The forms of interaction mediated by the internet brings society closer to the transformations of distinct forms of socialization and the contemporary idea of community. There exists a construction of an imagined community with ethnic and religious borders located in the United States and on the internet. Islamic on one side and Latino on the other side are characteristics expressed in that imagined community that in virtual space can take the form of a cyberenvironment of Islam Latino.
Latinx Muslims sought to be represented in front of other Muslims and civil society itself, such as the Latino community in the United States. The internet allows the creation of an extensive community based on the universal ummah and Islamic discourse. However, while the internet allows Islam to reach to minorities such as Latinos, it also enables the creation of cyberspaces where Latinx Muslims can express their needs as a community and claim their Muslim identity; what could form a flexible and changeable cyberenvironment according to their needs. Therefore, the margins that shape the cyberenvironment are a hybridization between Islamic and ethnic aspects.
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The Virtual Latinx-Muslim Community
Arely Medina
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Islam and the Middle East in the American Imagination
Brooke Sherrard
Americans have utilized Islam as a rhetorical device for articulating various understandings of American identity from the time of the earliest Anglo-American settlers. In every period, many rejected Islam and Muslims as oppositional to American identity, accusing Islam of inherent despotism that conflicted with American liberty. Others, though, used perceived traits of Islam to critique American behaviors or focused on similarities between Islam and Christianity. Many citizens of the early American republic assumed their country was essentially Protestant, but founding figures such as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington, and James Madison indicated their support for a more inclusive polity by listing Muslims among the varieties of people they believed could be good citizens. These men meant this abstractly, as they believed there were no Muslims in the United States at the time and did not know some African slaves were Muslim.
American Protestant organizations sent missionaries around the world starting in the early 19th century, including to areas of the Middle East where the Muslim majority was legally protected from proselytization. Therefore, missionaries tended to work with native Christian populations. American missionaries, travelers, and explorers had a great interest in the Holy Land. A frequent theme in their writings was a desire to see this area reclaimed from Islamic rule. They believed the Holy Land could be regenerated through Protestant influence and often suggested Jews could be relocated there. Over time, liberal Protestants moved away from seeking conversions and became more interested in educational and medical aspects of missions. American discussions about Islam intensified again after September 11, 2001. Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis argued that Western civilization and Islamic civilization were inherently incompatible. Others, like John L. Esposito and Feisal Abdul Rauf, focused on the historical and theological similarities between Christianity and Islam to suggest common ground.
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Islamic Colleges and Universities in North America
Andrea L. Stanton
The emergence of Islamic religiously affiliated higher education institutions connects to a much longer history of primarily religiously affiliated higher education in the United States and Canada—with religiously affiliated institutions comprising the majority of higher education institutions for most of the past three centuries. Islamic institutions joined a more recent wave that started in the 1970s with a small number of Buddhist universities. For North American Muslims, the move toward establishing higher education institutions took three sometimes overlapping paths: the first focused on providing undergraduate and graduate degrees, the second focused on providing training for Muslim religious education professionals, and the third for future or early 21st-century religious professionals. (A fourth thread runs through these others: most institutions offer some opportunity for community members to take courses or pursue programs for the purpose of deepening their personal piety.) These three paths have often diverged with respect to pursuing state or regional academic accreditation, although that diminished since the 2010s.
Islamic colleges and universities in North America are an internally diverse group, in terms of whether they seek academic accreditation, whether they offer full degrees or certifications/certificates, whether they offer residential, commuter, or online learning experiences, whether they envision graduates working as religious professionals or in other fields, and in the range of religious orientations they offer, within a largely Sunni identity. In addition, many of these institutions, including the most well known, Zaytuna College, have evolved in different directions since their founding, showing their dynamism as individual institutions and as a broader group. As the needs, interests, and outlooks of Muslim communities in the United States and Canada continue to shift, and as higher education in both countries continues to develop, these institutions will likely continue to do the same.
