“Muslim Americans are at a political crossroads,” write editors Brian Calfano and Nazita Lajevardi. Whereas Muslims are now widely incorporated in American public life, there are increasing social and political pressures that disenfranchise them or prevent them from realizing the American Dream. Understanding Muslim Political Life in America brings clarity to the social, religious, and political dynamics that this diverse religious community faces. In this timely volume, leading scholars cover a variety of topics assessing the Muslim American experience in the post-9/11 and pre-Trump era, including law enforcement; identity labels used in Muslim surveys; the role of gender relations; recognition; and how discrimination, tolerance, and politics impact American Muslims. Understanding Muslim Political Life in America offers an update and reappraisal of what we know about Muslims in American political life. The editors and contributors also consider future directions and important methodological questions for research in Muslim American scholarship. Contributors include Matt A. Barreto, Alejandro Beutel, Tony Carey, Youssef Chouhoud, Karam Dana, Oz Dincer, Rachel Gillum, Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Anwar Manje, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, Dani McLaughlan, Melissa R. Michelson, Yusuf Sarfati, Ahmet Tekelioglu, Marianne Marar Yacobian, and the editors.

Reveals the important role of Muslim Americans in American politics Since the 1950s, and especially in the post-9/11 era, Muslim Americans have played outsized roles in US politics, sometimes as political dissidents and sometimes as political insiders. However, more than at any other moment in history, Muslim Americans now stand at the symbolic center of US politics and public life. This volume argues that the future of American democracy depends on whether Muslim Americans are able to exercise their political rights as citizens and whether they can find acceptance as social equals. Many believe that, over time, Muslim Americans will be accepted just as other religious minorities have been. Yet Curtis contends that this belief overlooks the real barrier to their full citizenship, which is political rather than cultural. The dominant form of American liberalism has prevented the political assimilation of American Muslims, even while leaders from Eisenhower to Obama have offered rhetorical support for their acceptance. Drawing on examples ranging from the political rhetoric of the Nation of Islam in the 1950s and 1960s to the symbolic use of fallen Muslim American service members in the 2016 election cycle, Curtis shows that the efforts of Muslim Americans to be regarded as full Americans have been going on for decades, yet never with full success. Curtis argues that policies, laws, and political rhetoric concerning Muslim Americans are quintessential American political questions. Debates about freedom of speech and religion, equal justice under law, and the war on terrorism have placed Muslim Americans at the center of public discourse. How Americans decide to view and make policy regarding Muslim Americans will play a large role in what kind of country the United States will become, and whether it will be a country that chooses freedom over fear and justice over prejudice.

“Muslim Americans are at a political crossroads,” write editors Brian Calfano and Nazita Lajevardi. Whereas Muslims are now widely incorporated in American public life, there are increasing social and political pressures that disenfranchise them or prevent them from realizing the American Dream. Understanding Muslim Political Life in America brings clarity to the social, religious, and political dynamics that this diverse religious community faces. In this timely volume, leading scholars cover a variety of topics assessing the Muslim American experience in the post-9/11 and pre-Trump era, including law enforcement; identity labels used in Muslim surveys; the role of gender relations; recognition; and how discrimination, tolerance, and politics impact American Muslims. Understanding Muslim Political Life in America offers an update and reappraisal of what we know about Muslims in American political life. The editors and contributors also consider future directions and important methodological questions for research in Muslim American scholarship. Contributors include Matt A. Barreto, Alejandro Beutel, Tony Carey, Youssef Chouhoud, Karam Dana, Oz Dincer, Rachel Gillum, Kerem Ozan Kalkan, Anwar Manje, Valerie Martinez-Ebers, Dani McLaughlan, Melissa R. Michelson, Yusuf Sarfati, Ahmet Tekelioglu, Marianne Marar Yacobian, and the editors.

Claiming Belonging dives deep into the lives of Muslim American advocacy groups in the post-9/11 era, asking how they form and function within their broader community in a world marked by Islamophobia. Bias incidents against Muslim Americans reached unprecedented levels a few short years ago, and many groups responded through action—organizing on the national level to become increasingly visible, engaged, and assertive. Emily Cury draws on more than four years of participant observation and interviews to examine how Muslim American organizations have sought to access and influence the public square and, in so doing, forge a political identity. The result is an engaging and unique study, showing that policy advocacy, both foreign and domestic, is best understood as a sphere where Muslim American identity is performed and negotiated. Claiming Belonging offers ever-timely insight into the place of Muslims in American political life and, in the process, sheds light on one of the fastest-growing and most internally dynamic American minority groups.

There has never been an America without Muslims--so begins Amir Hussain, one of the most important scholars and teachers of Islam in America. Hussain, who is himself an American Muslim, contends that Muslims played an essential role in the creation and cultivation of the United States. Memories of 9/11 and the rise of global terrorism fuel concerns about American Muslims. The fear of American Muslims in part stems from the stereotype that all followers of Islam are violent extremists who want to overturn the American way of life. Inherent to this stereotype is the popular misconception that Islam is a new religion to America. In Muslims and the Making of America Hussain directly addresses both of these stereotypes. Far from undermining America, Islam and American Muslims have been, and continue to be, important threads in the fabric of American life. Hussain chronicles the history of Islam in America to underscore the valuable cultural influence of Muslims on American life. He then rivets attention on music, sports, and culture as key areas in which Muslims have shaped and transformed American identity. America, Hussain concludes, would not exist as it does today without the essential contributions made by its Muslim citizens. --J. Ryan Parker "The Midwest Book Review"

Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.