Thomas Jefferson's Qur'an: Islam and the Founders (51 page)

Even when religion was not the explicit focus of immigration policy, Arab ethnicity remained problematic. In 1942, one judge denied citizenship to a
Yemeni Arab immigrant because, he argued, “Arabs are not white persons within the meaning of the act.” (The jurist here referred to the superseded 1790 Naturalization Act, deliberately ignoring the 1870 revision, which included persons of African descent.) Occasionally, the same label would not provoke condemnation: In 1944, for instance, a judge in Michigan granted an Arab from Arabia citizenship based on a quite accurate appreciation of the historical presence of Muslims in Europe and their contributions to Western civilization. That judge wrote, “The names of Avicenna and Averroes, the sciences of algebra and medicine, the population and the architecture of Spain and Sicily, the very words of the English language remind us as they would have reminded the Founding Fathers of the action and interaction of Arabic and non-Arabic element of our culture.”
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Such sentiments, however, were not representative of how most American Protestants saw Islamic history. Even Jefferson’s expansive reading on the subject did not lead him to such conclusions, thanks to the distortions in most of his European sources.

Nativism would periodically flare with great intensity against Jews and Catholics, based on charges that would later be directed against Muslims. Beginning in the 1920s, extremist Protestant hate groups such as the Ku Klux Klan promoted violent resistance to the citizenship of immigrant Jews and Catholics, as well as African Americans. The Klan’s slogan spoke to an ideal far from dead in America: “Native, white, Protestant supremacy.”
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In 1926, an imperial wizard of the KKK argued that Catholics were “incapable of American patriotism and democracy” because their church was “separatist, anti-democratic, and run by foreigners.”
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The charge that Catholics were eternal “aliens,” who owed allegiance to a foreign power, was hardly changed from the eighteenth century, with slogans such as “Rome shall not rule America.”
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The difference now, however, was that the American Catholic population had expanded from twenty-five thousand at the time of the founding to twelve million by 1900, to become the largest religious denomination in the country.
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Also in 1926, the same KKK leader published the forged anti-Semitic libel
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, which stoked American Protestant fears of “a Jewish plot to take over the world.”
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This tract had been preceded by the arrival of two million Jewish immigrants by 1920, a massive increase from the original two thousand resident in 1776.
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Resistance to the political equality of Catholics as well as Jews could also be found at the highest levels of American business and government.
Henry Ford, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, despite eventually employing many immigrant Muslims, supported the
Protocols
and published a steady stream of anti-Semitic propaganda.
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In 1942, President Roosevelt would confide to his sole Jewish cabinet member (only the second in U.S. history) and to a Catholic member of his government, “You know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here under sufferance.”
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As
Kevin Schultz documents, “discrimination in employment, housing, and social fraternization” against Jews and more generalized discrimination against Catholics in “civic and political affairs” persisted into the mid-twentieth century in the United States.
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These prejudices have still not been eradicated, though the derogatory political discourse they fed had mostly disappeared from the mainstream by the 1970s.

In order to refute the national ideal of Protestant supremacy, groups of Protestants, Jews, and Catholics came together in the 1920s. As Schultz’s important history reveals, organizations such as the
National Conference of Christians and Jews promoted a religiously plural ideal of a “tri-faith America,” in which Catholics and Jews would be equal to Protestants.
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From this egalitarian vision issued the new phrase “Judeo-Christian,”
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which, although it can be dated to 1899, did not enter usage in the United States until the 1930s, becoming a commonplace of popular expression in the 1950s.
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It remains a common but largely unexamined characterization of the nation’s religious identity.
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As a practical matter, the “Judeo-Christian” rubric excluded Muslims despite their explicit mention in the eighteenth-century founding
discourse, though in 1953 only one member of the National Conference of Christians and Jews recognized this inconsistency: “And so American popular prejudice against the peoples of the Middle East, among others, based as it largely is on false concepts of their religious beliefs and institutions, is now a serious factor in American foreign policy, as anti-Catholicism was a generation ago.”
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Nor did all Americans embrace the phraseology. For one thing, it was not historical, insofar as no eighteenth-century Founder, including supporters of the most expansive religious pluralism like Jefferson and Washington, had ever used it. Others found it misleading for other reasons. In 1971,
Arthur Cohen rejected the term as “myth”: “We can learn much from the history of Jewish-Christian relations, but one thing we cannot make of it is a discourse of community, fellowship, and understanding.”
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Preferring perhaps not to dwell on past divisions, in the 1980s American Muslim scholar and activist Isma‘il Raji al-Faruqi suggested the country be described as “Judeo-Christian-Islamic,” a nod to unifying features of the three Abrahamic faiths.
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More recently, the historian
Richard W. Bulliet renewed an objection to papering over Jewish/Gentile animosities: “No one with the least knowledge of the past two thousand years of relations between Christians and Jews can possibly miss the irony of linking in a single term two faith communities that decidedly did not get along during most of that period.” In fact, he has advanced a new “case” for what he calls an “
Islamo-Christian civilization,” arguing that far from a “clash,” the encounter of these two civilizations has been one of important convergences.
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The “Judeo-Christian” rubric embraced by Protestant Americans as a counter to discrimination against Jews and Catholics in the twentieth century inadvertently became the basis for discrimination against
Muslims in the twenty-first century, overwriting the founding “Protestant promise” of universal religious and political equality.
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In part, this happened because the American Muslim population before World War II was relatively small, with a few Arab arrivals in New York and Chicago during the 1930s and 1940s, the majority settling in Dearborn and Detroit, Michigan, and finding jobs on the Ford automotive assembly line.
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Still, the immigration quota system of the 1920s ensured that Middle Eastern immigration was minimal.

