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Muslims in the United States Muslims in the United States: The State of Research by Karen Isaksen Leonard Russell Sage Foundation, 2003 199 pp. $17.95, paper

Prospects for absorbing the immigrants into American life seemed dim. They insisted in segregating their children in special religious schools, where, rumor had it, even the youngest were indoctrinated to hate others who were not like them. Knowledgeable observers claimed that the immigrants' places of worship concealed arsenals; that their fanatical secret societies swore bloody oaths to exterminate Americans; that their religious loyalties would always prevent them from assimilating in anything but name. Self-evidently, their rigid religious dogmas prevented them from participating in the intellectual debates of an open democracy. At their worst, their clergy and spiritual leaders sounded as if they were still living in the 13th century. But somehow, matters changed dramatically over time. In 1960, in fact, a member of this despised immigrant religion even became president of the United States, and today only the narrowest of bigots would deny that Roman Catholics are fully assimilated into American social, political and intellectual life.

For scholars of contemporary American Islam, the Catholic precedent must seem hopeful. Of course, modern Muslims face drawbacks, especially in the political arena. For all the vigor of anti-Catholicism in the 19th century, American forces never found themselves facing multiple simultaneous wars against Catholic powers overseas. Nor did Catholic militias and terrorist cells try to destroy American cities. Quite the contrary, Irish Catholic groups used the United States as a reliable base from which to challenge imperial Britain, and more or less to this day, they are funded by American dollars.

Yet in other ways, Muslims enjoy advantages that Catholics did not possess during their historic struggles for recognition. Islam works outstandingly well as a decentralized religion, so ordinary believers cannot be accused of subservience to some distant equivalent of the Vatican. Nor do most strands of the religion possess authoritative clerical structure of the kind that Protestant Americans so detested among Catholics. Meanwhile, the great majority of Muslims clearly share moral and spiritual values closely akin to those of mainstream Americans, Christian and Jewish. In light of recent controversies, it is ironic to recall that prior to September 11, 2001, George W. Bush stood out in his determined outreach to American Muslims, in his consistent references to people of faith, whether they belonged to the church, synagogue, or mosque. That comprehensive phrase has now entered political vocabulary, and probably will become as obligatory as the adjective "Judaeo-Christian" has been over the past half-century.

Many Muslims, also, are prepared to commit wholeheartedly to American values. Karen Leonard's book quotes the moving words of one Muslim activist who praised the true martyrs of September 11—that is, the police officers and firefighters who gave their lives trying to save others. In so doing, he suggested, they demonstrated Islamic values at their finest, the struggle (jihad) for righteousness. Some community leaders have enthusiastically praised the U.S. Constitution for its clear enunciation of pristine Islamic values. I have heard prominent Muslims declare, perhaps with an excess of patriotic fervor, that the United States is literally the only nation in the world in which it is possible to live a truly Muslim life. American exceptionalism is by no means exclusively Christian.

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