What Is American About American Islam?
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WHAT IS AMERICAN ABOUT AMERICAN ISLAM? MUSLIM AMERICAN NARRATIVES AND THE CONFIGURATION OF ISLAM IN THE UNITED STATES SABINA VON FISCHER 1 Dissertation submitted at the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Bern to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Sabina von Fischer, Bern Self publication, Bern 2012 Accepted by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schulze and Prof. Dr. Monika Wohlrab-Sahr on behalf of the Faculty of Humanities Bern, October 12, 2011, Dean: Prof. Dr. Heinzpeter Znoj Original document saved on the web server of the University Library of Bern This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-No derivative works 2.5 Switzerland licence. To see the licence go to http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ch/ or write to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California 94105, USA. 2 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to give special thanks to the following people for their part in my work: to my supervisor Prof. Dr. Reinhard Schulze, who’s ability to encourage out-of-the- box thinking has been a tremendous source of inspiration; to Susanne Leuenberger, Seline Reinhardt and Marius Rohrer for being my favorite sparring partners at the GS@IASH; to my parents for keeping faith in me as I chase my fluctuating dreams; and finally to my sister, to Bruno Prandi and to Adi Flück for their very much appre- ciated talent to put things into perspective. Last but not least, this dissertation could not have been written without the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation. Thanks! 3 CONTENTS Photos 5 Tables & Graphs 6 Glossary of Muslim American Organizations 7 Introduction 9 PART I – HOW TO (RE)CONSTRUCT AMERICAN ISLAM: RESEARCH DESIGN Chapter 1 Historical Narratives & Contemporary Organizations 17 Chapter 2 Research Perspectives & Objectives 57 Chapter 3 Theoretical Principles & Methodological Approach 72 Chapter 4 Data Collection & Corpus Building 93 PART II – NARRATIVES OF AMERICAN MUSLIMNESS & ISLAMICITY: ANALYSIS Chapter 5 Emploting Muslim Americans & American Islam 107 Chapter 6 The Muslim World & American Islamic Knowledge 119 Chapter 7 Muslim American Communal Constructions 144 Chapter 8 A Muslim American Diversity Narrative 176 Chapter 9 Functions of Islam in America 195 PART III – HERMENEUTICS OF AMERICAN ISLAM: CONCLUDING REMARKS Chapter 10 Putting American Islam into Perspective 218 References 233 Appendix I 247 Appendix II 249 4 PHOTOS Girls reading the Qur‘an at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York City 1 Sightseers watching the construction work at Ground Zero 16 Empty main hall at the 46th Annual ISNA Convention in Washington, DC 106 Prayer hall of the Noor Islamic Cultural Center in Columbus, Ohio 217 Photos by Sabina von Fischer, Summer 2009 5 TABLES & GRAPHS Figure 1: Chronology of emergence of Muslim American organizations or organizations active in the US. 45 Figure 2: Typology of organizations resulting from their main focus of advocacy. 48 Figure 3: Narrativization as modus operandi and narrative as opus operatum. 76 Figure 4: Word frequency lists. 87 Figure 5: First 32 lines of an alphabetically sorted concordance of Islam. 88 Figure 6: Significant collocates of the search word Islam. 90 Figure 7: Alexa Traffic Ranks of Muslim American organizations‘ websites. 95 Figure 8: Overview of corpora considered by analyses. 96 Figure 9: Chronology of „firsts“ deduced from the IH corpus. 109 Figure 10: Muslim scholars and leaders mentioned in the IH corpus. 128 Figure 11: Query of the typology advanced by research to describe boundaries within the Muslim American community. 146 Figure 12: Overview of agents with a special status mentioned in FC corpus. 147 Figure 13: Overview of agents mentioned in the IH corpus and the FC corpus. 148 Figure 14: Concordance of Fard Muhammad with the context word God. 153 Figure 15: Top collocates of the search word Muslim in the FC corpus. 158 Figure 16: Collocates of the search words race, racial, and racism. 167 Figure 17: Concordance lines of profiling. 172 Figure 18: Significant collocates of diversity. 178 Figure 19: Concordances displaying frequent diversity features. 179 Figure 20: The diversity collocate unity. 183 Figure 21: Relations between unum and pluribus. 184 Figure 22: Verbs collocating with the search word Muslims. 196 Figure 23: Fields of ‚Islamic‘ intervention. 