Islam The Next American Religion?
Islam Will Replace Collapsing Amerikan Empire
by Michal Wolfe
The U.S. began as a haven for Christian outcasts. But what religion fits our
current zeitgeist? The answer may be Islam.
Americans tend to think of their country as, at the very least, a nominally
Christian nation. Didn't the Pilgrims come here for freedom to practice
their Christian religion? Don't Christian values of righteousness under God,
and freedom, reinforce America's democratic, capitalist ideals?
True enough. But there's a new religion on the block now, one that fits the
current zeitgeist nicely. It's Islam.
Islam is the third-largest and fastest growing religious community in the
United States. This is not just because of immigration. More than 50% of
America's six million Muslims were born here. Statistics like these imply
some basic agreement between core American values and the beliefs that
Muslims hold. Americans who make the effort to look beyond popular
stereotypes to learn the truth of Islam are surprised to find themselves on
familiar ground.
Is America a Muslim nation? Here are seven reasons the answer may be yes.
Islam is monotheistic.
Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. They also revere the
same prophets as Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham, the first
monotheist, to Moses, the law giver and messenger of God, to Jesus � not
leaving out Noah, Job, or Isaiah along the way. The concept of a
Judeo-Christian tradition only came to the fore in the 1940s in America.
Now, as a nation, we may be transcending it, turning to a more inclusive
"Abrahamic" view.
In January, President Bush grouped mosques with churches and synagogues in
his inaugural address. A few days later, when he posed for photographers at
a meeting of several dozen religious figures, the Shi'ite imam Muhammad
Qazwini, of Orange County, Calif., stood directly behind Bush's chair like a
presiding angel, dressed in the robes and turban of his south Iraqi youth.
Islam is democratic in spirit.
Islam advocates the right to vote and educate yourself and pursue a
profession. The Qur'an, on which Islamic law is based, enjoins Muslims to
govern themselves by discussion and consensus. In mosques, there is no
particular priestly hierarchy. With Islam, each individual is responsible
for the condition of her or his own soul. Everyone stands equal before God.
Americans, who mostly associate Islamic government with a handful of
tyrants, may find this independent spirit surprising, supposing that Muslims
are somehow predisposed to passive submission. Nothing could be further from
the truth. The dictators reigning today in the Middle East are not the
result of Islamic principles. They are more a result of global economics and
the aftermath of European colonialism. Meanwhile, like everyone else,
average Muslims the world over want a larger say in what goes on in the
countries where they live. Those in America may actually succeed in it. In
this way, America is closer in spirit to Islam than many Arab countries.
Islam contains an attractive mystical tradition.
Mysticism is grounded in the individual search for God. Where better to do
that than in America, land of individualists and spiritual seekers? And who
might better benefit than Americans from the centuries-long tradition of
teachers and students that characterize Islam. Surprising as it may seem,
America's best-selling poet du jour is a Muslim mystic named Rumi, the
800-year-old Persian bard and founder of the Mevlevi Path, known in the West
as the Whirling Dervishes. Even book packagers are now rushing him into
print to meet and profit from mainstream demand for this visionary.
Translators as various as Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, and Kabir and Camille
Helminski have produced dozens of books of Rumi's verse and have only begun
to bring his enormous output before the English-speaking world. This is a
concrete poetry of ecstasy, where physical reality and the longing for God
are joined by flashes of metaphor and insight that continue to speak across
the centuries.
Islam is egalitarian.
From New York to California, the only houses of worship that are routinely
integrated today are the approximately 4,000 Muslim mosques. That is because
Islam is predicated on a level playing field, especially when it comes to
standing before God. The Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, "under God") and
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address (all people are "created equal") express themes
that are also basic to Islam.
Islam is often viewed as an aggressive faith because of the concept of
jihad, but this is actually a misunderstood term. Because Muslims believe
that God wants a just world, they tend to be activists, and they emphasize
that people are equal before God. These are two reasons why African
Americans have been drawn in such large numbers to Islam. They now comprise
about one-third of all Muslims in America.
