Public Islam in the Contemporary World: A View on the American Case

Abstract

The article reviews the status of the highly diverse community of American Muslims, with reference to US national identity and immigration history, history of Islam in the USA, and civil society organization. It is found that on average, and after the civil right movement of the 1960s, Muslims are very well assimilated into the US society and economy, in which the specific American civil society and religious organizations play an important enabling part, providing networks and inroads to society for newcomers as well as vehicles for preserving ethniccultural distinctiveness. This broad pattern of development has not changed in the aftermath of 9/11 and ensuing wars on terror. Compared with the Nordic context, where Muslims are often considered challenging to a secular social order, American Muslims do not stand out as more or differently religious, or any less American, than other religious communities. It is tentatively concluded that, downsides apart, US national identity and civil society structure could be more favorable for the social integration of Muslims than the Nordic welfare state model.

Religion and Multiculturalism: A Web of Legal, Institutional, and Cultural Connections

“…Whether this is true of all or most new immigrants is a matter of scholarly debate (e.g., Massey and Higgins ) and there is conflicting data, often from less‐than‐comparable data sets (see the discussion in Kivisto :58–61). Nonetheless, a significant number of studies show that involvement in religious organizations can be an important way that new immigrants to the United States adjust to their new social and cultural context and begin to become incorporated into American society (Foner and Alba ; Kivisto ; Williams ).…”

“…So, American individualism and laissez‐faire attitudes mean that all multicultural arrangements are bounded by the pressures of the political economy. Many immigrants with new cultures and religions have prospered in the United States and not elsewhere because the commitment to a certain amount of diversity, and to individual rights, has kept the hand of the state out of their lives (compared with their home societies); at the same time, the low level of state‐sponsored social welfare has left many immigrants in poverty, forced many to compromise their customs and religious dictates in order to get by in American society, even as it has kept the intergroup competition for state resources more low stakes and less intense (Williams ).…”