Islam, Muslims, and the US

The US subscribes to the ‘melting pot’ rather than the ‘mosaic’ model of unity — seeking unity ‘from’ diversity, rather than unity ‘in’ diversity. Confronted by the ‘other,’ the American way is to absorb or to kill. Live and let live is not an option. Historically, race (African-Americans) and ideology (communism) have raised the most profound anxieties among Americans. American Muslims are burdened by both.

Until the 1973 Arab-Israeli War in October, which led to a spike in oil prices, Americans had been scarcely aware of Islam and Muslims. In 1973, however, as Americans queued at petrol stations, Walter Cronkite informed them on "CBS Evening News" that Arabs were “Mawz-lems” who subscribed to a religion “Iz-lum”. That many Arabs are Christians as well as Jews is even today a well-kept secret from most Americans, as is the lack of church and clergy in Islam, and the differences between Shia and Sunni Muslims. Although the Nation of Islam was a precedent, mainstream Islam did not emerge on the radar of American consciousness until the 1979 Iran revolution. The revolution blindsided the Americans. They simply could not understand why a ‘mediaeval cleric’ would be preferred by Iranians to a modern, progressive ruler. The detail, that the CIA had engineered a coup in 1953 against a democratically elected secular government to install a dictator, the Shah of Iran, was largely forgotten.

It was the hostage crisis of November 1979, covered night after night on live television, more than the revolution itself that provided the Americans with their first introduction to Islam and Muslims. ABC — one of only four TV channels that existed, before cable and Internet — ran a nightly special, ‘America Held Hostage,’ and Walter Cronkite added to his signature sign-off a running count of the number of days the hostages had been in captivity. In his 1981 book, Covering Islam, Edward Said documents the birth of the reductionist racist caricature of Muslims and Islam that emerged. By 1990, a Yale professor of Pakistani-Welsh descent, Sara Suleri, would say that “the only form of licensed racism today is anti-Muslim racism.” This popular anti-Muslim racism acquired intellectual respectability during the 1990s. The dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 altered the balance of power in the Middle East and threatened the future of the military-industrial-financial complex in America. A Christian-Zionists alliance, aided by Israeli intelligence, re-cast the Palestinian uprising against occupation as Muslim terrorism against democratic Israel. Tapping into an abiding American phobia, an ‘–ism’ was added to Islam, to create ‘Islamism’ as the new Communism. “9/11” acted as rainfall on seeded ground as America found a new bête noire.

In December 2001, African-American novelist Ishmael Reed wrote in Time magazine, “Within two weeks after the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, my youngest daughter, Tennessee, was called a dirty Arab, twice.” By 2008, Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, discussing racial profiling  in The New York Times, dispensed with an African-American example, “nearly all of us have a civil liberties threshold: imagine Pakistani madrassa graduates lining up at airport security; race matters in such cases, and need no animus.” In the ongoing 2010 Population Census “Pakistani” is a race! In sum, race is the essential substance onto which Americans graft all the attributes — like religion, or the propensity to violence — that constitute an individual, and a people. This essential negritude of Muslims, and Islam, requires that Muslims re-construct Islam to accept the moral superiority of the white race, or they accept exile, or death.

The writer is a retired economist who blogs at afpakwar.com ([e-mail])

Published in the Express Tribune, June 17^th, 2010.