Uncle Sam’s Hajj
by
Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.
Lodi California
The dream of opportunity for all people has not come true for everyone in America, but its promise exists for all who come to our shores. And that includes nearly 7 million American Muslims in our country today who, by the way, enjoy incomes and educational levels that are higher than the American average.
President Barack Hussein Obama, The University of Cairo, June, 2009
Is President Obama correct in his claim that America is now one of the world’s leading Islamic countries with a population of 7 million Muslims?
Ibrahim Hooper, president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), believes this figure is correct. He bases this conclusion on data extrapolated from his agency’s study of mosque attendance. This data, he says, supports the President’s contention that Islam has eclipsed Judaism to become America’s second largest religion.
Mr. Hooper maintains he has been an eyewitness to the changing religious landscape. “When I came to the DC community ten years ago,” the CAIR director says, “the mosque that I attend in Sterling, Virginia held only one Friday prayer service for a handful of people.” Now, he adds, the mosque has built a large new facility, conducts multiple Friday services, and operates several satellite locations.
However, Mr. Hooper adds, “no one really knows the exact figure.”
Minneapolis, Minnesota
The Problem with Projections
Why this lack of pertinent demographic data?
One reason, according to Dr. James Dretke, executive director of the Zwemer Institute, “is the fact that Muslims do not join mosques as Christians join churches, so it is impossible to count them from membership rolls.”
Another reason resides with the U.S. Census Bureau.
For the past 50 years the United States government (unlike some countries) has not included questions about religious affiliation in its census.
In accordance with the new census forms, Americans are required, by law, to state their race; their means of getting to work, their income; their mortgage or rent payments; and their mental and physical condition. They are even compelled to inform Uncle Sam if their homes have a flush toilet and a refrigerator. But they are not asked their religious affiliation, since such an inquiry would violate their civil rights.
And so, the number of Muslims who now reside in the country remains a matter of debate.
Is Obama’s Figure Inflated?
Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, says that the claim that Muslims in the U.S. now number 7 million is grossly inflated.
“Study after study,” Mr. Pipes contends, “has found that demographic figure about three times too high.”
But the studies which Mr. Pipes uses to support his argument were conducted almost a decade ago. His first reference is to The American Religious Identification Survey which was carried out by the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2001. It polled more than 50,000 people and estimated the total American Muslim population to be 1.8 million. The second study, sponsored by the American Jewish Committee, placed the Muslim population at 1,886,000 in 2000.
These early studies, which prop up the contentions of Mr. Pipes, were widely contested.
The 2000 Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches estimated there were 3,900,000 Muslims in the U.S. at that time, while a Zogby International Survey, released in August 2000, placed the number of American Muslims at 8 million.
What is the right number?
FBI & Sheriffs honoring Jamaat Al Fuqra in South Carolina
Recent Independent Surveys
Several recent studies show that Muslims may number considerably more than 7 million in the U.S. Surveys conducted by The American Society of Psychiatrists and Cornell University estimate the number of U.S. Muslims somewhere between 8 to 10 million.
These findings have been called into question by the Pew Research Center which holds that Islamic population of America is 2.35 million.
But there is a serious problem with this estimate.
Pew researchers admit that the study does not take into account immigrant and poor black Muslims. What’s more, the Pew telephone survey was conducted strictly with landlines and failed to take into account the fact that nearly 50% of Americans and age 18-35 and nearly 100% of the illegal immigrants use cell phones exclusively.
Many people in the know, including municipal police officers, accept the higher estimates. Detective David Casey of the New York Police Department, for example, states that there are more than a million Muslims within the five boroughs of New York.
Brooklyn New York
The Muslim Presence
If CAIR is correct in its projections based on mosque attendance, then America’s present Islamic population may well exceed 12 million.
In 1990, America housed less than 600 mosques. By 2000, that number had climbed to 1,400. This figure failed to reflect the Muslim houses of worship that had sprouted up in low-rent storefronts, abandoned warehouses, Middle Eastern social clubs, private residences, college campuses, and second story business space.
What’s the exact number of Muslims in America?
