It was an extraordinary private event. Not a word about it appeared in next day’s New York Times or on the evening network news bulletins, and no media were present. But in the midst of one of those inimitably hot and steamy DC mornings a few days ago, I was invited with a few dozen other guests to attend the 50th-anniversary rededication of the Washington mosque on Massachusetts Avenue, just down the road from the vice-presidential mansion and the British embassy. Entering through magnetometers and guarded gates, I saw purposeful young men in unmarked military uniforms scurrying around with bags of what I took to be assault rifles.
I took off my shoes and entered the hallowed inner sanctum, with its lovingly maintained Turkish ceramic tiles and woven Persian carpets (all places of worship have that same atmosphere of inner peace, I find). There was an air of hushed expectancy. Then, with the minimum of fuss, and preceded by none of the customary wailing motorcade sirens, the unheralded guest of honour walked in: none other than a shoeless President George W Bush. The imam greeted him and Bush stood by his side, winking in the direction of two White House aides who had slipped in just before him – a habit Bush displays, I have noticed, when he is nervous. Then the hafiz chanted from the Quran and the imam, Dr Abdullah Khouj, told Bush: “Your constant concern for this mosque has been shown, sir.”
Indeed, Bush has visited the mosque three times since it was dedicated by President Dwight D Eisenhower in 1957 – something none of the eight US presidents between them managed to do even once. His first visit came six days after the 11 September 2001 atrocities, when fear was rampant among the nation’s Muslims.
But, in a speech designed that time to be highly publicised, Bush proclaimed: “Islam is peace,” pointing out that “America counts millions of Muslims amongst our citizens” who are “doctors, lawyers, law professors, members of the military, entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, moms and dads” and “need to be treated with respect”. The appeals worked, too: in those traumatised days following 9/11, there were remarkably few attacks on Muslims (or Sikhs, whose turbans still lead many Americans to see the two as indistinguishable) for such a violent society.
But America rightly prides itself on its respect for diverse religions. This may explain why a little-noticed study, released on 22 May by the reputable and bipartisan Pew Research Centre, concluded that, in contrast with the hate-filled young militants of Leeds or Luton, American Muslims are “largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate with respect to many of the issues that have divided Muslims around the world”. Islam, some claim, is now America’s fastest-growing religion. The new study, subtitled Middle Class and Mostly Mainstream, is the biggest and most comprehensive ever undertaken of the 2.35 million Muslims in the United States, and involved 55,000 interviews.
In the words of Luis Lugo, director of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, “Muslim Americans are very much like the rest of the country” and “do not see a conflict between being a devout Muslim and living in a modern society”. The telling paradox, of course, is that anti-Americanism has never been so intense among Muslims across the world; coincidentally, another Pew study, released late last month, about attitudes of more than 47,000 people in 47 countries, found that many Muslims in the Middle East now have more faith in Osama Bin Laden than they do in Bush.
No ifs and buts
So why is there supposedly such a stark contrast between the “optimistic” Muslims who live in America and those elsewhere, including Britain? I will come to the findings of the May study in a moment, because it methodically compares the lot of Muslims in the United States with those in Europe, including the UK.
I have to say in passing, however, that it would be reassuring to know that either Tony Blair or Gordon Brown had been as attentive to his country’s Muslims as Bush has; but my colleague Marie in London has looked in vain for any record of either ever having bothered to visit a British mosque, though Blair did sweep in to a glitzy Saudi-funded one in Pakistan last year. Even David Cameron has dropped in on Birmingham mosques three times this year. The Queen and Prince Charles squeezed in earlier visits, too.
I noticed years ago here that a Pakistani who had emigrated to the US would already be speaking, after five years, say, with a strong American accent – while his British counterpart would still sound totally Pakistani, and would continue to do so even after decades in the UK. But if you settle in America, you have to become “decidedly American in . . . outlook, values and attitudes” (as the Pew report describes Islamic immigrants to the US) if you want to thrive.
You must thus buy in to the American system, with no ifs and buts; as soon as you are able, you should symbolise this conversion by becoming a US citizen. The study duly found that more Muslims in the US see themselves as American first and Muslim second. In Britain it was the other way round, dramatically so: just 19 per cent saw themselves as British first and Muslim second. Twenty-one per cent of Muslims in the US marry people of other faiths, a proportion only slightly lower than that for other Americans.
The US census does not ask people their religion, so guesstimates of the Muslim population range between one and more than seven million. Pew goes with 2.35 million as the most authoritative figure, and says that nearly two-thirds of these are immigrants; just under a quarter of them come from the Arab region, and 18 per cent from Pakistan or elsewhere in south Asia. Of the remaining 35 per cent born in the US, 14 per cent already had Muslim parents. The rest – nearly all of them disenchanted black Americans, to whom I will come later – are converts (including the comedian Dave Chappelle, the late jazz bandleader Art Blakey and the legendary rapper Ice Cube).