Meanwhile, this egalitarian streak also plays itself out in relations
between the sexes. Muhammad, Islam's prophet, actually was a reformer in his
day. Following the Qur'an, he limited the number of wives a man could have
and strongly recommended against polygamy. The Qur'an laid out a set of
marriage laws that guarantees married women their family names, their own
possessions and capital, the right to agree upon whom they will marry, and
the right to initiate divorce. In Islam's early period, women were
professionals and property owners, as increasingly they are today. None of
this may seem obvious to most Americans because of cultural overlays that at
times make Islam appear to be a repressive faith toward women � but if you
look more closely, you can see the egalitarian streak preserved in the
Qur'an finding expression in contemporary terms. In today's Iran, for
example, more women than men attend university, and in recent local
elections there, 5,000 women ran for public office.
Islam shares America's new interest in food purity and diet.
Muslims conduct a month long fast during the holy month of Ramadan, a
practice that many Americans admire and even seek to emulate. I happened to
spend quite a bit of time with a non-Muslim friend during Ramadan this year.
After a month of being exposed to a practice that brings some annual control
to human consumption, my friend let me know, in January, that he was "doing
a little Ramadan" of his own. I asked what he meant. "Well, I'm not drinking
anything or smoking anything for at least a month, and I'm going off
coffee." Given this friend's normal intake of coffee, I could not believe my
ears.
Muslims also observe dietary laws that restrict the kind of meat they can
eat. These laws require that the permitted, or halal, meat is prepared in a
manner that emphasizes cleanliness and a humane treatment of animals. These
laws ride on the same trends that have made organic foods so popular.
Islam is tolerant of other faiths.
Like America, Islam has a history of respecting other religions. In
Muhammad's day, Christians, Sabeans, and Jews in Muslim lands retained their
own courts and enjoyed considerable autonomy. As Islam spread east toward
India and China, it came to view Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as
valid paths to salvation. As Islam spread north and west, Judaism especially
benefited. The return of the Jews to Jerusalem, after centuries as outcasts,
only came about after Muslims took the city in 638. The first thing the
Muslims did there was to rescue the Temple Mount, which by then had been
turned into a garbage heap.
Today, of course, the long discord between Israel and Palestine has acquired
harsh religious overtones. Yet the fact remains that this is a battle for
real estate, not a war between two faiths. Islam and Judaism revere the same
prophetic lineage, back to Abraham, and no amount of bullets or barbed wire
can change that. As The New York Times recently reported, while
Muslim/Jewish tensions sometimes flare on university campuses, lately these
same students have found ways to forge common links. For one thing, the two
religions share similar dietary laws, including ritual slaughter and a
prohibition on pork. Joining forces at Dartmouth this fall, the first
kosher/halal dining hall is scheduled to open its doors this autumn. That
isn't all: They're already planning a joint Thanksgiving dinner, with birds
dressed at a nearby farm by a rabbi and an imam. If the American Pilgrims
were watching now, they'd be rubbing their eyes with amazement. And, because
they came here fleeing religious persecution, they might also understand.
Islam encourages the pursuit of religious freedom.
The Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is not the world's first story of
religious emigration. Muhammad and his little band of 100 followers fled
religious persecution, too, from Mecca in the year 622. They only survived
by going to Madinah, an oasis a few hundred miles north, where they
established a new community based on a religion they could only practice
secretly back home. No wonder then that, in our own day, many Muslims have
come here as pilgrims from oppression, leaving places like Kashmir, Bosnia,
and Kosovo, where being a Muslim may radically shorten your life span. When
the 20th century's list of emigrant exiles is added up, it will prove to be
heavy with Muslims, that's for sure.
All in all, there seems to be a deep resonance between Islam and the United
States. Although one is a world religion and the other is a sovereign
nation, both are traditionally very strong on individual responsibility.
Like New Hampshire's motto, "Live Free or Die," America is wedded to
individual liberty and an ethic based on right action. For a Muslim,
spiritual salvation depends on these. This is best expressed in a popular
saying: Even when you think God isn't watching you, act as if he is.
Who knows? Perhaps it won't be long now before words like salat (Muslim
prayer) and Ramadan join karma and Nirvana in Webster's Dictionary, and
Muslims take their place in America's mainstream.
Michael Abdul Majeed Wolfe is the author of books of poetry, fiction,
travel, and history. His most recent works are a pair of books from Grove
Press on the pilgrimage to Mecca: "The Hajj" (1993), a first-person travel
account, and "One Thousand Roads to Mecca" (1997), an anthology of 10
centuries of travelers writing about the Muslim pilgrimage. In April 1997,
he hosted a televised account of the Hajj from Mecca for Ted Koppel's
"Nightline" on ABC. He is currently at work on a four-hour television
documentary on the life and times of the Prophet Muhammad.