Muslims on Main Street

MUSLIMS ON MAIN ST.
As American As You Are
By Mohja Kahf
Sunday, July 22, 2007; Page B01
FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.

A certain Middle Eastern religion is much maligned in this country. Full of veils and mystery, it is widely seen as sexist. Often violent, sometimes manipulated by demagogues, it yet has sweetness at the core, and many people are turning to it in their search for meaning.

I'm talking about Christianity.

This Muslim squirms whenever secular friends -- tolerant toward believers in Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism, Islam and Native American spirituality -- dismiss Christians with snorts of contempt. "It's because the Christian right wants to take over this country," they protest.

That may be, but it doesn't justify trashing the religion and its spectrum of believers. Christianity has inspired Americans to the politics of abolition and civil rights, as well as to heinous acts. Christian values have motivated the Ku Klux Klan to burn houses, and Jimmy Carter to build them. You can't say that when Christianity informs politics, only bad things happen.

This may strike you as odd coming from a Muslim. But, my dears, it's true: People of faith do not signify the apocalypse for democracy. And (here comes the Muslim agenda) that goes for believing Muslims as much as for other religious folk. Muslims, in a very specific way, are not strangers in your midst. We are kin. Not just kin in the lovely way that all humans are. We carry pieces of your family story.

I got a phone call one evening from a friend who is a lovable gossip in my home town. "Have you read today's paper?" she wanted to know. A letter-writing curmudgeon had mouthed off about how U.S. Muslims ought to be expelled, as worthless, dangerous and un-American. "What are we going to do?" she said. We'd worked together on non-pork lunch options for our kids in school -- we share that dietary law, as she's Jewish.

Anyhow. I invited the letter-writer to coffee. Walter declined, but we started writing to each other, his letters bearing a Purple Heart address label; he had been wounded in World War II. Walter was the crotchety, racist American great-uncle I never had. I sent him family photos, as you do to even an ornery relative; he replied that he guessed I was Syria's loss, America's gain.

"Huh?" I said.

"Why, you're a Syrian beauty queen," the old charmer said.

One day, I found a plastic baggie of asparagus tied to my doorknob. Mystified by this American vegetable, not one I cooked in my heritage cuisine, I brought it in -- then noticed, sticking to it, the little address label with the Purple Heart. "Sauté in butter," Walter advised. He made me promise to come to the cemetery on Veteran's Day; I did.

A year later, I get a knock at my door. It's Walter. "La ilaha illa allah!" he says, before "hello." "You and I worship the same God. I know that now." He limps into my living room, and we finally sit down to coffee.

Muslims are the youngest sibling in the Semitic family of religions, and we typically get no respect from the older kids -- Judaism and Christianity. That our older sisters didn't stick our pictures in the family scrapbook doesn't make us less related, sweetheart. And our stories are no less legit just because we have a different angle on family history. Want to know what happened to Hagar after she fades from the Bible story of Abraham and Sarah? Sit, have coffee, we'll talk.

My cousin was president of a national student group, and reporters constantly ask her whether Muslim youth turn to religion to reject their American identity. She grew up in the South, with friends who went to Bible camp in the summer. "Would you ask a Baptist that question?" she says, smoothing her head veil.

Does wearing a veil make you less American than wearing a yarmulke or a Mennonite bonnet? Does reading the Koran (even if it's not Thomas Jefferson's copy) make you less American than reading the Bible? If deploring U.S. foreign policy is un-American, then half the population is guilty. What else you got? Name your favorite symbol of Islamic difference, and I'll name other Americans who share it. The guy with all the wives on HBO's "Big Love," does anyone question his Americanness?

Assimilation is overrated. And it's not what minority religions do in the United States. Did Irish Catholics stop being Catholic when they arrived generations ago? People once believed that devout Catholics and Orthodox Jews could never be "true Americans." Today, I receive e-mails with solemn lists of why Muslims, "according to their own faith," can't possibly be "loyal Americans." The work of nut jobs. Yet purportedly sane people in Washington seem to think it's a valid question.

