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Preface

I’m Not Muslim. So Why Am I Writing This Book?

For the last twenty years, I’ve devoted my professional life to studying, teaching, and writing about Islamic traditions and the histories of Muslim communities.

I’ve studied Arabic and spent time in the Middle East.

I’ve taught courses about the modern history of the Middle East, about the debates that have animated life in the region during the modern period—debates about religion in public life, gender and sexuality, the nature of national identity, and the relationship of societies in the region with Western powers, including the United States.

I’ve also taught courses about Islamic devotional traditions. I’ve explored with my students how Muslims have read and experienced the Qur’an in different times and places, and how Muslims in different times and places have understood what it means to live a good life and be a good person.

I’ve written about debates in Muslim societies about what people need to thrive as human beings—and whether the government should be involved in providing those things.

Throughout, I’ve learned that one of the most meaningful things about studying communities of people in different times and places is what we can learn about ourselves in the process. The debates that I describe above aren’t necessarily particular to Muslim communities in the Middle East or elsewhere. Some of the details may be, but the debates themselves are not. Societies around the world, including the United States, grapple with where religion fits in public life; struggle with questions of national identity, especially in times of great change; and wrestle with disagreements about gender roles and sexuality.

People around the world think about what it means to live a good life and be a good person. Learning how people different from ourselves think about these kinds of questions can be incredibly illuminating about our own communities, our own societies, our own journeys through life. Let me give you an example from my own personal experience.

I was once invited by a local church to talk about Islam. I decided that I would describe how, as a non-Muslim, studying Islam has left a mark on my own life. In the talk I described what I find to be a really beautiful idea in Islamic devotional traditions: that God is closer to us than our own jugular.

I understand this idea to mean that God is always with us, is part of us. God is an ever-present witness to what we do, what we think, how we approach living with others in the world. God is, in other words, the ultimate conscience. This conscience doesn’t expect perfection (thank goodness). This conscience expects that at the end of our lives we can rest knowing that we’ve done more good than harm in the world. I find that a realistic standard, and I’ve taken it as my own in many important respects.

I don’t think this requires that I become Muslim myself. I’m not even sure that it requires a firmly held belief in God. I’ve translated the idea of God-as-conscience into something that makes sense to me—that reflecting on what I do and why I do it is an essential ingredient of being a good person.

For some reason, the way that this idea comes through in Islamic devotional traditions really made sense to me in a way that Jewish and Christian version of ideas never really did (despite all the time I spent in synagogue and Catholic mass growing up, which is perhaps its own story!). Studying Islam, and the ways that different Muslim communities have brought Islam to life, has helped me learn about myself and my own communities in meaningful ways.

Studying Islam has enriched my life by helping me think about what it means to live a good life and be a good person. Studying Islam has also made my professional life possible. I love teaching and sharing what I’ve learned with others. None of this—the personal growth and professional fulfillment—would be possible without untold, everyday Muslims past and present striving to understand what it means to do more good than bad in the world.

Over time, I’ve come to see that I owe quite a debt to the people whose lives have made my own personal growth and professional life possible. When I began to notice more and more reports about anti-Muslim activity across the United States in 2015, I decided that it was time to try to acknowledge that debt and, in some small way, begin to pay it back. That is how this project began.

Since then, I have spent a lot of time learning about anti-Muslim sentiment and activity in the United States—where it comes from, how it’s shown itself in different times, and how it became a big part of our public life today. This work left me with lots of questions about the state of public life in our country.

Sharing What I’ve Learned—and How I’ve Learned It

The book you’re reading now is my attempt to share with you some of what I’ve learned in search of answers. It’s one of my main hopes that reading this book will offer an opportunity for you to learn about a significant part of Muslim experiences in the United States and, at the same time, to reflect on where we find ourselves as a country today. Anti-Muslim activity tells us as much about the state of core American values in general as it does about the particular experiences of American Muslims.

Fear plays a big role in this book. Fear is a significant part of our public life in general, and fear of Muslims has become more and more common over the past twenty years. It’s worth considering whether we’re better off as a country for letting fear of Muslims contribute to the normalization of what I call “public hate.” The experiences of vulnerable people in our midst are a very good measure of where we are as a society in relation to our stated core values of equality.

If you are reading this book and you are Muslim, I hope that it helps you to feel seen by allies and to know that your experiences matter to people who aren’t Muslim.

* * *

Before we get much further, I’d like to tell you just a little bit about the sources I use and the decisions I made about that data that we will discuss throughout this book.

Like anyone who has questions, I started out just trying to find whatever was already out there that could help me answer them. In my case that meant reading work being done by scholars and journalists on Muslim experiences in the United States. I did have a head start on the search because back in 2011 I had put together a course at Grinnell College called Being Muslim in America. Coming just after a big controversy in late 2010 involving a proposed mosque and community center in lower Manhattan, I had wanted to learn more about people’s experiences of being Muslim in the United States from the country’s beginning through today. The reading I did back then provided me with an excellent foundation for a renewed exploration in 2015.

I quickly realized that lots more people had been writing on this subject since I had first started looking years earlier. I build upon the work of other people throughout this book.1

As I continued my research, I also began reading as many news reports about anti-Muslim activity as I could get my hands on. I wanted to learn about what Muslims across the country were experiencing in their lives as anti-Muslim sentiment seemed to be growing into a larger presence in public life. Soon, I had students working with me collecting articles. We began adding each news report to a dataset of anti-Muslim incidents, which we used to start a website called Mapping Islamophobia.2 This original dataset, the first of its kind, has over fifteen hundred news reports and allows us to identify trends in anti-Muslim activity. I’ve learned so much from reading all of these articles.

I’ve tried to be very careful about the sources I’ve used. My general rule has been to use information from newspapers that have a clear editorial policy and chain of command. Whenever possible I use articles from local newspapers. I want to be sure that you, as my reader, can trust the information I’m giving you.3 Establishing that trust is how you and I become a “we” as we move together through this book.