Muslim Commitment in North America Assimilation or Transformation?

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the curtent debates within the
American Muslim community regatding the expression of Muslim religious
commitment in American life. The size of the community is now
estimated to exceed four million (Stone 1991), and the numlxx of Muslim
immigrants entering the United Stab has more than doubled since 1960.
During the same period, the number of American converts to Islam has
also risen. Both the growth of the Muslim community in mxent yeas, in
the United Stab and worldwide, and the increasing number of Muslims
in "diaspora" as Muslim labor migration continues, which has resulted in
a heightened sense of "minority" status among Muslims (Haddad 1991),
have raised many crucial questions concerning religious expression:
Should Muslims remain marginal to secular power relations in accordance
with the teachings of classical Islam or adopt a strategy of assimilation
which, in the American context, includes the p d t of claims to equal
protection under civil law? What happens to a religious community, such
as the Muslim community, as it develops the institutional organization it
needs to preserve its identity in a non-Islamic society? Can it still remain
open to the sowe of inspiration and spiritual guidance located in the fold
of the Islamic world? Or does the locus of authority shift? Changing
circumstances require adaptation, and yet that adaptation involves the risk
of losing the connection to the heatt of the original insight and cultm.
Conflicting tesponses to these and related questions raise issues of
self-representation and lifwle. The resulting theological and ideological
debates within the Muslim community itself provide and refine various
models for Muslim minority life in a non-Islamic envimnment. They also
illustrate the tension between alienation and integration ...