With roughly five million adherents, Islam in the US is as much an American religion as Christianity and Judaism. Yet from time to time, a shocking Islamophobic assault on Muslims by their fellow Americans — such as the recent one in North Carolina, where three young Muslims were gunned down at a housing complex near the University of North Carolina, in Chapel Hill — reminds us not only of the struggle of Muslim Americans to reconcile the demands of their faith to American society, but also of the struggle of that same society to reconcile itself to the fact that American Muslims are in the US to stay.
As thousands gathered in Chapel Hill to honor the three young Muslims, and the FBI opened a “parallel preliminary inquiry to determine whether or not any federal laws were violated,” including hate-crime laws, the community tried to make sense of what happened at that housing complex, where Deah Barakat, 23, his wife of little more than six weeks, Yusor Abu Salha, 21, and her sister Razan, 19, were killed.
Local police have charged a man named Craig Hicks, 46, with the killings, which drew worldwide attention amid fears that the victims were targeted for their religion. President Obama, who was quick to respond, described the deaths as “brutal and outrageous murders,” and equally quick to offer his condolences to the victims’ families. No one in the US, he said, should ever have to face bigotry because of his ethnic background.
But there is a sub theme to this story, the story of America as a nation of nations, a land where immigrants are easily assimilated into the mainstream of a society that prides itself on having no single culture, but an amalgam of many different cultures, from which is derived the notion of multiculturalism, or if you wish E pluribus unum, from many, one.
The struggle to arrive at that synthesis, however, has not been easy. Not so long ago in American history, the nativist sentiment was so adamantly anchored in the view that Anglo-Saxon culture, along with that culture’s faith, Protestantism, was the defining feature of who Americans were supposed to be that bigotry against the “other” was the norm. As far back as 1789, after inauguration of the first American president, George Washington felt compelled to give the few minorities in the country at the time the resounding promise that the US would give “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance,” a promise regarded as a guarantee of non-Wasp immigrants’ right to live equally and freely.
But the nativists were then, and continued to be till the end of the first half of the 20th century, the overwhelming majority. The end result? The Irish, who began to arrive in the country in great numbers in the late 1840s after the potato famine, were reviled. Catholics — from whatever country they hailed — were not only persecuted, but their presence triggered the emergence of a political movement, known as the Know Nothing Party, that operated on a national basis, whose platform was confined to limiting Catholic influence in the US and pandering to fears that the country was being “overwhelmed” by German, Irish and Italian Catholic immigrants whom the Know-Nothings saw as communities “controlled” by the Pope in Rome.
Jews suffered mighty and humiliating anti-Semitic prejudice, exercised openly and brazenly, against them — though of course that prejudice clearly lacked the extent of its counterpart in Europe. Italians had to endure what was known as anti-Italianism, or Italophobia, in the wake of large-scale Italian immigration in the last part of the 19th century.
Other minorities, like Poles, Greeks and Lebanese did not fare well either. And the persecution of African Americans and Native Americans, along with Japanese Americans in later years, is no less than a stain on America’s past, embodying as it did that state of mind we call bigotry, that obstinately and irrationally sees the “other” as a lesser species of men and women.
But America’s social system, not unlike a human system, is dynamic. It has changed, evolved and transformed. Irish Americans were able — among their many other accomplishments — to send one of their own to occupy the White House in 1961 as the 35th president of the US. And all other minorities went on to prominence in the arts, in literature, in business, in media, in academe and in politics. And no social achievement of 20th century America equals the creation of an enduring national consensus on civil rights for African Americans, a consensus that effectively dealt head-on with the wide gap between white folks’ treatment of blacks and the egalitarian values of America’s own cherished national creed.
We have to trust that America can and will equally deal head-on with that undercurrent of Islamophobia that has raised its ugly head from time to time, particularly after 9/11. Disturbed losers like Crag Hicks, who allegedly killed those three young Muslims in North Carolina, and kooky old men like Pastor Terry Jones, who gained undeserved national and international attention in 2010 when he threatened to burn copies of the Qur’an on the 9th anniversary of 9/11 attacks, are not America. Men like them are fossils who hark back to a less tolerant, less enlightened and, well, less American America than the one President Obama identified last Friday in a statement to the nation.
“No one in the USA,” he said, by way of offering his condolences to families of the Chapel Hill victims, “should ever be targeted because of who they are, what they look like, or how they worship.”
I can attest to that, for I have lived in that same US for well over 40 years, and I have never — repeat, never — once been targeted because of who I was, what I looked like and how I worshiped. What is left for us to do now is to mourn the unnecessary snuffing out of three young, promising lives. And no, we cannot and should not feel the need to confront bigotry with bigotry.