197 6 GLOSSARY OF MUSLIM AMERICAN ORGANIZATIONS Ahmadiyya (AC) Al Fatiha Al Maghrib Institute American Islamic Chamber of Commerce (AICC) American Islamic Congress (AIC) American Islamic Forum for Democracy (AIFD) American Learning Institute for Muslims (ALIM) American Muslim Alliance (AMA) American Muslim Council (AMC) American Muslim Taskforce (AMT) American Muslims Intent on Learning and Activism (AMILA) American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA) As-Sunnah Foundation of America (ASFA) Assembly of Muslim Jurists in America (AMJA) Association of Muslim Social Scientists of North America (AMSS) Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP) Companionships Council of American Muslim Professionals (CAMP) Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Council on Islamic Education (CIE) Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) Free Muslims Coalition (Against Terrorism) (FMC) Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS) Hilal Sighting Commitee of North America Inner-City Muslim Action Network (IMAN) International Association of Sufism (IAS) International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) Internet Islamic University (IIU) IQRA‘ International Education Foundation (IQRA) Islamic American University (IAU) Islamic Assembly of North America (IANA) Islamic Circle of North America (ICNA) Islamic Council on Scouting of North America (ICSN/NICS) Islamic Food and Nutrition Council of America (IFANCA) Islamic Medical Association of North America (IMANA) Islamic Networks Group (ING) Islamic Relief (US branch) (IRUSA) 7 Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) Islamic Supreme Council of America (ISCA) Latino American Dawah Organization (LADO) Moorish Science Temple (MST) Muslim Advocates (MA) Muslim Alliance in North America (MANA) Muslim American Society (MAS) Muslim Chaplains Association (MCA) Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) Muslim Public Service Network (MPSN) Muslim Student’s Association of the United States and Canada (MSA) Muslim Ummah of North America (MUNA) Muslim Women Lawyers for Human Rights (KARAMAH) Muslim Women’s League (MWL) Nation of Islam (NOI) National Association of Muslim Lawyers (NAML) Nawawi Foundation North American Imam Federation (NAIF) North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) North American Shia Ithna-Asheri Muslim Communities (NASIMCO) Peaceful Families Project (PFP) Shura of Islamic Family Counselors of America (SIFCA) The 5% Network (5%) The Mosque Cares (Ministry of W.D. Mohammed) United Muslims of America (UMA) Young Muslims of North America (YM) Zaytuna College Zaytuna Institut 8 INTRODUCTION When conducting fieldwork in the United States in Summer 2009, I asked one of my interview partners what made life in the United States different from other places. Without hesitating, he answered: “America sells dreams”. It was only later that I real- ized how this statement had fundamentally influenced the way I made sense of my object of research – the configuration of Islam in the US. Although I lived in the US during different phases of my life, it is still a challenge to make sense of the American Way of Life. My hermeneutical background is not only the one of a scholar of Islamwissenschaft in a post 9/11 environment, but the one of a Swiss or European critical towards American foreign policy, a consumer of Hollywood movies, a friend of various people living in the US, a reader of American fiction and media, and so forth. The American Way of Life through this lens remains elusive and ambivalent – a promise, an illusion, entertainment, a sales strategy… The quote above breaks down this elusiveness by singling out two fundamental aspects that I consider to be characteristic for the American Way of Life in this study: Its narrative and its market-driven character. Accordingly, the American Dream is a story of promises in a capitalist setting. This study aims to show how Muslim Americans and American Islam are constructed in this particular setting or, as the title of this study implies, to show what is Ameri- can about American Islam. Thereby, it does not focus on Muslims as social agents but on the relations between Muslim American narratives and the narratives constitut- ing the American Way of Life. The study’s focus thus lies on the interaction of narra- tives – how they contradict and sustain each other, intermingle and fuse, appear and vanish. This perspective, as well as the methodological implications arising from it, differs somewhat from perspectives that research has applied to Muslim Americans and American Islam so far. I argue that this has to do with the predominance of scholars working at American universities that have been preoccupied with how Islam has become a part of the nation. As those frameworks are the result of particular re- search traditions, some thought has to be given to this: Generally, various disciplines have paid increased attention to Islam since 9/11. However, the study of Islam in the US has been institutionalized differently than, for example, in Europe. After World War II, in the US, Islam has increasingly been analyzed in departments of Near and Middle Eastern studies and hence has initially been the subject of area studies. (Ad- ams, 1976; Ernst & Martin, 2010a; Ismael & Ismael, 1990) More recently, the