No one knows.
New Religious Phenomenon
But no one can doubt the widespread presence of Islam throughout America – - a phenomenon that has taken place in a relatively short span of time.
In 1976, Leo Rosten’s published his sixth edition of Religions of America. It represented an exhaustive compilation of statistical information concerning every major and minor body of believers in the country. Entire chapters were devoted to such Protestant denominations as the Disciples of Christ, the 7th Day Adventists, the Unitarian Universalists, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the various manifestations of Presbyterianism, Lutheranism, and Methodism.
The study provided abundant data concerning the three forms of Judaism (Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform) and a lengthy discussion about the liturgical and doctrinal differences between Greek Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. It even contained facts and figures concerning the five percent of Americans who claimed to be Agnostic.
But Rosten’s exhaustive work contained no mention of Islam, not even as a footnote. This was not an oversight. The Muslims in America were statistically insignificant, numbering less than 10,000.
Reagan Airport Washington D.C.
As little as a decade ago, Americans could walk through crowded airports without encountering a woman in a burqa or a student in a shalwat kameez. Words such as jihad, imam, Sunni, and Shiite were not in common usage. Many major cities contained no Islamic bookstores or clothing shops featuring designer Muslim headdresses. And vendors selling halal hotdogs were non-existent on the street corners of midtown Manhattan.
Now Muslims have managed to infiltrate all aspects of American life, including the prison system, the military, the highest recesses of academia and college administration, and every branch government.
And, no less than their counterparts in Europe, American Muslims are making demands that are being met. Muslim special agents in the FBI insist upon separate potties from “infidel agents”; Muslim teachers in public schools, while denigrating Christianity, promote Islam by having their students recite prayers and verses from the Quran on prayer rugs; and Muslim women call for the expulsion of all men, including male lifeguards, from public pools and parks at certain hours of the day so that they could swim and stroll without fear of any violation to their sense of modesty.
Other developments have been infinitely more disturbing, including the perpetuation of Islamic attacks on American soil- – the killings by the Beltway snipers, the “honor killings” in Scottsdale and Louisville, the attack on the Jewish Federation Center in Seattle, the shooting rampage at a mall in Salt Lake City, and the murder this month of an American soldier at an Army recruiting station in Little Rock, Arkansas. The fact that such crimes were accompanied with cries of “Allahu Akhbar” gained scant mention in the press.
Clinton Recognizes Islam’s Sudden Ascent
In recognition that Islam has become the country’s second largest religion, Former President Bill Clinton recently told an Arab-American audience of 1,000 people last Saturday that the U.S. is no longer just a black-white country, nor a country that is dominated by Christians and a powerful Jewish minority, given the growing numbers of Muslims.
Mr. Clinton said that by 2050 America will no longer have a majority of people with European heritage, adding that “this is a very positive thing.”
ONE LAST NOTE
There are currently 5.128 million Jews in America – - a substantially lower amount than the President’s estimate of Muslims.
Islam: The Next American Religion?
The U.S. began as a haven for Christian outcasts. But what religion fits our current zeitgeist? The answer may be Islam.
By convert to Islam, Michael Wolfe.
Reprinted from Beliefnet.com
Americans tend to think of their country as, at the very least, a nominally Christian nation. Didn’t the Pilgrims come here for freedom to practice their Christian religion? Don’t Christian values of righteousness under God, and freedom, reinforce America’s democratic, capitalist ideals?
True enough. But there’s a new religion on the block now, one that fits the current zeitgeist nicely. It’s Islam.
Islam is the third-largest and fastest growing religious community in the United States. This is not just because of immigration. More than 50% of America’s six million Muslims were born here. Statistics like these imply some basic agreement between core American values and the beliefs that Muslims hold. Americans who make the effort to look beyond popular stereotypes to learn the truth of Islam are surprised to find themselves on familiar ground.
Is America a Muslim nation? Here are seven reasons the answer may be yes.
