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Book Review
Books written about Muslim-Americans
by Muslims: An assessment
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Silence from and about the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences were broken, and some were maintained by authors who lived with and within the policing strategies. What I am interested in are the strategies for breaking it.
TONI MORRISON, Playing in the Dark
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Dr. Shahid Sheikh
After the premeditated and cold-blooded murder of thousands in New York City on 9/11, all aspects of Muslim-American community have come under extreme scrutiny and even attack. These aspects have been reflected upon by the U.S. society shaped by the media as well as in the Muslim-American community itself.
The American public interested in the Muslim-Americans want answers to a wide multitude of questions, such as, who are the Muslim-Americans? What are their religious beliefs and practices? How long have they been here in the United States? What is their population? Which states, cities and neighborhoods do they live in? What are their issues and concerns? Among them, how many are eligible voters? How many are registered? Of which, what percentage vote in the presidential elections? What are their political affiliations? What motivated them to get politically involved in the American political process, prompting their leaders to create a Muslim bloc vote in the presidential election of 2000? Who were the major architects of the bloc vote movement? How did the Muslim-Americans react to the 9/11 tragedy, and what they did and did not do in its aftermath? How did the general public and the American government treat them after the tragedy? What is their future in the economic, social and political realms? Needless to say, the list of questions is endless.
This intense and sustained scrutiny has exposed the drastic fact that there is an extreme dearth of reliable information about the Muslim-Americans. Given the role of the media, such as books and other printed material, crucial to maintaining incorrect views that perpetuate oppression, it is not surprising to find such a lack of correct information about Muslims, here and abroad. A vast majority of arbitrators and disseminators of information--such as, television, radio, Internet, newspapers, publishers, scholars and writers—in turn, have resorted to filling the huge information gap with guesswork, rough estimates and anecdotal evidence.
A very few books written by non-Muslims tend to do full justice to the Muslim-Americans. A classic book, “Silent No More,” by Paul Findley instantly comes to mind. The book, however, is out dated because it was originally written in 1985 even though Findley updated it in 2001.
Most books written about the Muslim-Americans neatly fall into three distinct categories: 1) expose’ of author’s personal and his/her friends’ lives (Asma Gull Hasan’s “American Muslims: The New Generation”), 2) showing the compatibility of Islamic teachings with the West (Dr. Saleem Ahmed’s “Beyond Veil and Holy War”), and 3) a discussion of Islam combined with a superficial analysis of the Muslim-Americans’ involvement in the American political process (Dr. M.A. Muqtedar Khan’s “American Muslims”). The only notable exception is Dr. Mohamed Nimer’s book, “The North American Muslim Resource Guide,” in which Nimer really took great pains to collect nationwide data on several important matters related to the Muslim-Americans to produce an excellent scholarly book.
It should be noted that all these three kinds of books are supposed to be a fair and balanced portrayal of the Muslim-Americans. The catchy titles, many including the phrase “Muslim-Americans,” indeed give rise to those obvious expectations. To the reader’s utter dismay, he/she gets bombarded with usual guesswork, rough estimates, and anecdotal evidence about professional, stable, happy Muslim-American families shamelessly wallowing in their pre-9/11 make-believe idyllic existence within a detached, "invisible" safety bubble. Almost all these writers seem to take excessive pride in their families’ elite status in America and their connections with other elites here and abroad.
These writers are guilty of a deliberate biased sample selection because lifestyles of these elites do not represent in any shape or form the vast majority of about 7 million Muslim-Americans; many of them work hard at two jobs to make ends meet. Their writings, in turn, make the reader feel as if the 9/11 tragedy may have happened to some strangers in a distant part of the world, leaving them and their community totally unscathed.
The underlying assumption behind these kinds of books is that once American public is exposed to the “logic” of Islamic teachings and sees Islam in action in the Muslim-American families, the American public maybe subliminally persuaded to view the Muslim-Americans and Islam in their best lights. In other words, these intellectuals are attempting to present a “human face of Islam” to the American public.
In their unabashed, unchecked over-zealousness to present a distorted portrait of the Muslim-Americans, these books conveniently ignore any serious discussion of profiling of the Muslim-Americans by law-enforcements agencies, Special Registration, the perennial issue of secret evidence, secret detentions and deportations of thousands of Muslims, sustained vitriolic anti-Muslim campaign in the media and Muslims’ deafening silence, rising job discrimination, prison abuse, homeless mothers and children of the detainees and deportees, Muslim orphans being placed in non-Muslim homes, illegal closing and scrutiny of over 26 national Muslim charities, rising divorce rate and domestic violence among Muslim families, low educational achievements of Muslim students and deplorably low academic standards of Muslim schools, etc.
By deliberately suppressing or ignoring the discussion of all these pertinent issues and concerns for their political convenience, these books, consequently, miserably fail to answer not only the crucial but also some of the most basic questions about the Muslim-Americans, leaving much more to be desired to say the least. The unfortunate result is that since most readers are not informed about these issues and concerns, many of them question even their very existence when they are exposed to them in the mainstream American media or ethnic media in the Muslim-American community.
These writers’ flagrant disregard for accuracy, precision and a fair and balanced portrayal of the Muslim-Americans gets reflected on when many of these writers do not make even an ostensible attempt to include the existing research and data about the Muslim-Americans let alone conduct some serious and authentic research and data collection to satisfy their readers’ minds, brimming with questions already mentioned above as well as many others that arise during the normal course of reading these books. The great irony is that many of these producers of shoddy scholarship on the Muslim-Americans are highly accomplished researchers and scholars in their fields of specializations.
Finally, one extremely crucial measure of the American public’s desperately surging demand for information about the Muslim-Americans is that some of these second-rate pseudo-scholarly books are vying for bestseller status.
The writer is the executive director of the New York City-based American Educational Research Institute and the moderator of http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Muslim-Americans. He can be reached at aeriusa@hotmail.com.
September 13, 2004
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