Islam in the United States -- A Tentative Ascent:
A Conversation with Yvonne Haddad

The Islamic presence in the United States has grown substantially over the past decade or two. With that expansion, however, have come self-assessments from within the Islamic-American community, and speculation on what the future holds. In this 1997 interview, with U.S. Society & Values editors William Peters and Michael J. Bandler, Yvonne Haddad, professor of Islamic history at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, considers the state of Muslims in America today.

Q: The rise of Islam in the United States can be seen tangibly, every day, with the mosques that have been constructed in the nation's urban areas. What is the current total?

Haddad: There are twelve hundred fifty mosques and Islamic centers.

Q: How many have been erected in the past ten years?

Haddad: Quite a few. I think that since 1984, the number has doubled.

Q: Then there are the intangibles -- the spirit and resolve and determination of that community to make a life for itself in the United States. But first, I thought we'd discuss the fact that Islam is not completely new to these shores. It didn't spring up in the last 20 years.

Haddad: No, it did not. Some scholars are exploring the possibility that Muslims even preceded the Plymouth Plantation and the Virginia settlements. We have historical evidence that some of the Moors who were expelled from Spain somehow made their way to the islands of the Caribbean, and from there to the southern part of the United States. There's a book on the Melungeons who came to North America prior to the 1600s. So there are some Muslims now who are looking at this history and seeing themselves as part of the founding of America. It's sort of the Spanish version of the founding of America. We also know that a substantial number of the African Americans who were brought as slaves to the United States were Muslim, and were converted to Christianity. Some continued to practice Islam until the early part of this century. They lived on the outer banks of Georgia, on the periphery. So there are different ways of looking at the history. Generally speaking, we talk about steady emigration in the 1870s and 1880s when the Muslims from Lebanon and Syria came to the United States.

Q: Were these people able to live their lives as Muslims?

Haddad: They did continue their lives as Muslims. One of the things that is interesting about Islam is that it's a portable religion. Any place can be a place of worship. It's just that the establishment of community, and perpetuation of the faith is something that became prominent only at the beginning of the 1930s, during the Depression. We see a great deal of institutionalization among the immigrants. We ended up with about 52 mosques by the end of World War II. The United States, from the 1920s through the end of the Second World War, had no immigration to speak of. That's when you had the homogenization of America. Then, in the 1960s, the doors opened again, leading to a massive new immigration from all over the world -- reminiscent of the waves of Eastern Europeans who came at the turn of the 20th century.

Q: You mentioned a figure of 52 mosques.

Haddad: Nineteen fifty two saw the creation of the Federation of Islamic Associations of the United States and Canada. Fifty-two mosques joined, with predominantly Lebanese and Syrian populations. There were a few groups of Muslims from the Balkans. Not included in that count was about a hundred African American mosques.

Q: So you're talking about the growth from 150 to 1250 over less than a half-century.

Haddad: Right.

Q: In those early days, were there contacts between the different communities?

Haddad: Most of them were chain migration Muslims. They came out of the same villages in Lebanon. You had people who settled in North Dakota. Then, during the First World War, some were drafted and went to Europe and died, and others came back, but didn't go back to North Dakota, where they had homesteaded, but went into the automobile factories in Detroit [Michigan], for example, or started businesses in Ohio.

Q: Was that the genesis of the strong Muslim presence in the Detroit area?

Haddad: It was the Ford Rouge Factory. It employed Muslims as well as African Americans from the South. The company paid five dollars a day, and took in anybody who could put up with the heat and horrible working conditions. Most of the people who came from the Middle East didn't know any English. It was good pay.

Q: Were there any tensions with American society, based on religion?

Haddad: It was more racist than religious. There were two court cases at the time. The question was whether Arabs were considered fit citizens for the United States, because at that time citizenship was defined either by being Caucasian or Negroid, and the Arabs didn't fit either profile.

Q: Let's focus on the tremendous growth that has taken place in recent years. First, pinpoint the reasons for it.

Haddad: The most important factor is the change in the U.S. immigration laws around 1965, in which people were given visas based on their ability to contribute to society, rather than chain migration, which is through relatives. What you had after 1965 was the inflow of doctors and engineers -- the brain drain, the professional class -- Pakistanis and Bangladeshis and Arabs. That is what established Islam in a very solid way as a religion in America. They soon set up mosques, because they could not relate to the more assimilationist mosques that were established by the Federation of Islamic Associations. They thought of them as being too Americanized, too Christianized.

Q: So there was a very definite distinction between the old-line mosques and the new ones.

Haddad:Correct.

Q: What were the older ones like?

