis are pitted against Sufis, and moderates are pitted against the militants who want to blow up America in the name of Islam.

    Many Muslims fled this kind of chaos for the United States, believing they could blend their peace-loving and tolerant interpretations of Islam with American values.  As Ahmed, some seem truly to be at home in both worlds, confident and committed to their Muslim identities, while forging a unique American identity. Others, as Ahmed’s research shows, are to angry to be at home anywhere in a world they see filled with injustice and immorality.

      Above all, Journey into America clearly reveals just how complex the history of Islam has been in the United States, and how complicated post Sept. 11 life is for Muslims in America.

Read more:
http://onfaith.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/guestvoices/2010/10/exposing_the_infrastructure