Radley Balko takes a look at that 2007 Pew poll on American Muslims and finds:
In contrast to many of the minority Muslim populations in Europe, American Muslims embrace modernity, are better educated, and earn more money than their non-Muslim fellow citizens. A 2007 Pew poll suggests American Muslims are also doing just fine when it comes to assimilating and viewing themselves as part of America. According to the poll, just 5 percent of American Muslims express any level of support for Al Qaeda, and strong majorities condemn suicide attacks for any reason (80+ percent), and have a generally positive image of America and its promise for Muslims.
You know who had some interesting thoughts on Islam, assimilation, and the United States? Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf.
Most Americans would be horrified by the notion that they live in a country that abides by Islamic law. But some American Muslim leaders contend that U.S. society is harmonious with Koranic injunctions without even trying. "America is positively, unabashedly religious," enthuses Feisal Abdul Rauf, a New York-based imam. In his important 2004 book, titled What's Right With Islam, Abdul Rauf contends that space for religiosity is essentially inseparable from American liberalism, codified in both the U.S. political system and the broader U.S. social compact: "Fully in keeping with the principles of the Abrahamic ethic, American religious pluralism was not merely a historical or political fact; it became, in the mind of the American, the primordial condition of things, a self-evident and essential aspect of the American way of life and therefore in itself an aspect of the American creed." Drawing on hundreds of years of Islamic writings, Abdul Rauf makes the case that, by upholding the five conditions understood by Muslim legal scholars to constitute the good society -- life, mental well-being, religion, property, and family -- "the American political structure is Shariah compliant."
Spencer Ackerman wrote that in 2005, contending that America's comfort with expressions of faith made observant Muslims feel welcome in a manner they don't in far more secular Europe, that comfort working as a kind of prophylactic against domestic radicalization. I think in a number of ways things have changed, the expanded use of the Internet for recruitment, the rise of some de-facto segregated immigrant Muslim communities in the U.S., but I think the broader point still holds.
I think Balko's probably right that "Muslim Americans appear to be confident enough with their position here that the escalating hysterics of Sarah Palin, Newt Gingrich, & Co. aren't likely to budge their general optimism about America." But as the Pew survey notes, "The survey finds that younger Muslim Americans – those under age 30 – are both much more religiously observant and more accepting of Islamic extremism than are older Muslim Americans." For those of you wondering about how American mosques could be a moderating influence, that's how -- those frustrated younger Muslims can connect with older, more responsible figures instead of extremist predators on the Internet.
Still, I suspect that for a number of young American Muslims already dealing with the angst of adolescence, the time American politicians debated whether or not there should be, in Glenn Greenwald's words, a "Muslim free-zone" around the former site of the World Trade Center will be a formative experience.