Haddad: First of all, the immigrants who came in that earlier wave were uneducated, mostly young single men. We even have records of people on a train going to Washington State, passing through Chicago. The group included more than 50 people who were between the ages of 9 and 11. It was child labor, headed for the mines or orchards, or the railroads. These kids didn't even know where they came from. They didn't know English. But eventually, they married Americans, settled, and tried to invent an identity, and developed a bare minimum of religion, with the food and music and marriage customs as culture.

Q: So the worship wasn't the focal point. It was almost incidental.

Haddad: That's right. These mosques were social clubs. But then, once they got married, they began to worry about bringing up children. We have a record of the Quincy [Massachusetts] mosque. Eleven families banded together and said, we need a mosque, a building, a place where we can gather so our children can grow up as Muslims and marry each other. They built the mosque. But, according to a survey, not one of the children, male or female, married Muslims. And all the marriages ended in divorce. It's an incredible statistic.

Q: That's the way it was. And obviously, change was needed.

Haddad: Right. When the post-1965 immigrants came, they looked at what had been going on, and decided that wasn't what they wanted. The identity and consciousness of the new immigrants are different. They are the product of the nation- states that arose after the Second World War. They are educated. They have a national identity, whether as Pakistanis, Lebanese, or Syrians. They have been taught a particular history, a background, as well as the history of Islam, its culture and contribution to world civilization. So they came already formed with a particular perspective on life. They looked at the earlier immigrants who did not share their identity, and decided to establish their own institutions.

Q: So you've identified two distinctive schools. Then there is the black Muslim.

Haddad: Absolutely. From 1933 to 1975, they were growing up parallel and separate. The African American experience really developed in the industrial cities in the North as a reaction to racism. When African Americans left the Southern cotton fields at the beginning of the twentieth century, they expected the North would be more open, and it wasn't. So gradually, Islam was rediscovered as an identity that would ground them in their original African identity -- since Africa had at least three Islamic kingdoms (Mali, Songhai and Ghana) that had made great contributions to African civilizations. African Americans started changing their names as a rejection of slave identity.

Q: Today, in the Islamic community, as one response to the voids of the past, there is a whole network of schools.

Haddad: There are over a hundred day schools, and over a thousand Sunday or weekend schools.

Q: And are there community organizations?

Haddad: Yes, besides the 1,250 mosques or Islamic centers, we have addresses for organizations, publishers, radio stations - - about 1,200 institutions.

Q: Is there a religious training program for leaders?

Haddad: There is a new one established this year near Herndon, Virginia. It is run by the International Institute of Islamic Thought. It gives an M.A. in Imamate Studies, preparing Imams for religious leadership, and an M.A. in Islamic Studies. It is going to serve as a seminary, to prepare leaders who have lived and are trained in America. Up to now the leadership has been imported. And that isn't working too well.

Q: That must have created some stresses.

Haddad: At first it didn't, but it did as the immigrants acclimatized to life in America. And the imported leaders couldn't communicate with the children.

Q: I'm sure that even the youngsters who go to day schools are Americanized in many ways.

Haddad: They are. They live in two cultures, straddling them.

Q: Let's talk about living in two cultures -- whether it's even possible to do so. How successfully is it accomplished?

Haddad: It's a very interesting question. I've been looking at it for some time. On one level, they've been able to do that very successfully. On another level, given the heightened Islamophobia in America, it's become very uncomfortable. In one of the surveys we did in the 1980s, we asked people whether they believed America discriminated against Muslims. Of a sample of 365 people, 100 percent said yes. Then, when we asked whether any had personally experienced discrimination, none had. So it is in the air. The press contributes to the paranoia, and we cannot ignore it. Muslims feel comfortable, they've been invited to churches and synagogues, and have participated in interfaith dialogue. They know we're not out to get them. And yet, they get up in the morning and read press reports about terrorists and they panic. There is this fear that at any moment, you'll have a mob marching, trying to bomb a mosque. It has happened. There have been three or four bombings, perhaps two cases of arson, and some desecration of mosques, since 1989. No one has been killed, but these religious sites have been attacked and this is very frightening. Usually these incidents follow, or are linked to, some high-visibility terrorist act overseas.

Q: Certainly there has been, particularly among some of the strongly ecumenical Christian groups, a sense that they have a mission to reach out, and correct the errors of the past.

Haddad: Absolutely. The National Council of Churches has come out with statements about Christian relations with Muslims. At least eight denominations have come out in support of Christian and Muslim rights in Jerusalem. These same denominations have presented statements about how to treat our neighbors, how to get churches to reach out to the Muslim community.

Q: So there's some counterbalance to the extreme actions.

Haddad: From some of the churches, yes. I agree. Many have taken a stand that neighbors should work with each other, that congregations should be taught how to relate with Muslims as Americans, as full citizens, as participants in building the future of America.

