Muslim-american contributions part of everyday lives
As an expert on Muslim America, I am painfully aware that there are Muslim terrorists in the United States.
Still, I decided not to include an entry on “terrorism” in my “Encyclopedia of Muslim-American History.” Readers will fi nd entries on John Walker Lindh, José Padilla, and the terrorist attacks of 9/11, but there is no overview entry on the topic. I didn’t want to give the impression that terrorism is a typical activity for Muslim-Americans.
I know the decision will elicit criticism. Some critics might say that the work is part of a conspiracy bent on justifying the Islamization of America. Or that my encyclopedia ignores the role of religion in inspiring violence, oppressing women and restricting free speech.
But we already know about all that.
Viewing Muslim America mainly through the lens of terrorists and extremists distorts the realities of Muslim-American life.
If there really were a statistically significant population of MuslimAmericans committed to violence against the United States and its citizens, we would be living in a very different country. Think Israel or Iraq. In fact, as of 2012, of the 180,000 murders in the
United States since 9/11, only 33 were committed by Muslim-American terrorists. For the sake of comparison, white supremacists and their allies murdered over 200 Americans during that time.
All this terrorism talk makes what is abnormal — the Muslim-American terrorist — seem normal. As a result, we don’t know enough about regular, everyday Muslim-Americans. And there is a severe shortage of awareness, sometimes among Muslims themselves, about Muslim-American contributions to U.S. history.
Much of that has nothing to do with religion.
The story starts before the republic was founded as slaves such as Job Ben Solomon arrived on American shores. It continues in the early 20th century with the tales of Punjabi sailors who lived on Congo Square in New Orleans and Syrian sodbusters such as Mary Juma who settled in North Dakota.
It is well-known that Muslims such as Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali shaped the political culture of the 1960s and 1970s, but not enough people know how Fazlur Rahman Khan shaped American architecture or how Farooq Kathwari influenced the history of home furnishings. From United States v. Ali (1921) to Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), the nation’s legal history is similarly incomplete without the study of Muslim Americans.
Muslim-American contributions to the arts, like Ahmad Jamal’s jazz album Live at the Pershing, Moustapha Akkad’s horror film “Halloween,” and Suheir Hammad’s poem “First Writing Since,” have changed what we hear, see and read. Muslim-American cuisine, like the 19th century rice cakes made by Muslim slaves on the Georgia seacoast and the falafel sandwiches made by Muslim vendors along America’s urban streets, have made our palates bigger.
Perhaps my favorite story recounted in the encyclopedia is when, on July 4, 1893, a Christian minister who was supposed to deliver an invocation at the Chicago World Fair did not show up. Visiting Muslim Imam Jamal Effendi filled in. He asked God’s blessings on America, and at the end of the prayer, the Muslims in attendance loudly cheered for the United States, shouting “Allahu Akbar” (God is great!).
Needless to say, the non-Muslims in the crowd were shocked. Today, we can celebrate this incident as a great moment in our multicultural American past.
Appreciating Muslim-American contributions to U. S. society does not mean that we should ignore difficult questions. For example, we must ask why some Muslim-Americans have strongly opposed aspects of U. S. foreign policy or why some Muslims choose to wear the veil and some do not. The more we know about MuslimAmerican history, the better our answers will be.
With this more encyclopedic view of Muslim-Americans, our historical imaginations as Americans are enriched. We conjure our Muslim-American ancestors, and they help us fight the ghosts of cultural exclusivity. We can disagree about what this history means, but even then, we create a shared world of significance in discussing it. We also help to bridge one of the great political divides of our time.
So what does “T” stand for in Muslim-American history? Toledo, of course. Look it up.