Islam is monotheistic. Muslims worship the same God as Jews and Christians. They also revere the same prophets as Judaism and Christianity, from Abraham, the first monotheist, to Moses, the law giver and messenger of God, to Jesus–not leaving out Noah, Job, or Isaiah along the way. The concept of a Judeo-Christian tradition only came to the fore in the 1940s in America. Now, as a nation, we may be transcending it, turning to a more inclusive “Abrahamic” view.
In January, President Bush grouped mosques with churches and synagogues in his inaugural address. A few days later, when he posed for photographers at a meeting of several dozen religious figures, the Shi’ite imam Muhammad Qazwini, of Orange County, Calif., stood directly behind Bush’s chair like a presiding angel, dressed in the robes and turban of his south Iraqi youth.
Islam is democratic in spirit. Islam advocates the right to vote and educate yourself and pursue a profession. The Qur’an, on which Islamic law is based, enjoins Muslims to govern themselves by discussion and consensus. In mosques, there is no particular priestly hierarchy. With Islam, each individual is responsible for the condition of her or his own soul. Everyone stands equal before God.
Americans, who mostly associate Islamic government with a handful of tyrants, may find this independent spirit surprising, supposing that Muslims are somehow predisposed to passive submission. Nothing could be further from the truth. The dictators reigning today in the Middle East are not the result of Islamic principles. They are more a result of global economics and the aftermath of European colonialism. Meanwhile, like everyone else, average Muslims the world over want a larger say in what goes on in the countries where they live. Those in America may actually succeed in it. In this way, America is closer in spirit to Islam than many Arab countries.
Islam contains an attractive mystical tradition. Mysticism is grounded in the individual search for God. Where better to do that than in America, land of individualists and spiritual seekers? And who might better benefit than Americans from the centuries-long tradition of teachers and students that characterize Islam. Surprising as it may seem, America’s best-selling poet du jour is a Muslim mystic named Rumi, the 800-year-old Persian bard and founder of the Mevlevi Path, known in the West as the Whirling Dervishes. Even book packagers are now rushing him into print to meet and profit from mainstream demand for this visionary. Translators as various as Robert Bly, Coleman Barks, and Kabir and Camille Helminski have produced dozens of books of Rumi’s verse and have only begun to bring his enormous output before the English-speaking world. This is a concrete poetry of ecstasy, where physical reality and the longing for God are joined by flashes of metaphor and insight that continue to speak across the centuries.
Islam is egalitarian. From New York to California, the only houses of worship that are routinely integrated today are the approximately 4,000 Muslim mosques. That is because Islam is predicated on a level playing field, especially when it comes to standing before God. The Pledge of Allegiance (one nation, “under God”) and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address (all people are “created equal”) express themes that are also basic to Islam.
Islam is often viewed as an aggressive faith because of the concept of jihad, but this is actually a misunderstood term. Because Muslims believe that God wants a just world, they tend to be activists, and they emphasize that people are equal before God. These are two reasons why African Americans have been drawn in such large numbers to Islam. They now comprise about one-third of all Muslims in America.
Meanwhile, this egalitarian streak also plays itself out in relations between the sexes. Muhammad, Islam’s prophet, actually was a reformer in his day. Following the Qur’an, he limited the number of wives a man could have and strongly recommended against polygamy. The Qur’an laid out a set of marriage laws that guarantees married women their family names, their own possessions and capital, the right to agree upon whom they will marry, and the right to initiate divorce. In Islam’s early period, women were professionals and property owners, as increasingly they are today. None of this may seem obvious to most Americans because of cultural overlays that at times make Islam appear to be a repressive faith toward women–but if you look more closely, you can see the egalitarian streak preserved in the Qur’an finding expression in contemporary terms. In today’s Iran, for example, more women than men attend university, and in recent local elections there, 5,000 women ran for public office.
Islam shares America’s new interest in food purity and diet. Muslims conduct a monthlong fast during the holy month of Ramadan, a practice that many Americans admire and even seek to emulate. I happened to spend quite a bit of time with a non-Muslim friend during Ramadan this year. After a month of being exposed to a practice that brings some annual control to human consumption, my friend let me know, in January, that he was “doing a little Ramadan” of his own. I asked what he meant. “Well, I’m not drinking anything or smoking anything for at least a month, and I’m going off coffee.” Given this friend’s normal intake of coffee, I could not believe my ears.