In the UK, a 2004 Home Office report found that British Muslims were three times more likely to be unemployed than the rest of the population. In the US, 41 per cent of Muslim households report annual income of $50,000 or more, compared with 44 per cent of all American households. By contrast, more than half of Germany’s Muslims put their annual family income at less than ?18,000, against 35 per cent of the rest of Germany; the gap in France is similar. In Britain, 61 per cent of all Muslims have incomes of less than £20,000, compared with 39 per cent of the rest of the population. The divide in Spain is even wider.
“Victims of aggression”
In fact, just 2 per cent of America’s Muslims are classified as being in the nation’s low-income bracket, compared with 18 per cent in France and Germany, 22 per cent in Britain and 23 per cent in Spain. Well over half the Muslims in the US have at least an undergraduate education, mirroring the rest of America, and eight out of ten describe themselves as being “very happy” (24 per cent) or “pretty happy” (54 per cent) with their lives, proportions just modestly lower than those for America generally.
No wonder that Bush’s short speech I heard at the mosque in Washington was greeted with applause five times by the almost entirely Muslim audience – though I couldn’t bring myself to tell the president afterwards that 71 per cent of American Muslims voted for John Kerry in 2004, compared to 14 per cent for him. Or that, although Pew reports that more than half are “very concerned” by the rise of Islamist terrorism, they are opposed to the Iraq war by a ratio of six to one.
More than three-quarters of America’s Muslim population believe that suicide bombings against civilian targets are “never” justified, yet one in four young Muslims in the United States believes such attacks to be at least “sometimes” justified if the cause is “to defend Islam” – a finding that is causing much alarmist consternation here, even though the figures for Britain, France and Spain are twice as high.
I find it irresistible to point out to indignant Islamophobes in America, in any case, that the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes found this year that 51 per cent of all Americans believe that bombings and other attacks intentionally aimed at civilians are sometimes justifiable.
This conundrum, that America is killing innocent Muslims at an infinitely greater rate than has ever been the case vice versa – albeit usually unintentionally – is one that simply never occurs to the vast majority of Americans, who see themselves as the victims of Islamic aggression. Pew reports that, the upbeat tone of its May study notwithstanding, 53 per cent of American Muslims say that life has been more difficult for them since 9/11. Still more believe that the US government is now singling out Muslims for surveillance, and a quarter say they have been discriminated against because of their faith.
These ugly prejudices surfaced the other day when a DC radio host called Jerry Klein suggested that all Muslims in the US should be forced to wear armbands or have crescent-shaped tattoos. The phone lines at his powerful radio station, WMAL, were instantly jammed. “Not only do you tattoo them in the middle of their forehead, but you ship them out of the country,” one irate caller said, amid a flood of supportive calls. Klein, in fact, had been lampooning Islamophobia and his comments were meant to be a spoof, but sadly, a significant part of present-day white America then spoke up.
By no means all commentators and experts on Islam, in fact, believe that the Pew study is an accurate reflection of the situation here. Geneive Abdo, a US-born Maronite Christian of Leba nese origin who is author of the acclaimed Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11 – tells me Pew makes “false comparisons” between the US and Europe. She also estimates the Muslim population of the US to be six million.
“You can’t compare Muslims in different cultures and from different ethnic backgrounds,” she says. In her book, Abdo paints Islam in the United States as an “enclave culture”, a religious community that sees itself as beleaguered, and is thus divided – between men and women, us and them, genuine Muslims and ersatz believers, and so on.
The result, she concludes, is that a post-9/11, more religious Islamic population in the US is accelerating towards alienation and separatism from mainstream America – “a people apart”, in her words. The Pew study reflects American wishful thinking, she suggests, that “Europe” is getting everything wrong while America is doing everything right.
Yet there remains one huge and still potentially ruinous stain that permeates the 108 pages of the Pew study: the legacy of the slavery that first brought both black people and the beginnings of Islam to America in the 18th century, together with slavery’s repercussions now and for well into the future. Native black American converts to Islam were decidedly bleaker in their outlook than Muslim immigrants or Muslims born here, and inclined much more towards the belief that Muslims should separate themselves from the rest of America. They have never bought in to the American dream.
Disillusioned black Americans who were never able to break free from the shackles of the slavery mentality started to convert to Islam in large numbers seven decades ago, and were further inspired by Malcolm X’s leadership of the Nation of Islam. More recently, US prisons have become incubators of black discontent and resulting conversions to Islam.
According to some estimates, as many as a quarter of a million black US prison convicts may be converts to Islam. As the British example of the shoe bomber Richard Reid showed, the implications hardly need to be spelled out.
The president’s extraordinarily symbolic visit to the DC mosque that sweltering day in the last week of June illustrates only too well the extent to which his administration believes the US needs the support of domestic Muslims, not just for its own national security, but to help dampen down the anti-American hatred that is rising elsewhere throughout the Islamic world.
It would behove Gordon Brown, I respectfully suggest, to follow the unlikely lead of George W Bush and to express his heartfelt support for Britain’s Muslims by making a well-publicised visit to a mosque in the UK. And preferably, given events in London and Glasgow in the first days of his prime ministership, very soon.
Additional research by Marie Mathieu
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