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Race and Religion in the United States
Ryan P. Jordan
For centuries before the European colonization of North America, sectarian, ethnic, and racial discrimination were interrelated. The proscription of certain groups based on their biological or other apparently ingrained characteristics, which is one definition of racism, in fact describes much religious prejudice in Western history—even as the modern term “racism” was not used until the 20th century. An early example of the similarities between religious and racial prejudice can be seen in the case of anti-Semitism, where merely possessing “Jewish blood” made one inherently unassimilable in many parts of Europe for nearly a thousand years before the initial European conquest of the New World. Throughout Western history, religious values have been mobilized to dehumanize other non-Christian groups such as Muslims, and starting in the 16th century, religious justifications of conquest played an indispensable role in the European takeover of the Americas. In the culture of the 17th- and 18th-century British colonies, still another example of religious and racial hatred existed in the anti-Catholicism of the original Protestant settlers, and this prejudice was particularly evident with the arrival of Irish immigrants in the 19th century. In contemporary language, the Irish belonged to the Celtic “race” and one of the many markers of this race’s inherent inferiority was Catholicism—a religious system that was alternatively defined as non-Western, pagan, or irrational by many Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who similarly saw themselves as a different, superior race. In addition to the Irish, many other racial groups—most notably Native Americans—were defined as inferior based on their religious beliefs. Throughout much of early American history, the normative religious culture of Anglo-Protestantism treated groups ranging from African slaves to Asian or Middle Eastern immigrants as alternatively unequal, corrupt, subversive, or civically immature by virtue of their religious identity. Historians can see many examples of the supposedly dangerous religious attributes of foreigners—such as those of the Chinese in the late 19th century—as a basis for restricting immigration. Evangelical Protestant ideas of divine chosen-ness also influenced imperial projects launched on behalf of the United States. The ideology of Manifest Destiny demonstrates how religious differences could be mobilized to excuse the conquest and monitoring of foreign subjects in places such as Mexico or the Philippines. Anglo-Protestant cultural chauvinism held sway for much of American history, though since the mid-1900s, it can be said to have lost some of its power. Throughout its history, many racial or ethnic groups—such as Hispanic Americans, African-Americans, or Asian Americans in the United States have struggled to counter the dominant ethnic or racial prejudice of the Anglo-Protestant majority by recovering alternative religious visions of nationhood or cultural solidarity. For groups such as the 20th-century Native American Church, or the African American Nation of Islam, religious expression formed an important vehicle to contest white supremacy.
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Park51 and the “Ground Zero Mosque” Controversy
Kate Yanina DeConinck
Park51 is the name of a nonprofit organization that was initially founded to create an Islamic community center in lower Manhattan. The organization’s leaders had hoped that the community center would serve three core purposes: providing local Muslims with a much-needed space to pray and take pride in their identity, uniting the diverse Muslim communities of New York under one roof, and offering services such as child care, educational programs, fitness facilities, and more to the wider city. Originally known as Cordoba House, the project later changed its name to reflect the address of the site that was purchased to create this community center: 51 Park Place.
The community center was first conceptualized in 2006 and, over the next few years, elicited support from local city council members, state senators, and others. However, the plans eventually drew the attention of conservative pundits, who condemned the proposal as a potential “victory mosque.” These critics claimed the site was located too close to the sacred space of Ground Zero, where thousands of people were killed on September 11, 2001. Consequently, the project came to be known in mainstream media as the “Ground Zero Mosque.” The damaging rhetoric against Park51 became increasingly severe throughout 2010 as the project became a point of debate in congressional races across the nation. Vitriol, fueled largely by Islamophobia, led to a series of challenges for the organization that effectively stalled progress on their project. After stepping back from the national spotlight for two and a half years to reevaluate their mission, the leaders of Park51 reemerged in 2014 to announce new plans for their site, which now included a residential skyscraper, a prayer space, and a three-story museum dedicated to the faith of Islam and its arts and cultures.
Scholarly literature about Islam in America reveals that Islam has a long and complex history in the United States. However, the September 11 attacks created new circumstances and questions with which American Muslims have had to grapple. First, many Muslim Americans faced widespread Islamophobia and hate crimes in the wake of 9/11, creating lasting emotional and psychological distress. The social vulnerability and sense of isolation that many American Muslims experienced was further amplified by other pressures from both inside and outside of their communities. Throughout the early 21st century, Muslims have faced ongoing pressure to foreground their identity as Americans and to show that they are civically engaged citizens. Some scholars have posited that there must be more solidarity among Muslims of different racial, ethnic, national, and other backgrounds to foster mutual support and face these challenges together. Park51 is an organization that spent more than a decade attempting to navigate these complex realities. The inclusion of a museum in the revised plans for its site is particularly noteworthy given the persisting need to shift public perceptions of and misunderstandings about Islam.
