Books Written about
Muslim-Americans by Muslims: An Assessment
by Dr. Shahid Sheikh
|
Silence from and about
the subject was the order of the day. Some of the silences
were broken, and some were maintained by authors who lived
with and within the policing strategies. What I am interested
in are the strategies for breaking it.
TONI MORRISON, Playing in the
Dark |
After the premeditated and
cold-blooded murder of thousands in New York City on 9/11, all
aspects of Muslim-American community have come under extreme
scrutiny and even attack. These aspects have been reflected upon
by the U.S. society shaped by the media as well as in the
Muslim-American community itself.
The American public
interested in the Muslim-Americans want answers to a wide
multitude of questions, such as, who are the Muslim-Americans?
What are their religious beliefs and practices? How long have they
been here in the United States? What is their population? Which
states, cities and neighborhoods do they live in? What are their
issues and concerns? Among them, how many are eligible voters? How
many are registered? Of which, what percentage vote in the
presidential elections? What are their political affiliations?
What motivated them to get politically involved in the American
political process, prompting their leaders to create a Muslim bloc
vote in the presidential election of 2000? Who were the major
architects of the bloc vote movement? How did the Muslim-Americans
react to the 9/11 tragedy, and what they did and did not do in its
aftermath? How did the general public and the American government
treat them after the tragedy? What is their future in the
economic, social and political realms? Needless to say, the list
of questions is endless.
This intense and sustained
scrutiny has exposed the drastic fact that there is an extreme
dearth of reliable information about the Muslim-Americans. Given
the role of the media, such as books and other printed material,
crucial to maintaining incorrect views that perpetuate oppression,
it is not surprising to find such a lack of correct information
about Muslims, here and abroad. A vast majority of arbitrators and
disseminators of information--such as, television, radio,
Internet, newspapers, publishers, scholars and writers—in turn,
have resorted to filling the huge information gap with guesswork,
rough estimates and anecdotal evidence.
A very few books written by
non-Muslims tend to do full justice to the Muslim-Americans. A
classic book, “Silent No More,” by Paul Findley instantly comes to
mind. The book, however, is dated because it was originally
written in 1985 even though Findley updated it in 2001.
Most books written about the
Muslim-Americans neatly fall into three distinct categories: 1)
expose’ of author’s personal and his/her friends’ lives (Asma Gull
Hasan’s “American Muslims: The New Generation”), 2) showing the
compatibility of Islamic teachings with the West (Dr. Saleem
Ahmed’s “Beyond Veil and Holy War”), and 3) a discussion of Islam
combined with a superficial analysis of the Muslim-Americans’
involvement in the American political process (Dr. M.A. Muqtedar
Khan’s “American Muslims”). The only notable exception is Dr.
Mohamed Nimer’s book, “The North American Muslim Resource Guide,”
in which Nimer really took great pains to collect nationwide data
on several important matters related to the Muslim-Americans to
produce an excellent scholarly book.
It should be noted that all
these three kinds of books are supposed to be a fair and balanced
portrayal of the Muslim-Americans. The catchy titles, many
including the phrase “Muslim-Americans,” indeed give rise to those
obvious expectations. To the reader’s utter dismay, he/she gets
bombarded with usual guesswork, rough estimates, and anecdotal
evidence about professional, stable, happy Muslim-American
families shamelessly wallowing in their pre-9/11 make-believe
idyllic existence within a detached, "invisible" safety bubble.
Almost all these writers seem to take excessive pride in their
families’ elite status in America and their connections with other
elites here and abroad.
These writers are guilty of
a deliberate biased sample selection because lifestyles of these
elites do not represent in any shape or form the vast majority of
about 7 million Muslim-Americans; many of them work hard at two
jobs to make ends meet. Their writings, in turn, make the reader
feel as if the 9/11 tragedy may have happened to some strangers in
a distant part of the world, leaving them and their community
totally unscathed.
The underlying assumption behind these kinds of books is that once
American public is exposed to the “logic” of Islamic teachings and
sees Islam in action in the Muslim-American families, the American
public maybe subliminally persuaded to view the Muslim-Americans
and Islam in their best lights. In other words, these
intellectuals are attempting to present a “human face of Islam” to
the American public.
In their unabashed,
unchecked over-zealousness to present a distorted portrait of the
Muslim-Americans, these books conveniently ignore any serious
discussion of profiling of the Muslim-Americans by
law-enforcements agencies, Special Registration, the perennial
issue of secret evidence, secret detentions and deportations of
thousands of Muslims, sustained vitriolic anti-Muslim campaign in
the media and Muslims’ deafening silence, rising job
discrimination, prison abuse, homeless mothers and children of the
detainees and deportees, Muslim orphans being placed in non-Muslim
homes, illegal closing and scrutiny of over 26 national Muslim
charities, rising divorce rate and domestic violence among Muslim
families, low educational achievements of Muslim students and
deplorably low academic standards of Muslim schools, etc.
By deliberately suppressing
or ignoring the discussion of all these pertinent issues and
concerns for their political convenience, these books,
consequently, miserably fail to answer not only the crucial but
also some of the most basic questions about the Muslim-Americans,
leaving much more to be desired to say the least. The unfortunate
result is that since most readers are not informed about these
issues and concerns, many of them question even their very
existence when they are exposed to them in the mainstream American
media or ethnic media in the Muslim-American community.
These writers’ flagrant
disregard for accuracy, precision and a fair and balanced
portrayal of the Muslim-Americans gets reflected on when many of
these writers do not make even an ostensible attempt to include
the existing research and data about the Muslim-Americans let
alone conduct some serious and authentic research and data
collection to satisfy their readers’ minds, brimming with
questions already mentioned above as well as many others that
arise during the normal course of reading these books. The great
irony is that many of these producers of shoddy scholarship on the
Muslim-Americans are highly accomplished researchers and scholars
in their fields of specializations.
Finally, one extremely
crucial measure of the American public’s desperately surging
demand for information about the Muslim-Americans is that some of
these second-rate pseudo-scholarly books are vying for bestseller
status.
Dr. Shahid Sheikh is the executive director of
the New York City-based American Educational Research Institute.
He can be reached at aeriusa@hotmail.com.
