AAM DISPATCH

In the past two days, sentences have been handed down in two homegrown terror cases – the five men from Alexandria, Va. who traveled to Pakistan with the presumed intent of carrying out attacks and Faisal Shahzad, the failed Pakistani-American Times Square bomber.

After a year-long inquiry into American Islam, spanning 75 cities and more than a 100 mosques across the United States, Professor Akbar Ahmed is curious about the point of failure in these mens’ lives.

At a Brookings Institution event launching his new book “Journey into America; The Challenge of Islam,” Ahmed wondered what would make these homegrown terrorists want to blow people up instead of helping them.

“We need to know these answers. I’m not prepared to accept the answer that Islam is provoking this….[the answer is, the young man] is failing, his Imam is failing, his community is failing, his parents are failing. It’s not easy to grow up as a Muslim in post-9/11 America.”

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Katherine Gypson

Just returning to a snow covered DC from four days in the greater Detroit area, where I traveled with our partner Mithat Bereket, leading host for Turkey’s public television station TRT, to film a documentary on Islam in America. Michigan has one of America’s largest, and one of the world’s most diverse, Muslim populations. Ranging from Arab American to African American, Sunni to Shia, recent immigrant to third generation, you’d be hard pressed to find a Muslim community not represented in Detroit and its surrounding suburbs. We barely scratched the surface of the Bangladeshi, Yemeni, or South Asian communities. But I did manage to get a close look at two vastly different Muslim communities.

On Saturday we spent most of our day with Imam Abdullah El Amin and his congregation at the Muslim Center of Detroit. After leaving our hotel in suburban Dearborn, and navigating the tangled web of freeways in the heart of Ford country, we arrive at an unassuming white brick building in a dilapidated neighborhood of urban Detroit.

Many of the surrounding houses are windowless and boarded up, and the ‘main streets’ in the area are a wasteland of “Coney Island’ fast food establishments, car dealerships, businesses and restaurants which look as though they’ve been out of business for years. We walk into the masjid, which serves the largest congregation of African American Muslims in the area, and are greeted warmly by several members of the congregation eager to share their mosque with a Turkish television audience. The Muslim Center, which was originally a bank before being incorporated as a mosque in 1985, seems more of a community center than a mosque. While they gather for prayer five times a day, their Saturday is also brimming with community service activity.

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Ilana Weinberg America, Detroit, Islam, Muslims, Religion

The Princeton historian and Islamic scholar, Bernard Lewis, said in July 2004 in an interview with the German-based daily Die Welt, that he thinks that “current trends show that Europe will have a Muslim majority by the end of the 21st Century at the very latest.” America’s Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, part of the non-partisan Pew Research Center, said in a report: “These [EU] countries possess deep historical, cultural, religious and linguistic traditions. Injecting hundreds of thousands, and in some cases millions, of people who look, speak and act differently into these settings often makes for a difficult social fit.”

Christopher Caldwell, a senior editor at The Weekly Standard and a columnist for The Financial Times, writes in his new book, “Reflections on the Revolution in Europe” that Muslims are changing the face of Europe due to decades-long immigration to European cities and because Muslim immigrants retain a Muslim identity rather than assimilating to their new homelands. Caldwell is quoted in the The New York Times:

In the middle of the 20th century, there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe,” Mr. Caldwell writes. “At the turn of the 21st, there were between 15 and 17 million Muslims in Western Europe, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany, and 2 million in Britain.

The religious practices and conservative values of many Muslim immigrants are in stark contrast to the secular and liberal European societies they live in. The threat of Islamic terrorism and the fear that Muslim immigrants will transform the secular society have caused concern throughout Europe. French President Nicolas Sarkozy has spoken strongly against the wearing of the burqa by Muslim women in France, Europe continues to flip-flop at the prospect of Turkey joining the EU, and a resurgent group of extreme-Right (anti-immigrant) political parties, among them the British National Party, gained two seats at recent elections to the European Parliament.

Combine that with the poverty and discrimination Muslim immigrants often face, and the result can be tense and sometimes dangerous. Dr. Gilles Kepel, Professor at The Institute of Political Studies in Paris and author of “Beyond Terror and Martyrdom and The War for Muslim Minds,” spoke to America Abroad to discuss the history of Muslim immigration to Europe and the difficulties in integrating into their adopted homes. Listen:

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Javier Barrera Europe

The current tension between the Muslim world and the West doesn’t just play out in the sands of the Middle East—the friction is often as apparent on the streets of London, Paris and Amsterdam now that over 15 million Muslims live in Europe. Many of these immigrants have settled in nicely to life… but some have not. The religious practices and conservative values of many Muslim immigrants are in stark contrast to the secular and liberal European societies they live in. Combine that with the poverty and discrimination Muslim immigrants often face, and the result can be tense and sometimes dangerous.

The threat of Islamic terrorism and the fear that Muslim immigrants will transform the secular society have caused concern throughout Europe. These concerns have fueled a backlash and sparked the rise of anti-immigration parties across the continent. While there have been numerous plots and arrests in the US, America has not seen the home grown extremism evident in Europe, but there are plenty in the US wondering if or when that will change.

America Abroad compares the situation of Muslims in Europe with that of American Muslims. We explore how the liberal norms of Dutch society clash with the immigrant population’s Islamic faith and we visit Boston and Chicago to see how Muslim immigration fits into the American meting pot.

Listen to America Abroad’s Integrating Islam.

Javier Barrera Europe, Immigration, Mulsim Life