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Sufism in North America
William Rory Dickson
Sufism in North America is exceptionally diverse, reflecting its heterogenous origins and complex transnational dynamics. It can be found as an essential, if at times subtle, element of Muslim devotional practice, with several North American Muslim networks and organizations integrating Sufism into their teachings. It manifests more explicitly in various Sufi orders, normally led by a lineage-holding shaykh or shaykha, with a spectrum of approaches to Islamic identity and practice. Sufism has further been drawn upon as a niche resource for literature and commodity within the broader spiritual marketplace, intersecting with popular culture. Sufism in North America is thus an integral aspect of Muslim devotional practice, a distinct spiritual path embodied in various lineages and orders, and a literary phenomenon and popular spiritual commodity.
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Conversions to Islam in Mexico
Camila Pastor
Conversion to Islam in Mexico has accelerated in the early 21st century, thanks to both increased migration from Muslim-majority countries and the expanding global, regional, and local networks among Islamic religious communities. Despite there being no mosques in the country until the 1980s, official figures from Mexican censuses show the number of Muslims doubling between 2000 and 2010 and again in 2020. Though many communities were built in urban centers, outreach and proselytizing activities have extended into rural regions as well and have included Shia and Sufi as well as Sunni groups. Thus, the establishment of Muslim communities in Mexico has become a transnational phenomenon, with implications for the wider diaspora. This is demonstrated through an exploration of the historiography and ethnography of Islam and by drawing from data collected during the Ethnographic Census of Muslims in Mexico (2011–2014) and using interviews with converts, migrants, and diplomatic personnel to identify some of the core characteristics and consequences of Mexican Islam as convert Islam.
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The Construction of Muslim Families, Interfaith Marriage, and Religious Education in Mexico
Ruth Jatziri García Linares
Fieldwork conducted in the Islamic Center of the North (Centro Islámico del Norte, or CIN) in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, between 2015 and 2017, yielded several findings. First, it examined the reasons for women’s conversion to Islam; second, it looked at the ways these women and their husbands raise their children under Islamic religious precepts. Thus, the author seeks to shed light on how this conversion and child-rearing take place within both Muslim and interfaith homes, dividing her discussion into three parts. The first contextualizes the women and men who make up these families and households and also discusses the Muslim community settled in Monterrey, of which they are members. The second provides an outline of interreligious and Islamic marriages, as well as what Islam has to say about marriage between Muslims and people of other religious faiths. The last section consists of a series of examples taken from interviews with Muslim women who are members of the CIN in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon. The narratives provide insight into how religious values are transmitted to children and young people, as well as the ways in which marriages initially considered interreligious sometimes become completely Islamic.
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American Muslim Comedy
Samah Selina Choudhury
That Muslims are both consumers and practitioners of comedy may run counter to the otherwise ubiquitous notion that Islam, seemingly above all other religious traditions, is devoid of humor. Yet comedy, especially its staged performance version known as stand-up, is an occupation readily taken up by a number of Muslim comedians during the 21st century in North America. Muslim comedians are also South Asian comedians, Arab comedians, Iranian comedians, or Black comedians, among others, and the naming of their comedy explicitly as “Muslim” can be traced to how openly they speak of their common experiences of being subject to anti-Muslim hostility as a racialized act of violence. This racialization of Islam relies on “looking” Muslim: phenotypic features like dark hair, skin, and beards that simultaneously sweep up others that may share these attributes and make them targets of institutional and interpersonal violences. This common refrain can be seen especially in the material of comedians from the Allah Made Me Funny and Axis of Evil tours during the early 2000s, while later comedians like Hasan Minhaj, Aziz Ansari, and Kumail Nanjiani describe similar experiences in added terms of a racialized solidarity with other minoritized communities of color in the United States. These later comedians of the 2010s and their brand of politically oriented comedy have been upheld by dominant arts industries as examples of American multiculturalism and diversity, coinciding with the large-scale and cross-sectional social justice efforts to support undocumented immigrants, Black Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movement. Far from being a mark of their non-belonging in North American society, this racialized association with Islam is platformed as emblematic of North American societies: their exceptional openness and unparalleled freedoms. At the same time, however, women and Black Muslim comedians are rarely bestowed a similar entrée of visibility as “Muslim” comedians due to the hegemonic racialized image of Muslims as terrifying “terrorists”—a distorted privilege accessible usually only to male comedians of South Asian or Middle Eastern heritage.
