GUEST EDITORIAL
Eminent Scholar Ali A. Mazrui
North American Muslims: The Challenge of a Dual Identity
Like other North Americans, Muslims who are Canadians or American citizens have a variety of identities: ethnic, religious, occupational, regional and others. But in their capacity as North American Muslims, they operate within a dual identity, a duality which is not always at ease with itself. They operate both as North Americans and as Muslims.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, four challenges confront North American Muslims in relation to their dual identity. Can this dualism rise to the challenge of economic advancement? How far will this dualism facilitate political participation? As the children of North American Muslims become more and more Canadianized or Americanized, how successful will they be at fostering cultural preservation as Muslims? In the face of a secular and often materialistic North America, how can North American Muslims ensure their own spiritual renewal?
Our purpose in this essay is to address these four challenges of economic advancement, political participation, cultural preservation, and spiritual renewal.
Economic Advancement: Alternative Strategies
There are several different strategies that Muslims either have considered already or ought to consider as options in the pursuit of economic advancement. The strategy of ethnic self-help has been pursued across the decades, including most recently by followers of Louis Farrakhan.
At its best, this strategy can be a quest for ethnic self- reliance and mutual cooperation. Comparable forms of communal self-help have been practiced by Arab- Americans, Pakistani-Canadians, and others. This usually takes the form of self-help among fellow nationals with a shared ancestry.
The second major strategy that North American Muslims should consider is that of capitalist counter penetration, by which is meant the quest for fuller entry into the mainstream economy. In essence, this is a call for North American Muslims' full economic integration into North American capitalism.
This third option is pan-Islamic interdependence. At its most extreme, economic pan-Islamism could mean the policy of "buy Muslim, sell Muslim". More realistically, economic pan-Islamism could mean giving priority to Muslims in trade, industry, finance, and investment - but not exclusively.
Pan-Islamism could be internationally, by seeking economic dealings with the Muslim world as a whole, or domestic, by focusing on the economic solidarity of Canadian or American Muslims. Secondly, pan-Islamism could be either comprehensive or selective. The first model would favor flow Muslims in all branches of economic activity; for example, in trade, investment, aid, and financial exchange. The second option, on the other hand, would favor such special economic areas as credit and loans.
Which of these economic strategies is likely to best serve the Muslims of Canada and the United States? The strategy of ethnic self-help may be alright for nationalities and races, but it is not directly Islamic.
Even a comprehensive pan-Islamic strategy would not be in the best interest of North American Muslims. Any attempts to create a Muslim economy within the wider attract economic retaliation and political hostility.
What about a selective pan-Islamic strategy which would involve Muslims giving priority to Muslims only. in certain areas? This is the kind of internal affirmative action that the Jews practiced in the past and that many still practice today.
We know that affirmative action is under attack. Ast practiced in the United States, affirmative action has been an official policy of favoring disadvantaged ethnic minorities and women as a disadvantaged gender. However, there has been no affirmative action in favor of disadvantaged religious minorities. Should Muslims of North America, as Muslims, have been beneficiaries of affirmative action programs or beneficiaries of positive discrimination as a disadvantaged religious group?
In the United States, government-sponsored affirmative action programs for religious groups are clearly unconstitutional, which is not the case for programs directed toward racial groups and women. There would be debates about maintaining church-state separation.
What is the solution? Can affirmative action programs be undertaken by institutions other than the government? Even now affirmative action for ethnic minorities is practiced by some private universities and some private businesses. Are there ways to make universities and businesses protect disadvantaged religious minorities?
The resulting legal complications of such a situation would be greater than those for racial minorities, not least because the most relevant racial minorities (e.g., African- Americans, Afro-Canadians, the First Nations, Native Americans, and Latinos) have been at a disadvantage in North American societies for several centuries. In addition, they are not perceived as new communities in America, whereas Muslims are.
What is the answer? Is affirmative action out of the question for religious minorities? Of course, Muslims are not the first religious minority to be disadvantaged in North America. Let us look at the experience of other religious minorities in the past that faced this same question.
The most successful religious groups invented their own affirmative action policies. Two of the most successful groups are the Mormons and the Jews. Both groups were at one time persecuted much worse in the United States than American Muslims have ever been.
The Mormons were able to take advantage of a; solution that is no longer available to contemporary communities: the territorial solution. They decided to follow this policy and so undertook an exodus westward.
They were not looking for green pastures, but rather for religious asylum. They found their promised land in Utah and created a new state and a new city: Salt Lake City. Brigham Young, their territorial savior, had been the president of the Council of Twelve Apostles. Their quest for affirmative action resulted in the creation of a little America of their own. Later Utah was admitted to the union as a full state. This territorial solution is not available today. We cannot create a Muslim Utah or a new Madinah in North America.
What about the Jewish paradigm? These people also faced discrimination and persecution. Although world Jewry sought a territorial solution in Palestine, those in the United States did not. At no time was there an American Jewish movement to create a Jewish Utah in this vast continent. Zionism wanted a Jewish Utah in Palestine, not in North America.
What was the Jewish paradigm? Stated simply, it was affirmative action by Jews and for Jews, on the one hand, and, on the other, a quest for fuller economic participation in mainstream economic America. The Jews practiced affirmative action within the Jewish community and counter penetration of the mainstream economy at the same time.
As the twentieth century draws to a close, we can say that the Jewish paradigm has been a spectacular success in the United States, Jews are no longer a disadvantaged religious group. Based on a per head survey of the nation's population, they are among the most privileged people in North America. Is this paradigm open to Muslims?
