In Muslim America : A presence and a challenge - attitudes toward US of American converts to Islam

National Review, Feb 21, 2000 by Daniel Pipes

AN odd controversy briefly dominated the sports pages in March 1996. A player in the National Basketball Association, Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf, refused to follow the league's rule requiring that players stand in a "dignified posture" during the national anthem. Instead, since the beginning of the 1995-96 season, Abdul-Rauf had remained seated during the playing of "The Star-Spangled Banner." A black, 27-year-old former Baptist from Mississippi who had converted to Islam in 1991, he declared that as a Muslim, he could not pay homage to the American flag-which he called a "symbol of oppression, of tyranny." He argued further that the flag directly contradicted his Islamic faith: "This country has a long history of [oppression]. I don't think you can argue the facts. You can't be for God and for oppression. It's clear in the Koran. Islam is the only way."

The NBA responded firmly, suspending Abdul-Rauf until he agreed to obey league rules. He missed one game, then capitulated. Two factors probably weighed most heavily on him: losing a cool $31,707 for each game missed, and facing wide opposition to his decision from other Muslims.

Though soon forgotten, this act of defiance raised important questions. When a successful young man earning almost $3 million a year and enjoying wide adulation talks publicly of hating his own country, something is afoot. What that might be is hinted at by a similar case a whole generation earlier, that of the boxer Muhammad Ali. After his conversion in 1964 to a form of Islam (Elijah Muhammad's Nation of Islam), the former Cassius Clay adopted a set of intensely anti-American attitudes. Most famously, he refused to serve in the U.S. military, which led to the forfeit of his heavyweight title. As Muhammad Ali later put it, he stood against "the entire power structure" in the United States, one he claimed was dominated by Zionists who "are really against the Islam religion."

Stories such as these have given American converts to Islam a reputation for hating their own country. But is this accurate?

Although numbers about religious affiliation in the United States are soft, Americans who have converted to Islam-plus their descendants- probably total about one million. This makes them by far the largest convert population of Muslims in the Western world; but, using the conventional figure of six million Muslims residing in the United States, converts are far outnumbered by immigrants. Of the million, whites number maybe 50,000; the overwhelming majority is black. Given that African Americans constitute a small minority of the U.S. population, this implies that a black person is over 100 times more likely to embrace Islam than is a white person.

A convert's attitude toward the United States depends on what form of Islam he adopts. If it is a tolerant and moderate variant, then he probably has mild views. His Islam will be an act of private faith with few political consequences. This moderate spirit is widely found among those (most of them female) who convert because they are marrying a Muslim, and those (most of them white) who convert because they are attracted to the mystical Sufi movement within Islam. The same goes for converts drawn to Islam as an old-fashioned way of life, or for its emphatic monotheism. Clearly, there is nothing inherently antagonistic between the faith of Islam and good American citizenship.

Well-known moderate Muslim converts include Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the basketball player, who has a positive view of the United States and a constructive attitude towards its problems. Mike Tyson, for all his troubles with the law, has found in Islam a soothing and civilizing influence; Islam, he says, is "going to make me a better person." Robert Crane, a one-time foreign-policy adviser to Richard Nixon and Muslim convert, holds that the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights were implicitly based on the Islamic principles of equality and justice for all. He concludes from this that the United States and Islam are totally compatible: "To be the best Muslim is to be a good American, and to be the best American is to be Islamic." In fact, "both paradigms, the overtly Islamic and the traditionalist American, are the same."

But there are often less happy results when a convert adopts one of two specific types of Islam: the Nation of Islam (the black-nationalist sect that originated in Detroit in 1930) or the fundamentalist variety (now usually known as Islamism) imported from the Middle East and South Asia. Converts to these forms of Islam are much more likely to turn anti- American.

From its inception, the Nation of Islam has promoted a black-nationalist outlook hostile to mainstream American culture and politics. "You are not American citizens," Elijah Muhammad, its longtime leader, told his followers. He went to jail for draft evasion instead of enlisting to fight in World War II, and even forbade Nation of Islam members to accept Social Security numbers. Malcolm X, his most famous disciple, contrasted the pure evil of America with the pure good of Islam, saying that an American passport "signifies the exact opposite of what Islam stands for." Continuing in this spirit, the group's current leader, Louis Farrakhan, threatened some years ago to "lead an army of black men and women to Washington, D.C., and we will sit down with the president, whoever he may be, and will negotiate for a separate state or territory of our own." On a 1996 visit to the virulently anti-American regime in Teheran, Farrakhan declared that "God will destroy America at the hands of Muslims."