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America’s Interactions with Islam and Judaism in North Africa
Lawrence A. Peskin
Encounters between Americans, Muslims, and Jews in North Africa played a foundational role in Americans’ early understanding of Islam and Judaism. At a time when the United States population had few Jews and virtually no free Muslims, North Africa was one of the places Americans were most likely to meet individuals from these groups.
Initially, American sailors and diplomats encountered North African Muslims and Jews as the result of frequent ship captures by Barbary corsairs beginning in the colonial period and culminating in the 1780s and 1790s. After 1815, the sailors and diplomats were joined by missionaries journeying to the Mediterranean region to convert Jews and Muslims as well as non-Protestant Christians.
These encounters prompted a good deal of literature published in the United States, including captivity narratives, novels, plays, histories, and missionary journals. These publications reinforced two dominant views of Islam. First, the early focus on Barbary corsairs capturing American “slaves” reinforced old notions of Islam as despotic and Muslims as “savages” similar to Native Americans. Missionary accounts prompted more thoughtful approaches to Muslim theology at the same time that they reinforced existing notions of Islam as a deceitful religion and revivified millenarian hopes that the declining Ottoman Empire foretold the Second Coming.
As a result of the captivity crises, Americans often had to deal with the area’s small but influential group of Jewish merchants in order to get terms and credit to free their countrymen. These fraught negotiations reinforced older European stereotypes of Jews as sharpers and Shylocks. As with Islam, the missionary period brought more thoughtful consideration of Jewish theology as Americans engaged in chiliastic hopes of bringing the Jews to Jerusalem.
After 1850 or so, Americans interested in Jews or Muslims looked less frequently to North Africa. Growing immigrant populations, first of Jews and then of Muslims, meant that Americans could encounter people of all three Abrahamic faiths at home. At the same time, missionary interests moved east, into the Holy Land, Syria, Turkey, and ultimately East Asia. Nevertheless, the early impact of North Africa on American thinking retained its influence, as is evident from President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech on American-Islamic relations delivered in Cairo.
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Sufi Groups in North America: A History
Jason Idriss Sparkes
North America is home to an extraordinary diversity of Sufi groups. This diversity is especially great in Canada and the United States, largely because of policies that have encouraged immigration from every part of the globe, including the vast regions of Africa and Eurasia where Sufism historically emerged. These liberal immigration policies, which began in the 1960s, opened the way for immigrants and foreign students to establish North American branches of Sufi groups from their countries of origin. It also allowed them to interact with Muslims and non-Muslims of other ethnic backgrounds, including the North American descendants of Western Europeans and Africans. New Sufi groups as well as groups partly influenced by Sufism were born from this interaction. These groups have evolved as a diverse minority within an equally diverse Muslim minority in Canada and the United States. As a result, each group tends to be relatively small and includes between a handful and a few thousand adherents. In Central America and the Caribbean Islands, there are fewer groups despite the presence of Sufism, which dates to the early colonial period.
To understand contemporary expressions of Sufism in North America, it is necessary to examine the contested role of Sufism within the global Islamic tradition. For example, it is useful to consider how Sufis, who consider themselves specialists of the inner or mystical dimension of Islam, have engaged with specialists of other dimensions, such as jurisprudence and doctrine. It is also helpful to examine how Orientalist discourses associated with Western colonialism depict antinomian currents within Sufism as representing a universalist spirituality, closer to Christianity than the purported legalism of Islam.
