Essential Reading - Ahmed's "Journey Into America"

I earlier previewed Ambassador Akbar Ahmed's book entitled "Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam," where Dr. Ahmed and his team of anthropology students visited 100 mosques, churches, and other institutions and thinkers across America, chronicling the issues of identity, integration and cohesion for Muslims in America.

After finishing the book this week, I've come to the conclusion it's essential reading: every American, Muslim or not, should read this book, even if you're not interested in Muslims.

The strength of the book comes from Ahmed's considerable analysis of the evolution of American cultural identities (primordial, pluralist,predator), quite apart from how they might intersect with Muslim identification. For that analysis alone, even Americans uninterested in the Muslim dialogue would gain some insight from Ahmed's historical overview of American identity.

He identifies three Muslim strands as well (mystic, modernist, and literalist), and the stories of how these mesh or collide with American identities forms the bulk of the book ( one interesting intersection he surfaces throughout is how much America's Founding Fathers respected Islam and Islamic thought's compatibility with those early ideals). He draws some eloquent conclusions and recommendations at the end, dishing out plenty of responsibility on all sides.

Among the key takeaways for me is his exploration of the history of the African -American Muslim community and its relative ease of integration with the rest of America.

This is an important aspect of American Islam that must be surfaced. I don't see a lot of the current "Islamophobia" directed at this segment, which reinforces my belief that current fears aren't based so much on theology but borne of a wound incurred on Sept. 11 that simply hasn't healed: Middle Easterners or South Asians are "Islamophobe" targets because they "look like", at a subliminal level, the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks.

I'm also curious as to why the African-American Muslim community is relatively silent in the current media focus. They are neither sought out by the public media efforts for their view, nor do they seem to be offering their availability. As one of the best examples of American Muslim integration, their presence needs to be more visible in the current public dialogue, both as voice and as community role models for the rest of the ummah.

One aspect of American Muslim identity that wasn't examined in the book -- and perhaps there's more here than could comfortably fall in the project's current scope -- is the undercurrent of younger American Muslim thought, creativity and identity starting to emerge, diverse in their own right, evidenced by such figures as the Canadian couple behind the Philosufi blog ; Hijabman; the Creative Muslims group; and most notably, Michael Muhammed Knight's work and the subsequent Taqwacore movement it inadvertently spawned.

These fresh voices trying to carve out a 21st century Western Muslim identity deserve a closer look, in my view: however unorthodox they may appear to mainstream Muslims, the fact that these new voices have emerged at all --- and in the case of taqwacore, found a deep resonance with a sizable segment of young Muslims grappling with their own identity issues -- tells me there's yet more questions and areas to be explored about modern Muslim identity. Perhaps it could be a new aspect that Ahmed and his team could undertake.