Islam is the fastest growing religion in the United States. There are more Muslims in America than in Kuwait, Qatar, and Libya together. Leaving aside immigration and conversion, birthrate alone ensures that in the first part of the twenty-first century Islam will replace Judaism as the nation's second largest religion. Like all religious minorities in America, Muslims must confront a host of difficult questions concerning faith and national identity. Can they become part of a pluralistic American society without sacrificing their identity? Can Muslims be Muslims in a state that is not governed by Islamic law? Will the American legal system protect Muslim religious and cultural differences? Is there a contradiction between demanding equal rights and insisting on maintaining a distinctively separate identity? Will the secular and/or Judeo-Christian values of American society inhibit the Muslim practice of religious faith? While the Muslims of America are indeed on the path to Americanization, what that means and what that will yield remains uncertain. In this thoughtful and wide-ranging volume, fourteen distinguished scholars take an in-depth look at these issues and examine the varied responses and opinions of the Muslim community.

Based on a three-year ethnographic study of a steadily growing suburban Muslim immigrant congregation in Midwest America, this book examines the micro-processes through which a group of Muslim immigrants from diverse backgrounds negotiate multiple identities while seeking to become part of American society in the years following 9/11. The author looks into frictions, conflicts, and schisms within the community to debunk myths and provide a close-up look at the experiences of ordinary immigrant Muslims in the United States. Instead of treating Muslim immigrants as fundamentally different from others, this book views Muslims as multidimensional individuals whose identities are defined by a number of basic social attributes, including gender, race, social class, and religiosity. Each person portrayed in this ethnography is a complex individual, whose hierarchy of identities is shaped by particular events and the larger social environment. By focusing on a single congregation, this study controls variables related to the particularity of place and presents a “thick” description of interactions within small groups. This book argues that the frictions, conflicts and schisms are necessary as much as inevitable in cultivating a “composite culture” within the American Muslim community marked by diversity, leading it onto the path of Americanization.

This, the first volume from the Muslims in the American Public Square research project, gives theoretical and demographic portraits of Muslims in the American civil landscape.

The essays collected in this book place this issue in its historical context and offer case studies of Muslim societies from North Africa to Southeast Asia. These fascinating studies shed light on the impact of the Islamic resurgence on gender issues in Iran, Egypt, Jordan, Pakistan, Oman, Bahrain, the Philippines, and Kuwait. Taken together, the essays reveal the wide variety that exists among Muslim societies and believers, and the complexity of the issues under consideration.

In this essay Yvonne Haddad explores the history of immigration and integration of Arab Muslims in the United States and their struggle to legitimate their presence in the face of continuing exclusion based on race, nationalist identity, and religion.

Muslims began arriving in the New World long before the rise of the Atlantic slave trade. Kambiz GhaneaBassiri's fascinating book traces the history of Muslims in the United States and their different waves of immigration and conversion across five centuries, through colonial and antebellum America, through world wars and civil rights struggles, to the contemporary era. The book tells the often deeply moving stories of individual Muslims and their lives as immigrants and citizens within the broad context of the American religious experience, showing how that experience has been integral to the evolution of American Muslim institutions and practices. This is a unique and intelligent portrayal of a diverse religious community and its relationship with America. It will serve as a strong antidote to the current politicized dichotomy between Islam and the West, which has come to dominate the study of Muslims in America and further afield.

Since its inception, the United States has defined itself as a nation of immigrants and a land of religious freedom. But following September 11, 2001 American openness to immigrants and openness to other beliefs have come into question. In a timely manner, Religion and Immigration provides comparative perspectives on Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and Jews entering the American scene. Will Muslims seek and receive inclusion in ways similar to Catholics and Jews generations before? How will new immigrant populations influence and be influenced by current religious communities? How do overlapping identities of home country, language, class, and ethnicity affect immigrants' sense of their religion? How do the faithful retain their values in a new country of individualism and pluralism? How do religious institutions help immigrants with their physical needs as they are entering a new country? The contributors to Religion and Immigration approach these questions from the perspectives of theology, history, sociology, international studies, political science, and religious studies. A concluding chapter provides results from a pioneering study of immigrants and their religious affiliation. Leading scholars Haddad, Smith, and Esposito have created a valuable text for classes in history, religion or the social sciences or for anyone interested in questions of American religion and immigration.