An understanding of this broader history is crucial to situate the history of Sufism in North America, from the 15th century until the early 21st century. Since the early colonial period, Sufis have been present in the Americas, mostly as a marginalized and discrete population among the millions of African victims of the transatlantic slave trade. From the mid-19th to the mid-20th century, practitioners of Sufism in North America tended to be largely of Asian origin. Since the mid-20th century , Sufi groups with adherents of extremely diverse origins have developed in a variety of ways, including universalist groups composed of both Muslims and non-Muslims and ethnically homogeneous groups of Muslims operating discretely within local mosques and immigrant communities.
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Moderation in American Religion
Rosemary R. Corbett
Religious moderation is hardly the first thing that comes to mind when considering the history of the United States. Would one have spoken of the Puritans as moderates? Could one characterize the many great revivals and awakenings that coursed through colonial and early republican American in such terms? And what about the impertinence of Anne Hutchison, the audacity of Jarena Lee, the bold experiment of Prohibition, or the modern political fervor that accompanied the rise of the religious right? When compared to England and many other nominally Christian European nations, the United States generally figures as an example of religious zeal. Yet moderation holds a special place in American religious thought, and not just recently. Since the Protestant Reformation, at least, the concept of religious moderation has been inescapably entangled with concerns about the form and shape of government. Just how much religious “enthusiasm” is safe for a monarchy, a democracy, or a republic? wondered English political theorists in the 1600s and 1700s. Their concerns unavoidably carried to the “New World,” contributing to the persecution or marginalization of Quakers, Shakers, and other religious practitioners deemed too immoderate in their passions and, not infrequently, their gendered practices and sexualities. With the birth of the new republic, Americans also raised questions about the political valences of religious moderation when debating which residents of the nation could fully enjoy the rights of citizenship. Appeals to moderation were used for centuries to exclude not only religious minorities but also racial and ethnic minorities and women. And yet the contours of moderation were continually contested by both those who wielded power and those subject to it.
Since the late 1800s, questions of religious moderation have also been intertwined with questions of modernity and the reconfiguration of public and private spaces. This was especially true with the rise of the fundamentalist movement in the early 1900s, a movement that opposed some of the modernist interpretive measures gaining currency among many American Christians, as well as the idea (increasingly popular over the course of the 20th century—particularly after the failure of Prohibition) that most forms of religion properly belong to the private realm. While fundamentalists were no less technologically savvy or educated than their theological opponents, their positions were nevertheless cast as anti-modern and immoderate, in that fundamentalists ostensibly held more closely to revelation than to modern science. This notion of fundamentalism as the incursion of immoderate anti-modernism, traditionalism, or enthusiasm into politics and public life has continued into the 21st century. While 21st-century arguments for religious moderation are most often directed at Muslims (who, in addition to conservative Christians, are frequently depicted as prone to trampling on the rights of those with whom they disagree), American history has no shortage of incidents involving pressures, often violent, on racial and religious minorities to moderate or privatize their ostensibly uncivilized behavior for the sake of the nation or even for humanity.
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Film and Religion in America
Eric Michael Mazur
Religion intersects with film not only in film content, but also in the production and experience of film. From the earliest period, religious attitudes have shaped how religious individuals and communities have approached filmmaking as way to present temptation or salvation to the masses. Individual religious communities have produced their own films or have sought to monitor those that have been mass produced. To avoid conflict, filmmakers voluntarily agreed to self-monitoring, which had the effect of strongly shaping how religious figures and issues were presented. The demise of this system of self-regulation reintroduced conflict over film content as it expanded the ways in which religious figures and issues were presented, but it also shifted attention away from the religious identity of the filmmakers. Built on a foundation of “reading” symbolism in “art” films, and drawing from various forms of myth—the savior, the end of the world, and others—audiences became more comfortable finding in films religious symbolism that was not specifically associated with a specific religious community. Shifts in American religious demographics due to immigration, combined with the advent of the videocassette and the expansion of global capitalism, broadened (and improved) the representation of non-Christian religious themes and issues, and has resulted in the narrative use of non-Christian myths. Experimentation with sound and image has broadened the religious aspect of the film experience and made it possible for the viewing of film to replicate for some a religious experience. Others have broadened the film-viewing experience into a religious system. While traditional film continues to present traditional religions in traditional ways, technology has radically individualized audio-visual production, delivery, and experience, making film, like religion, and increasingly individualized phenomenon.