Not until the passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act in 1965 would preferences for arrivals from Europe be lifted, allowing significant numbers of Muslims from the Middle East and South Asia
to enter the country and seek citizenship.
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In contrast to the earliest Muslim immigrants, these new arrivals were often professionals or students, who chose the United States as an alternative to repressive political and economic conditions in their countries of origin. The American Muslim population has grown rapidly ever since, through the last forty years of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, helping to create what
Diana Eck, a scholar of religious pluralism, describes as “the world’s most religiously diverse nation.” Also included in the new wave of immigrants have been Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Jains, and Zoroastrians, none of whom fit under the Judeo-Christian rubric.
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How many American Muslim citizens now reside in the United States? Scholars and pollsters disagree, with estimates ranging from two to eight million.
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A Pew Research poll of August 2011 put the total at just under three million out of a total U.S. population of just over three hundred million.
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(Since the U.S. Census cannot ask Americans about their religion, claims about the number of American Muslims remain unverifiable.) What is clear, despite these divergent estimates, is that no American Muslim monolith exists: American Muslims represent the most ethnically, racially, and theologically diverse Islamic community in the world. American Muslim citizens hail from seventy-seven countries of origin.
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Sixty-three percent were born abroad, with 37 percent indigenous to the United States. For those in the former category, the Middle East and North Africa were originally home to 26 percent, with Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan accounting for another 26 percent of the population. The remaining 11 percent among the foreign-born come from sub-Saharan Africa, Europe, and other places.
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Of the 37 percent indigenous American Muslims, the largest group, 40 percent, are African Americans whose families at some point “reverted” to what they perceived as their original African faith. Many opted for Islam in response to the racism and slavery associated with the Christian past.
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But the ranks of American Muslim converts are racially diverse: 18 percent are white, 10 percent are Asian, 10 percent are Hispanic, and 21 percent claim to be of mixed racial origin.
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Hispanic converts, like African Americans, also identify Islam as their ancestral faith in Spain prior to the fifteenth century.
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As to varieties of Islam, 65 percent of American Muslims identify as Sunnis, with 11 percent professing
Shi‘ism, and another 24 percent refusing classification as either. Many American Muslims also embrace the mystical
strain of Sufism, which may explain a certain degree of nonsectarianism.
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In any case, Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the country.
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Among the high number of foreign-born Muslims, 81 percent have won U.S. citizenship.
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Resistance to the founding ideal of citizenship for Muslims is not new, but Muslim citizenship is no longer merely a theoretical concept. Consequently, the nature of resistance to it has evolved. Anti-Muslim hate groups, members of major and fringe political parties, and certain extreme conservative elements among Protestants and Jews have all been party to defaming American Muslims and denying their religious and political equality. Many of these movements were galvanized by the events of
September 11, 2001, when nineteen foreign extremists rationalized their violence in the name of Islam and perpetrated deadly terrorist attacks against the United States. On that day, some Americans expressed a willingness to indict all American Muslims en masse as potential co-conspirators in terrorism. For their part, American Muslims refused to equate their faith with acts of terrorism against their own country.

A coalition of American Muslim organizations issued a joint statement immediately after 9/11:

The
Muslim Students’ Association’s national headquarters, representing seven hundred organizations on campuses across the United States, issued press releases about their “grief and support for the larger American community.”
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But these statements were largely ignored, a response since described as “selective deafness.”
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As a result, American Muslims continue to be criticized for their supposed failure to denounce terrorism.
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Sixty American Muslims perished in the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but this fact was not remembered by most
non-Muslim Americans. American Muslims were in fact victimized twice by the attacks: once by the criminals who profaned their faith by their violent actions, and a second time by many of their fellow citizens who suspected their loyalty.
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The case of
Talat Hamdani is striking: As a New York City police cadet and emergency technician trainee, the Pakistani-born Hamdani, a U.S. citizen since 1990, had raced into the World Trade Center to render aid. With his disappearance at the site of the attack, accusations against him as a potential terrorist persisted until his body was recovered in 2002 under the North Tower—in thirty-four pieces.
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Only then was his name cleared. The New York City police commissioner “called him a hero.” But his mother’s bitterness about the slander of her son remains: “My anger comes from his own country casting suspicion on him.” She concluded of all those killed on 9/11, “They died for one reason. Not because they were Muslims or from Pakistan or anywhere else. They died because they were Americans.”
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It is notable how much the anti-Islamic invective inflamed by 9/11 resembles the denigration of Islam in America as far back as the seventeenth century. The evangelical Protestant minister
Franklin Graham’s assertion that Islam is “a very evil and wicked religion”
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could have equally been uttered by any number of Protestant leaders over the centuries. Perhaps this is because while there have been few encounters with the Islamic world since the founding, the limited experience of the twentieth century tended only to reinforce negative impressions.