Islam in America

"Jane Smith’s is an important and knowledgeable book. She gives us a picture of what is happening in the Muslim communities in America – Islam’s evolution there and its deep historical context. She writes about the reality of Islam in America mainly through the experience of migrants. Once again it is not avoiding critical questions, but it is much more positive because it’s based on historical evolution – how things are moving forward, the way the discourse is changing, and the way the young generation is getting a better sense of what it means to be an American. At the same time, it is not dismissing the religious concerns that Muslims have living in the West. Immigrant Muslims in America are mainly from the Middle East and Pakistan. They are usually educated people – professors, teachers, computer scientists, engineers and so on. Many of them quickly buy into the American dream that you can find your place and be very quickly integrated if you have the skills and know-how to contribute. In Europe, it is a completely different story for migrants. They came from previously colonised countries and with a very modest background as to their knowledge of their religion, their culture and surrounding society. Between this book and my next choice, Sherman Jackson’s Islam and the Blackamerican , you can also get an understanding of the relationship between Muslim migrants in America and African American Muslims. The African Americans, as to their social status, are experiencing things that are not that different from what new European Muslims are facing in Britain and in France. As Jane Smith is showing, religious integration is essentially done. The critical issue today for African American Muslims and European Muslims is social justice and social integration. Exactly. This is what I have been repeating in France and Britain for many years. Stop ethnicising, culturalising or Islamising socioeconomic problems. We need social policies. This is very important when it comes to schools, for example. I don’t want private, separate schools for Muslims. For me, it is not a panacea. But if you go to some areas in Britain, France and the United States and see how some people are living and the second-class schools that they have, they understandably are not happy with the state school system. So in order to give their children the best opportunity to succeed, they create Islamic private schools. The education system is not working, so they are creating a parallel system. It is a religious answer to a socioeconomic problem. The state school system should be reformed by understanding the needs of people who are living in very poor and segregated areas in our societies. So I think that sometimes Muslims are coming up with religious answers to socioeconomic problems and then you have politicians using the socioeconomic problems and making them religious. And we have what I call a “strategy diversion” in the political discourse. As they don’t have political answers, they just come up with a religious problem, and I think that’s wrong."