Q: Today, do you think a good Muslim can practice his or her religion in this country comfortably?

Haddad: Well, the practice of religion is to pray five times a day, to perform ablutions before the prayers, to fast the month of Ramadan, to give alms, to go on the hajj once in a lifetime. Fasting is not as easy as fasting in a Muslim country, where the workday is shortened.

Q: Yet the United States has religious leave and other laws.

Haddad: Well, they haven't accommodated Muslims yet. The only place where this has been tested is in the prison system. African American Muslims have sued certain prison systems and have acquired the right, for example, to get halal food -- Islamically slaughtered food -- and the right, while fasting, to eat not at times designated by the prison authorities but at the times that the religion allows them to eat.

The five daily prayers happen to be concentrated in the afternoon and evening. You do the first one in the morning before you leave the house, and have a noon break for the second. You can postpone the mid-afternoon one in some cases. They don't take that much time -- five to ten minutes. The only thing is that you need a clean space to be able to perform ablutions. That's the toughest thing. Performing ablutions in a public bathroom, the lack of a private space, is hard.

Q: Because we're considering Islam in America as an evolutionary situation, would you say that it is easier today for Muslims to effectively practice their religion in this country as opposed to 50 years ago?

Haddad: It's easier in that there are Muslim mosques throughout the 50 states, and you can find a community where you can worship. When we first moved into Hartford [Connecticut] in 1970, we knew there was a Muslim person. He used to go to the Maronite church to seek community. At that time, there was no mosque. He died, and was buried in a Christian cemetery. Now there is a Muslim section of the cemetery. And Muslims are able to make arrangements with funeral homes that will allow them to wash the bodies according to Islamic practice and prescriptions and perform the prayers. So it is becoming easier for Muslims to live in the United States. It is more comfortable; there's no question about it. They are organized better, and they are beginning to ask for their rights under American law.

Q: Let's discuss the current state of political activism among Muslims in the United States today -- both in terms of specific causes and also some of the more broad-based kinds of issues where they might join with other groups.

Haddad: Political action is very hard to pinpoint, basically because it's not well-organized. There's no consensus on issues. Since the early 1970s, there have been several Arab- American political action groups -- the Arab-American Anti- Discrimination Committee, the National Association of Arab Americans -- but those included both Muslims and Christians. They came into existence after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. These are not necessarily Islamic. They will work for Arab- American causes, like discrimination. For Muslims, at the moment, the cause is [U.S.] anti-terrorism legislation that attempts to create profiles. There is a fear that it could target Muslims and Arabs, or people who look like Arabs, when they go to an airport.

Q: But that's not an Islamic religious issue.

Haddad: No. Then you have different groups, like the United Muslims of America, or the Muslim Alliance, that have defined themselves as political action groups, that try to invite candidates for office to speak to them. They have not been very successful, for a variety of reasons. We do have a record, for example, of public officials who returned Arab American Christian money because they said it was tainted.

Q: That was 10 or more years ago.

Haddad: Right. But it is a fear that they are being disenfranchised. This changed, though, with Jesse Jackson running for office. When he ran for president in 1988, there were 50 Arab Americans and Muslim Americans who were part of his delegation to the Democratic National Convention. And [candidate Michael] Dukakis acknowledged them when he addressed the assemblage as "Christians, Jews and Muslims." President Reagan once met the Pope in Florida, and welcomed him in the name of Americans, their churches, synagogues and mosques. And President Clinton, several times, has sent congratulations at the time of Ramadan. And Mrs. Clinton invited Muslims for an Iftar dinner [the meal that breaks the Ramadan Fast] at the White House. So there is a feeling that people are beginning to notice Muslims as part of America.

During the last election, there was an effort to bring five Muslim political action committees together, trying to create a voting bloc. Knowing the Jewish vote was going to go for [President] Clinton, Muslims wondered, could they go for Dole? They couldn't do that. About fifty percent voted for the Democratic party, and fifty for the Republicans. So they're totally divided, and have independent opinions. Also, since they're mostly recent immigrants, they have their own particular interests. The issue of Jerusalem is universal for all Muslims, regardless of where they're from. But when you talk about Kashmir, for example, you'll see that Indian and Pakistani Muslims will focus on that. You have the issue of the Moro revolution in the Philippines -- everybody will give some sort of lip service to it, but that's about it. They all rallied in support the Muslims of Bosnia.

Q: You've been citing foreign policy issues, for the most part. Where do Muslims in the United States come down on critical domestic issues?

