of Muslims living in the United States see some contradiction between their religion and certain American ideals. This tells us that American Muslim communities are a lot like other American communities—that it’s incredibly hard to generalize across millions of people on the basis of one shared characteristic, in this case religious identity.
And yet. It’s hard to discount the data, which shows that on the whole American Muslims think of themselves—and live their lives—as Americans. We are on solid ground with this generalization.
Given all this evidence, why do so many non-Muslim Americans appear to doubt that American Muslims can be—or want to be—“really” American? And how does this relate to the kind of hostility that has left its mark on Maheen, affecting the way she participates in public life?
The Democracy Fund, a nonpartisan organization in Washington, DC, released a report about stereotypes—positive and negative—that the American public associates with American Muslims.8 Two points really stuck out to me when I read the report. Only 56 percent of respondents believe that American Muslims want to “fit in” in the United States. And only 51 percent believe that Muslims living in the United States “respect American ideals.” That means that nearly half the country thinks that Muslims aren’t fully committed to being part of life in the United States.
It’s hard to discern exactly what survey participants really mean when they respond to questions or prompts. The ambiguity of what it means to “fit in” or “respect American ideals” limits the conclusions we can reach. Still, as much of this book explores, there are very serious consequences that result from nearly half the country thinking that American Muslims aren’t fully committed to being American.9
Through my own research over the last couple of years, I have found that these sentiments—and the hostility they can lead to—have become part of public life as they never have been before. They show themselves in very local settings and on the national stage, all the way up to the highest elected office in the country.
Back in 2016, then-candidate Donald Trump appeared on Fox News with Sean Hannity not too long after having advocated a freeze on Muslims entering the United States. In response to a question about whether non-Muslims could ever really know, in their hearts, that Muslims immigrating to the United States really wanted to be American, Trump said, “Assimilation has been very hard. It’s almost—I won’t say nonexistent, but it gets pretty close. And I’m talking about second and third generation. They come—they don’t—for some reason, there’s no real assimilation.”
A couple of things jump out in these comments. The default assumption at work is that American Muslims are all immigrants. It’s true that American Muslims are more likely than members of other religious groups to have been born outside of the country. A national poll of Muslims living in the United States found that 50 percent are foreign-born.10 Yet this means that 50 percent of American Muslims were born in the United States, meaning that this is the first and perhaps only home they have ever known. Conflating being Muslim with being an immigrant contributes to a sense of “foreignness” around Islam and Muslims.
His comments further underscore this point when, as something of an afterthought, he extends the argument to those born and raised in the United States. This extension reinforces the idea that Muslims, wherever they are born, aren’t and perhaps never can be American simply because they are Muslim. The word “assimilation” is really important here.
Candidate Trump’s comments, and the broader attitudes they represent, are not about Muslims believing in the promise of hard work or wanting to be full participants in public life. According to the authors of the Democracy Fund report, the doubts that 50 percent of Americans have about American Muslim commitment to life in the United States reflect concerns about “cultural fit.”
Assimilation is a model of becoming—or being—American that emphasizes sameness. It reflects a particular moment in our history of immigration: the arrival of people from Ireland starting in the mid-1800s and from Southern and Eastern Europe a little bit later. These immigrants experienced extraordinary bigotry when they began arriving in large numbers during this period. Over time, however, this changed.
The idea of assimilation often serves as a popular model for thinking about immigration and the process of becoming American. The key element of this story is time. The idea is that eventually, even if they initially encounter bigotry, everyone comes to be accepted as part of the social fabric. However, it’s really important to remember that there have always been people in the United States whose ability to be or become truly American has been the subject of debate, often pretty vitriolic and violent. Most often, it’s been nonwhites who have been subject to the most extreme forms of doubt and exclusion. As hard as it might be to face, race has always been at the heart of what it means to be American.
From the earliest moments in the country’s history, people in positions of power tried to make sure that the boundaries between white and nonwhite were clear. Official efforts include the 1790 naturalization law I mentioned above (to establish the basis for citizenship at the time of the country’s founding) and various other laws relating to enslavement, anti-miscegenation, segregation, and immigration. These efforts were all very closely related to questions about who counted as white and who could be American.
It’s no coincidence, for example, that in the early twentieth century, just as understandings of what it meant to be white were expanding to include Irish and German immigrants and their descendants, courts were hearing cases about immigrants from South Asia and parts of the Ottoman Empire—including Christians and Muslims—who claimed to be white and, therefore, eligible for naturalization. These cases are especially interesting because what counted as “white” was unclear.11
There are a variety of ways judges and other officials determined race. Some looked at skin color. Others drew on biological sciences to make claims about race. Still others thought that “civilizational heritage” determined someone’s race. Religion was not allowed to be an explicit element in decisions because of the establishment clause, but it was often a factor in more implicit ways.12 What was very clear is that being white, or being able to make a reasonable claim to being white, was crucial to the success of those seeking to become American.
The Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 changed that, at least officially, by moving away from race as a consideration in setting immigration quotas. If we add this to slightly earlier changes opening citizenship to people of Asian descent, we see that being white was becoming less and less an official requirement for becoming formally American.
In the context of the broader civil rights struggle that was flowering at the national level in the 1960s, these changes show that official policies explicitly linking being American and being white appeared to be coming to an end. As important as these changes have been to what it means to be American—and they have definitely been important—we also need to consider the other ways that communities signal who belongs and who does not. These can be more powerful than official policies.
The “melting pot” story of American immigration suggests that time is the most important factor in the process of becoming American—being seen as a “cultural fit” for the United States will happen for everyone eventually. Perhaps this view is understandable when we use European immigration as a model. After all, the arrival of immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, including Jews, brought on much hand-wringing about whether these “races” could ever become truly American. For the most part, such debates about these particular communities were over by the 1950s and 1960s.
But it’s worth considering whether the melting pot is the best model for thinking about American Muslims today, many of whom came to, or were born in, the United States well after immigration reform in 1965 opened the door to immigrants from South Asia, the Middle East,