The Muslim spectrum contains many complex identities, from lapsed to ultra-orthodox. There's this wisdom going around that only the liberal sort are worthy of existence. No, my dears. Conservative Muslims have a right to breathe as well. Being devout, even if it means prostration prayer at airports, is not a criminal offense. And those stubborn unassimilated types may have a critique of the American social fabric that you should hear.

I grew up Islamist. That's right, not only conservative Muslim, but full-blown, caliphate-loving Islamist, among folk who take core Islamic values and put them to work in education and politics, much like evangelical Christians. One of the things about the United States that delighted my parents, and many Islamist immigrants, is that here, through patient daily jihad, they could actually teach their children Islam -- as opposed to motley customs that pass for Islam in the Old Countries.

Look, Islam never really "took" in the Arab world. The egalitarianism that the prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) preached, for example, never much budged Arab tribalism. The Koran's sexual ethic, enjoining chaste behavior and personal responsibility toward God on men and women both, not tribal ownership of women's sexuality, never uprooted the sexual double standard or the pagan honor code. Honor killing, as a recent fatwa by al-Azhar University's mufti reminds believers, is a pagan rite violating Islamic principles. Here in the United States, religious Muslims can practice Islam without those entrenched codes.

They are also critical of casual sex and immodesty. Such conservative Muslim criticism of mainstream American culture isn't new in American discourse. "Unlike Muslims, we Americans believe in women's equality," someone will object. Really, that's an essential American trait? Tell that to citizens who struggle for gender justice. Muslims, pious ones even, will tell you that they believe in it, too, and are no more sexist than you. Your sexism just takes forms so familiar that they're invisible; holding doors open for women doesn't seem nearly as sexist as walking protectively ahead of them.

Other American values are easily in synch with the Islam of the devout. Observant Muslims have long seen meritocracy, consultation of the people by the government and the idea that hard work should trump family name as refreshing affirmations of Islamic values. "America is Islam, without the Muslim 'brand name,' " goes a refrain from the pulpit of immigrant mosques. Usually followed by, "The Old Countries are Muslim in name, without Islamic values."

This is the Mayflower Compact of these new Pilgrims. That analogy may not sit well with African Americans, whose ancestors didn't come voluntarily, and with Native Americans, because it links newcomers to those who devastated their lands. Nevertheless, this is one way immigrant Muslims see themselves in this land: as part of a long caravan of faiths seeking to build the beloved community. This American narrative merges with the Muslim concept of hijrah -- emigration for the sake of worshiping God freely.

"How green is America!" a visiting relative of mine exclaimed upon seeing the rolling hills of Virginia. The busy-busy metropolis had not appealed to him. I hoped to dislodge his stereotype of American life as fast, crass and dehumanizing. When my husband and I moved to a small Southern city and took him to the farmer's market, he saw it -- the other America, past the glitz, where folks have time for one another, as they do in the Arab world. "What church do you go to?" is the watchword in this America. Like the Arab query "What family?" it means, "Where do you fit in?"

We fit right in to your sweet bosom. Christianity and Islam have the genetic structure of siblings. "Allah" is in the Bible. "Eloi, eloi, lama sabachthani?" the New Testament has Jesus (peace be upon him) asking on the cross. "Eloi," "Elohim" of the Hebrew Bible and "Allah" are all derived from the same root word for "God." When I discovered that fixed-time prayer was an early Christian rite, that Christians and Jews once practiced prostration, like Muslim prostration in our five daily salat, it was like recognizing my nose on someone's face in a photograph, then learning that the picture was of my great-grandmother. Joy!

Doctrinal differences abound, and each faith has its sacraments. Exploring these distinctions should be a source of delight, not of one-upmanship. In difference lie blessing and abundance. The Gospels detail many moments in Christ's life, but for Mary's own feelings in labor, you'll want a glimpse of the Koran -- and of Muslim hearts where the scene lives.

Pious Christian and Jewish values are not inherently in conflict with American civic life, as secular folk tend to forget. Devout immigrant Muslims don't belong? That ship has sailed. Myles Muhammad Standish and Harriet Halima Tubman are here. Not as strangers out of place, either. This is a letter to your beautiful heart: We are your blood.

DamasceneQueen[@]yahoo[.]com

Mohja Kahf is the author of the novel "The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf."

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