Haddad: Nowhere. They have not been able to organize or make an impact. First of all, the people running for office don't want to be associated with Muslims. There's this fear of being tarred. I agree that there are issues that they could share with other groups. One example of cooperation I can cite is the statement about abortion issued by the American Muslim Council in Washington in collaboration with the Catholic Bishop of Maryland.

Q: What was the substance of that?

Haddad: They were jointly against abortions, at the time of the United Nations Beijing Conference. It's not that they were against women's rights, but they felt that the way these rights were defined was against the religious teachings of Catholicism and Islam. There also was one court case where Muslims and Jews collaborated, that had to do with freedom of worship. Generally, though, even where there may be a confluence of interests, there is no cooperation.

Q: So what else can you say about this newly vibrant community?

Haddad: The thing is that it becomes more vibrant the more it feels persecuted. We ran a survey in the 1980s and found out that only five to ten percent of the community is interested in organized religion. Most people of Islamic background will have nothing to do with the mosques, even though they see themselves as Muslims and identify themselves as Muslims.

Q: Is that still true today?

Haddad: I think it gets higher in periods when you have a perception of persecution.

Q: What does Muslim education accomplish, in the day schools and weekend schools? Do these institutions expand and build a base?

Haddad: They hope it will. Some Christians attend these schools. They're good schools, sometimes operating in ghetto areas. But there aren't that many schools -- what is a hundred across the whole United States? And only a few go through high school. The Sunday schools are producing a very interesting group of students. I'm starting to get them in my college classes, and they all come knowing what Islam is, because they were raised in this consciousness. They're a very interesting parallel to my Jewish students. They have a specific, particular knowledge but not necessarily grounded in the historical facts of Judaism or Islam, their thoughts and institutions. Sometimes I say something about Judaism, and my students jump. There was one student who would challenge me all the time. I told him to go check with his rabbi. He came back, and told me, "the rabbi said you're right." And the same happens with the Muslim students.

Q: How do you view things as they are going to evolve into the next century? Are you sanguine about the growth and enrichment of Islam in the United States?

Haddad: I believe that the issue of Islamophobia in some quarters of the United States is serious. One of the leaders told me, "our biggest enemy in America would be tolerance." We know, for example, that in Chicago we had two or three mosques. Then the Salman Rushdie affair developed, bringing fears among the Muslim immigrants that their children would become Salman Rushdies, denying their faith and being integrated into the system -- in a sense adopting the language of the enemy of Islam and using it against Islam. So what happened was that more than 60 Sunday schools sprang up, and each one became a mosque. It was a wakeup call for the community. Then there was the World Trade Center bombing, and people began going to mosques. Others were hiding. They were claiming, `I'm not Pakistani -- I'm Hindu,' or `I'm not Egyptian -- I'm Greek,' just to get rid of the bias and the stereotype.

I really personally believe, having been doing research on the Islamic community for over twenty years, that if they felt comfortable, they would probably integrate much more easily and would have an easier life. But the last few years, since the fall of the Soviet empire, there are certain people who feel we need an enemy.

Muslims are eager to be part of this country. They don't want to be discriminated against. They want their children to be able to live here. They would like Islam to be recognized as a positive force for justice and peace in the world.

Q: If there is more recognition of Islam, as you said, by various U.S. presidents, or greetings to Muslims during the Ramadan season that appear on local television stations, isn't this an acknowledgment of some forward movement?

Haddad: I think that goes a long way towards making them feel at home in the United States. There are developments coming through. If you look at the mosque movement itself, you will see a great deal of Americanization within it. Remember that in most of the countries Muslims came from -- especially in the early parts of the century -- people did not go to the mosques. Now there is a mosque movement worldwide. And what we have in America is that women, too, are going. Female space has been created -- sometimes in the basement, sometimes in a separate room, sometimes side-by-side or in the back or on a higher level from the men. Basically, we're seeing the kind of innovations that are making the mosques American.

Q: If we try to sum up the Islamic community in the United States, putting the religion aside, how would you assess it?

Haddad: I think they will feel comfortable. Increasingly, they are learning how to operate within the system. Their children are American and they know it. They may know that they are also Pakistani, or Lebanese, or Syrian, or Palestinian, but at the same time, they are Americans, and they can operate better within the American system than they can in Pakistan, for instance. Some of them have never been to Pakistan -- it's a place their parents talk about. And they know that that's what they're supposed to be, but they don't know what it is. And I think it's the coming generation that is going to define what Islam is going to be in America. If we look at the history of the development of religion in America, it would be parallel to churches. We're beginning to have more pot-luck dinners. There is one mosque in New York with a woman president -- which is unheard of. She's a medical doctor, of Pakistani extraction. So why not?

In a sense, then, the mosque is not going to be a transplant -- something that is foreign and brought here. It is going to be an indigenous experience of religiosity in America.