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Asian American Religions
Tony Carnes
Asian American religions have dramatically increased their presence in the United States. Partly, this is a function of the increasing population of Asian Americans since 1965.
Asian American is a name given to the United States residents who trace their ancestry back to the area of Asia from Pakistan in the west to the Pacific islands east of the Asian landmass. There are over 18 million Asian Americans in the United States (about 6 percent of the national population), and Asians are immigrating to the country at rates that far exceed those for any other group.
Other names have been taken, given, or forced upon Asian Americans. Such terms as “Chinese or Japanese imperial subjects” heightened a unity of political and religious obedience to a divine emperor. “Oriental” started as a French idealization of the Confucian state before descending to the level of being an epithet for backwardness.
Immigrants come with nationalities like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Indian, and so forth that often intervene into religious discourses (see an example of this process in the Chinese American experience as described by Fenggang Yang (Chinese Christians in America. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999). In the 1970s the name Asian American was popularized by West Coast intellectuals in order to gather forces at the barricades of political and racial movements. Some scholars like Michael Omi and Howard Winant (Racial Formation in the United States. From the 1960s to the 1990s. New York: Routledge, 1994) claimed “Asian American” as a racialized reality, which was the result of racial conflicts innate to American society. Others saw the identity as an ethnic claim to assimilation into American cultural reality.
Asian immigrants and their progeny find ways to balance out the religious, national, ethnic, racial, and other identities from their homeland, new nation, and religion. “Asian American” has also become a common-sense meaning that was institutionalized by the U.S. census. But one should remember that many layers of names sit upon Asian American houses of worship as so many barnacles telling tales of ancestral honors, woes, and self-reflections.
Over three-quarters of Asian Americans profess a religious faith. About a quarter say that they are “religious nones,” that is, either having no particular religious faith or identifying as agnostic or atheist. About half of the “nones” actually have religious beliefs and ethics and practice them as an intrinsic part of Asian American culture, not as something that is “religious.”
Two-thirds of religious Asian Americans are Christians. This is not surprising when we take into account the rapid growth of Christianity in the non-European world. Asian Americans are contributing to the “de-Europeanization” of American Christianity and signal the increasingly religious direction of the 21st century.
Other Asian American religions include Hinduism, Buddhism, Islam, Sikhism, Jainism, Zoroasterism, new Japanese religions, and many more.
The history of Asian American religions involves a dynamic interplay of the United States and Asia, global politics, democratic revolutions, persecution in Asia, racism in the United States, Supreme Court cases, and religious innovation.
The largest Asian American groups, those with 1–4 million people each, trace their ancestry back to Japan, China, Philippines, Vietnam, India, and Korea. Seven smaller groups have over 100,000 people each: Bangladeshis, Burmese, Cambodians, Hmong, Laotians, Pakistanis, and Thais. And there are many more smaller groups.
The diverse ethnic and national origins of Asian Americans means that their religions have a kaleidoscope of religious styles and cultures.
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History of Muslims in the United States
Yasmine Flodin-Ali
During the transatlantic slave trade, enslaved Muslims were brought from North and West Africa to what would become the United States. Many of these African Muslims were literate in Arabic. Even in the face of formative obstacles, enslaved people and their descendants continued to observe their faith and to adapt Islamic and Islamically influenced practices in the United States.
In the mid-1800s to early 1900s, Muslims began to immigrate to the United States from the Middle East and South Asia. Muslim immigrants used a variety of tactics to establish communities in the United States while navigating segregation, miscegenation, and restrictive citizenship laws. A few small-scale Muslim institutions were established, including mosques and cultural centers.
Prominent Muslim and Islamically influenced movements flourished in the early 20th century, such as the Moorish Science Temple of America (MSTA) and the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community movement. The MSTA was an African American–majority movement born of the Great Migration. The Thesophist movement was largely white. Both movements were similar in terms of their exploration of the occult and emphasis on bodily control as a means of spiritual purification. The Ahmadiyya produced and translated much of the religious literature that circulated in the United States across Muslim sects in the first half of the 20th century, including the most popular translation of the Qur’an, often without attribution. Sunni and Shi’i communities were also present in this time period.