Muslims also observe dietary laws that restrict the kind of meat they can eat. These laws require that the permitted, or halal, meat is prepared in a manner that emphasizes cleanliness and a humane treatment of animals. These laws ride on the same trends that have made organic foods so popular.
Islam is tolerant of other faiths. Like America, Islam has a history of respecting other religions. In Muhammad’s day, Christians, Sabeans, and Jews in Muslim lands retained their own courts and enjoyed considerable autonomy. As Islam spread east toward India and China, it came to view Zoroastrianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism as valid paths to salvation. As Islam spread north and west, Judaism especially benefited. The return of the Jews to Jerusalem, after centuries as outcasts, only came about after Muslims took the city in 638. The first thing the Muslims did there was to rescue the Temple Mount, which by then had been turned into a garbage heap.
Today, of course, the long discord between Israel and Palestine has acquired harsh religious overtones. Yet the fact remains that this is a battle for real estate, not a war between two faiths. Islam and Judaism revere the same prophetic lineage, back to Abraham, and no amount of bullets or barbed wire can change that. As The New York Times recently reported, while Muslim/Jewish tensions sometimes flare on university campuses, lately these same students have found ways to forge common links. For one thing, the two religions share similar dietary laws, including ritual slaughter and a prohibition on pork. Joining forces at Dartmouth this fall, the first kosher/halal dining hall is scheduled to open its doors this autumn. That isn’t all: They’re already planning a joint Thanksgiving dinner, with birds dressed at a nearby farm by a rabbi and an imam. If the American Pilgrims were watching now, they’d be rubbing their eyes with amazement. And, because they came here fleeing religious persecution, they might also understand.
Islam encourages the pursuit of religious freedom. The Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock is not the world’s first story of religious emigration. Muhammad and his little band of 100 followers fled religious persecution, too, from Mecca in the year 622. They only survived by going to Madinah, an oasis a few hundred miles north, where they established a new community based on a religion they could only practice secretly back home. No wonder then that, in our own day, many Muslims have come here as pilgrims from oppression, leaving places like Kashmir, Bosnia, and Kosovo, where being a Muslim may radically shorten your life span. When the 20th century’s list of emigrant exiles is added up, it will prove to be heavy with Muslims, that’s for sure.
All in all, there seems to be a deep resonance between Islam and the United States. Although one is a world religion and the other is a sovereign nation, both are traditionally very strong on individual responsibility. Like New Hampshire’s motto, “Live Free or Die,” America is wedded to individual liberty and an ethic based on right action. For a Muslim, spiritual salvation depends on these. This is best expressed in a popular saying: Even when you think God isn’t watching you, act as if he is.
Who knows? Perhaps it won’t be long now before words like salat (Muslim prayer) and Ramadan join karma and Nirvana in Webster’s Dictionary, and Muslims take their place in America’s mainstream.
Dr. Williams, I had the pleasure of attending one of your lectures in Virginia and have been searching for your website ever since. Many so called “experts” have flooded our airwaves in recent years but very few have actually had the guts to go face to face with our Islamic enemies as you have. My wife and I applaud your efforts to raise the level of journalism in these confused times.
Sweet contest, totally doing it
I
So, What’s the problem?? That people are becoming muslims and leaving christianity? For me the problem is zionist lobbyist who make america donate billions of dollars in Israel when we have people dying in the streets and children not getting proper education ore health care. We have dirty politicians promise us heaven on earth for hard working people just so they can collect our vote. I am tired of racist White uncle sam’s who are always looking for somebody to hate! I have seen White,dark,red,yellow muslims I don’t care! And I don’t care if people are christians ore Jew. BUt I do care when people are spreading fear and hate for no reason. America must bann people like you, not people who practise their religion and live in peace! Ignorance is deadly! this is how hitler started, and now the same people who are screaming “never again” are the same people who are discriminating and hating minority’s. SHAME ON YOU! Go live like Jesus and don’t hate!