TUNISIAN FRENCH scholar Nadia Marzouki published a book in France in 2013 with the title L’Islam, une religion américaine? In 2017, the book was updated with the events of the Trump campaign and additional analysis and republished in the United States as Islam: An American Religion.
Somehow along the way, as religious studies scholar Winnifred Fallers Sullivan notes, the question mark was dropped. The reasons are not entirely clear. Did something dramatic happen during those four years, not just to Muslims but, more important, by Muslims? Was it a marketing gimmick by the new publisher, Columbia University Press?
Either way, it raises a fascinating question: What does it mean to be an American religion, and can Islam in America be said to constitute one?
It may be useful to present Marzouki’s own case for her declaration. Islam has become an American religion, she claims, because Muslim leaders are taking care to present their community and tradition within the terms that broad numbers of Americans would understand and appreciate. She writes that “it’s out of the materials of American politics, law, and culture generally that Muslims are building the norms of their discourse and their public actions. In political and legal battles, their audience and interlocutor is the American public, not some hypothetical global ummah.”
Muslims are people with rights and dreams, like other Americans. Muslim leaders emphasize that they have an Abrahamic religion, Islam, similar to the Abrahamic religions of millions of other Americans, Judaism and Christianity. When they reference sharia, that big scary boo word, Muslim leaders have taken to talking about it as a code of ethics that can be easily adapted to the American context, as other global religions have adapted their ethics and laws to America.
In Hasan Minhaj’s Netflix comedy special Homecoming King, Minhaj tells the story of a racist attack that takes place at his home after 9/11. As they receive a threatening phone call from one group of bigots, they hear loud noises coming from outside. Another group has smashed in the windows of their car. Minhaj, knowing that the assailants can’t be far, runs up and down the street looking for them, blood streaming down his arm from his ill-fated attempt to reach through the broken window and retrieve his bag from the back seat of the car. Minhaj returns to the driveway to see his father stoically sweeping up the glass. “These things happen, and these things will continue to happen,” his father says. “That’s the price we pay for being here.”
Minhaj calls this attitude the American Dream tax, which he describes as something that some immigrants and minorities simply accept. You are going to endure some racism which, if it doesn’t kill you, is simply the tax that gets paid for living in a white man’s country.
That is not how Minhaj sees it. Raised in the United States, he has what he calls “the audacity of equality.” He looks at the camera and says: “I’m in Honors Gov. I have it right here: Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All men are created equal. ... I’m equal. I don’t deserve this.”
Somewhere in this land, there is a Muslim teenager watching that show, a kid who has maybe experienced harassment in school or at the mall, and she is nodding when Minhaj tells his story, and feeling like an American.
Eboo Patel (@EbooPatel), founder of the Interfaith Youth Core, writes about social justice from his perspective as a Muslim American of Indian heritage.
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