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Time Magazine - August 14, 2006
The American Exception
Why Muslims in the U.S. aren't as
attracted to jihad as those in Europe
By PETER SKERRY
How concerned should Americans be about homegrown terrorism in the U.S.? In the face of another plot by British Islamists, it's worth keeping in mind that America's Muslim community is strikingly different from those in Britain and the rest of Europe.
The first difference is in relative numbers. The most authoritative estimate of the number of Muslims in the U.S. is between 2 million and 3 million--less than 1% of the total population. In France, Muslims constitute about 8% to 9%; in the Netherlands, about 5.6%; in Germany, 3.6%; and in Britain, just under 3%.
More important, Muslims in Europe are concentrated in highly visible enclaves. American Muslims tend to be university-educated professionals living in the suburbs.
The most vital difference between Muslims in America and their brethren in Europe is the U.S.'s enduring emphasis on religious liberty. Religion is accorded far more respect in the public realm in the U.S. than in Europe. Think about it. We are in the midst of a rancorous debate over immigration in which many Americans reject "hyphenated identities" like Mexican-American as a threat to national cohesion. Yet while evangelical Christian, Catholic and Jewish Americans may disagree vehemently among themselves, the religious basis of their identity is not seriously questioned by anyone. If Muslim Americans are not so readily accepted today, it is not because they are believers. In Europe, by contrast, Muslims are resented and marginalized precisely because their religion threatens strong secular values.
In practice, America's religious liberty means that here there are very few--and no seriously divisive--disputes over Muslim head scarves. Religious liberty in the U.S. is also evident in the 250 or so full-time Muslim schools operating in America--about double the number in Britain, which has roughly the same number of Muslims. And in France there are only a handful of Muslim schools--at last count, three.
In the same vein, Muslim political advocacy groups are much more visible and influential in the U.S. than in Europe. Walk into the headquarters of the Islamic Society of North America on the outskirts of Indianapolis, Ind., for example, and you will see stacks of religious literature ready to be mailed. But you will also see stacks of thick guides to the IRS code. Setting up and running their own religious institutions gives Muslims a stake in the society while teaching them valuable skills in self-government and democracy……
[Skerry, a professor of political science at Boston College and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, is completing a book about Muslims in America]
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1226160,00.html
Boston Globe – August 20, 2006
America's Muslim community shows few
signs of the radicalism seen in Britain
By Drake Bennett
AFTER 9/11, foreign policy scholars quickly took to describing terrorism as the dark underside of globalization. Al Qaeda was like a multinational corporation, the thinking went, and the money and men that had been used to such murderous effect were simply part of a larger tide of goods and capital streaming across national borders and overwhelming the governments within them.
In retrospect, there's something almost reassuring about that model. After last July's London subway bombings, in which 4 native Britons, acting largely on their own, killed 52 of their countrymen, the West started worrying in earnest not just about imported terrorism, but the homegrown kind.
The news a week and a half ago that British intelligence services had thwarted a plot to blow up 10 airliners over the Atlantic once again pricked those fears. All 23 suspects were native-born British Muslims. Only two months earlier, Canadian authorities had arrested 17 Canadian Muslims and charged them with plotting to attack various government buildings and behead the country's prime minister.
The United States has not been entirely immune to these trends: Intelligence and law enforcement agencies have broken up a handful of what they have called domestic terror cells. (Though there have been questions raised about the danger actually posed by some of these purported terrorists.)
Yet, as both terrorism experts and scholars who study the American Muslim community point out, the United States has proven notably unfavorable to the growth of domestic terrorism (at least of the radical Islamic variety: Timothy McVeigh's Oklahoma City bombing, of course, was the second most deadly terrorist act ever committed on American soil). American Muslims, by and large, are wealthier and better integrated into American society than their European counterparts, and feel freer to practice their religious faith than Muslims in the more avowedly secular nations of Western Europe. And the blend of different ethnicities and sects in the American Muslim community has lent its beliefs a more ecumenical and flexible cast than those of Europe's Muslim immigrants.
``The risk is much, much greater in Europe than it is here, on the order of 30 to one," says Mark Sageman, formerly a CIA case officer in Afghanistan and now a psychiatrist who studies the formation of terrorist networks. ``The US is a very, very different environment from Europe, anyone who's lived in both places immediately knows it."
But if America's Muslim community shows little evidence of the kind of radicalism that elsewhere has bred terrorism, there are other signs that attitudes within the community-so far as one can generalize-may be shifting. And while the sort of cultural and socioeconomic forces that have helped American Muslims assimilate into the mainstream haven't changed, the political landscape has. The years since 9/11 have bred in America's diverse Muslim community a greater sense of group identity, but also estrangement from the larger American culture, especially among the young.
``I don't see radicalization," says Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, a Muslim American advocacy group, ``but I do see a sense of frustration. It's not a mainstream problem in the community, but if it's not handled in a healthy and effective way it could lead to radicalization in the US."
Unlike in Europe, where France's Muslim population, for example, is overwhelmingly North African, England's Pakistani, and Germany's Turkish, no one sect or country of origin can claim a majority of America's 2 million to 3 million Muslims: There are significant numbers from the Middle East, South Asia, North Africa, and Iran, as well as native-born African-Americans, who have been estimated to make up nearly one-third of the country's Muslims….
American Muslims as a whole also tend to be better off financially, not only than European Muslims but than the average American. Whereas Europe imported its Muslim population mostly as cheap labor for the 1960s building boom, American immigration policy favored educated, professional Muslim immigrants. According to research by John Logan, a Brown University sociologist, instead of living in the sort of ethnic ghettos one sees on the outskirts of Paris or London, American Muslims, like the rest of the professional class, tend to live in the suburbs (with the notable exception of African-American Muslims). In the United States, predominantly Arab Muslim cities and neighborhoods like Dearborn, Mich., and the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn are rare.
Muslim Americans' mainstream sensibility is reflected in polling data. One of the more complete sources of information about American Muslim attitudes is a pair of surveys that Zogby International conducted for the Muslim Public Affairs Council. The first survey took place two months after 9/11, the second almost three years later, in August and September of 2004.
The portrait that emerges is of a deeply civic-minded and socially engaged community: In 2001 and 2004 American Muslims almost unanimously said they thought it was important to participate in the American political process, to donate to non-Muslim social service programs, and ``participate in interfaith activities." The most dramatic shift between the two polls was a mass migration into the Democratic Party (immigrant Muslim voters had actually favored Bush in the 2000 election) in response to the war in Iraq and what they saw as the civil liberties infringements of the war on terrorism at home-hardly a radical response……
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2006/08/20/hearts_and_minds/
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