September 11, 2001, was a bad day for American Muslims. Angry and afraid, people of all stripes lashed out at perceived threats.
Muslims – hurting just as badly as anyone else from the wound the country had been dealt – suffered again as confused neighbors circled wagons. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh (not Muslim) gas station owner, was shot dead in Mesa for wearing suspicious-looking headgear.
Over the last 10 years, our Muslim countrymen have stoically accepted strip searches and dirty looks because they look like people who think nothing like them.
And like the grownups we should all be, they have tolerated the indignity.
But today, they’re being subjected to a different, if more honest, discrimination. For 10 years, we’ve told Muslims, “It’s not you we don’t like. It’s just all of those radicals that look like you. Let us make sure you’re not them, and we’ll leave you be.”
But today, with increasing frequency, Americans of other faiths are saying, “No, it’s you. Your faith does not belong here.”
The holy book word search, a longtime favorite of atheists worldwide, has been Christianized as pundits comb through the Koran for phrases to use out of context against an entire faith. Objective-sounding experts explain that all Muslims are radicals and that the faith is too top-down for a democracy, or that it is a threat to women.
Sharia law has become the new terror threat, creeping insidiously from Europe. Never mind that it looks so much like rabbinical court, which has so far failed to unravel our civil justice system.
The fact that we’re debating whether Muslims can assimilate shows how poorly we know our own history. In 200 years we have not found one people that couldn’t do it, though not for want of trying. The idea of cultural incompatibility seems to have a tight hold on our worldview.
For the majority of our history — outlasting the abolishment of slavery some 90 years — we strictly limited the right to naturalize. Only whites, the law said until 1952, could become citizens, non-whites being inherently “unassimilable.” Under this doctrine, we got Supreme Court cases 60 years after Dred Scott, claiming that people of Indian or Japanese ancestry were not white, and thus ineligible for citizenship (followed by a host of other rights such as land ownership).
It turns out Indian and Japanese people assimilate just fine.
And so do Catholics, in spite of contrary arguments as old as our nation. In the 2000s, 40 years after JFK, prominent political philosophers argue that poor Catholics cannot assimilate with their faith in the ultimate goodness of poverty and sacrifice. How could such people succeed here?
Yet they do, all the time. And so do Muslims.
The United States is a great melting pot, as rich as its ingredients are different. There is something about freedom that appeals to every faith and culture, and people from the world have moved this country forward.
To deny that is to minimize our greatest strength.
Reach John at john.a.gaylord@asu.edu
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