The best economic strategy for us is selective pan-Islamic cooperation combined with counter penetration of the main economy.
Political Participation: Voices, Votes and Vigor
Should organize to ensure Muslim participation as voters in the context of North American politics, Muslims steps: ensuring the greater registration of all (i.e., male in elections. This goal can be attained via the following and female) Muslims; ensuring that all registered Muslims vote; providing Muslim campaign workers to our support to enthusiastic if it alienates other voters. In sympathetic candidates; and knowing when not to make other words, we have to know when not to embarrass a candidate with a "kiss of death".
Second, there is the issue of Muslim participation as involves running for school boards and municipal candidates for political and other public offices. These elections; beginning to think of having one or two Muslim mayors in major cities; finding Muslim candidates for state or provincial legislatures; thinking of Muslim candidates for national office, including Congress or Parliament; working for a Muslim Justice on the Supreme Court before the year 2020; and encouraging Muslim women to run for public office. The appointment of a; Muslim woman to represent the United States at the United Nations in the first decade of the twenty-first century is entirely conceivable.
Third, we must produce Muslim lobbyists. Do we need a separate League of Muslim Voters, which would be designed to lobby members of all political parties on issues of concern to Muslims, or should we simply strengthen and equip existing Muslim institutions, among them the American Muslim Council, to help them in their crusades for Islamic causes?
We should do both. Of course, strengthen existing Islamic institutions and seek to empower them. But we also need a separate League of Muslim Voters that would focus on electoral and legislative issues at both the federal and the relevant state and provincial levels.
Such a league should build up expertise on legislative analysis and study the possible legal and political implications for Muslims at the federal level and in those states with a substantial Muslim presence. As we have seen in Quebec and California, provincial and state legislation can have wide-ranging and potentially disruptive implications. This league should also study the implications of issues that, at first sight, may not seem to be related to Islam and Muslims, such as affirmative action, immigration laws, school prayer (good news or bad?), and language politics. Muslims should support individual school prayer, oppose organized group prayers at schools, and link up with Jews against organized school prayers.
Fourth, there is the question of Muslim participation in opinion formation. To be successful, Muslims have to seek to influence opinion on issues of relevance to Muslim concerns, both domestic and policy, from the war on drugs to the war in Bosnia. We must promote a more correct portrayal of Islam and what it stands for, strengthen existing efforts to influence the production of more accurate school textbooks, and correct the media's and the public's anti-Islamic bias. Splendid work is being done in this area by, among others, the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Finally, we must participate in the formation of public and official opinion on wider issues of national policy and global concerns.
Cultural Preservation: Return to the Chosen Language
Unfortunately, our national languages will never be spoken by our grandchildren. Should we try to hand down. our Urdu, Bengali, Farsi, Hausa, Gujarati, Bhasa Indonesia, or Swahili tongues? Or, rather, is being in North America an opportunity for returning to Arabic as our common language? Do North American Muslims of future generations need a religious lingua franca?
As a conscious policy of cultural preservation, should all Muslim children be taught the Arabic language? We, the parents, may not speak Arabic but at least we can instill in our grandchildren a knowledge of Arabic.
In North America, trying to preserve Bhasa Malaysia, Kurdish, Turkish tongues in hopeless, as is trying to instill the poetry of Afghanistan. But if Muslims poll their resources, they could ensure that all American Muslim children of the future are bilingual in Arabic and English.
Islam has no "Chosen People", for ine Prophet told us explicitly that Arabs were not superior to non-Arabs. nor whites to blacks, so vice-versa, except for their piety. But we do have a "Chosen Language" - the language of the Qur'an, of formal prayer, of Haj. Contemporary Arabs may not be the most devout Muslims, but Allah chose their language to communicate with humanity.
Here in North America, we could combine Arabic with English the language of the bedouin with the language of the bard, Sunnah and Shakespeare. Our grandchildren shall grow up bilingual in the languages of the Sahabah and of Shakespeare.
The challenge of spiritual renewal is the neart of Islam and the depth of Muslim spirituality. North American Muslims must seek the following: spiritual renewal by holding onto the rope of Islam in an alien ocean and not letting it go; renewal by testing the modern world against Islam, not testing Islam against the modern world. This effort includes spiritual renewal through a greater Islamization of Knowledge and renewal through inter-madhahib (interdenominational) intellectual discourse. Some steps toward Islamic ecumenicalism need to be taken, Muslims have started dialogues with Jews and Christians, but often refuse to dialogue with Muslims of other denominations. We must transcend such narrow sectarianism. Finally, we need to undertake renewal through da'wah, the calling of new brothers and sisters to the faith.
African-Americans are the collective Bilal of the New World. And, just as Bilal was a former slave who lived to become a key figure in early Muslim history, African-Americans are a formerly enslaved people who may well play a key role in future Muslim history. And just as the historical Bilal was a muezzin who called believers to prayer, African-American Muslims are a collective muezzin calling on more people to believe.
The challenges of spiritual renewal present us with four goals; positive change within each Muslim, positive change within the contemporary ummah, positive change in our body of knowledge about Islam, and positive trends in the expansions of the ummah.
The Islamization of the soul (ruh), the Islamization of the ummah, the Islamization of knowledge (ilm), and, one day, the Islamization of the world are the goals of North American Muslims. A dream endures, and a faith persists.
The dual identity of North American Muslims is part of a momentous story in the annals of humanity.
(Source: The Islamic Horizons, March/April, 1996