The Nation of Islam (NOI, 1930–1975) surpassed the MSTA and Ahmadiyya to become the largest and most influential Muslim American movement in the secondhalf of the 20th century. The NOI emphasized communal economic empowerment and self-reliance for Black Americans in order to achieve the goal of separation from Whites as a means of achieving racial justice. Prominent figures from the NOI, such as Malcolm X, are frequently invoked by different Muslim American groups in the 21st century. When Elijah Muhammad died in 1975, NOI members went in different directions. Elijah Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad, led a large portion of the community to Sunni Islam. Other members joined Louis Farrakhan’s NOI.
The Harter-Celler Act of 1965 opened up non-European immigration, leading to a large increase in Muslim immigrants from the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Due to the law’s stipulations, these immigrants were largely upper-class and well-educated. In the 1960s and 1970s, there was also a push by many different Muslim American groups toward Sunnism.
The 1979 Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis increased anti-Muslim hostility in the United States and created the stereotype that all Muslim Americans were immigrants from the Middle East. The 9/11 attacks amplified this backlash, but also led to the creation and strengthening of nationwide Muslim civil rights and advocacy organizations.
Advocacy campaigns and heated debates have also taken place within the Muslim American community in the 21st century. Professor of Islamic Studies Amina Wadud has been particularly influential in shaping conversations around gender and Islam, both in the United States and globally. Wadud is also well-known for leading a mixed-gender congregational prayer in New York City in 2005, which sparked a global debate over the permissibility of women leading prayer. In the early 21st century, so-called third spaces proliferated, including art spaces and gatherings facilitated through online groups such as Meetup, where Muslims who felt left out of more traditional mosque spaces found community. This entry ends in 2010, almost a decade after 9/11 and before the rising presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump.
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The Judeo-Christian and Abrahamic Traditions in America
K. Healan Gaston
The terms “Judeo-Christian” and “Abrahamic” are collective religious descriptors that identify points of theological, historical, and ethical commonality between the world’s largest monotheistic religious traditions. “Judeo-Christian” refers to the ground shared by Judaism and Christianity; “Abrahamic” designates elements common to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These terms have most often appeared in three contexts. First, scholars of religion have used them for technical, descriptive purposes, to denote the aforementioned religious traditions and the commitments they share. Second, interfaith advocates have employed the terms to identify the particular ecumenical task of cultivating harmonious relations between these three traditions. Finally, in wider public discourses, they have served as descriptors of the religious character of American culture, democracy, and/or national identity. Over time, the terms “Judeo-Christian” and “Abrahamic” have each become important ways of talking about the contributions of the world’s largest monotheistic religions to politics and culture in the United States.
However, in American public discourse, “Judeo-Christian” formulations have thus far demonstrated greater reach than “Abrahamic” ones. Between roughly World War II and the mid-1970s, when the United States rose to superpower status and assumed the helm of the Western civilizational project, the idea of America as, in various senses, a Judeo-Christian nation became commonplace. But unlike “Judeo-Christian,” which maps onto a discrete geographical region and a long-standing cultural project, “Abrahamic” tends to be used more narrowly to indicate a set of historically meaningful but geographically diffuse relationships that have become the subject of scholarly and ecumenical concern. Moreover, “Judeo-Christian” emerged in the wake of a massive influx of Jewish and Catholic immigrants between 1880 and 1920 that reshaped the American religious landscape. “Abrahamic” has likewise become more widespread since the immigration reforms of the mid-1960s, which began to bring greater numbers of Muslim immigrants to America’s shores. But the growing embrace of multiculturalism has largely militated against the widespread use of “Abrahamic” as a descriptor of American identity. Proponents and opponents of these terms have vigorously debated their strengths and weaknesses, their uses and abuses. Yet, despite the controversies over their meaning and relevance, “Judeo-Christian” and “Abrahamic” remain important ways of describing aspects of the American landscape in a multireligious age.
