Restriction of Immigration may be a good thing
Posted on March 28th, 2006 by Tariq Nelson
Some American Muslim Associations have taken on a new initiative to lobby the government to allow more immigration from Muslim lands and stop harassment of Muslims when traveling.
Filed under: Changing World, Muslim Isolation, Practical Solutions, Race
You are spot on about the white idenitiy. In the most of the country, outside of the Northeast, white people just see themslves as white and the American idenitity is all that they have, or want. If you go to New York what we have is a hoarde of sub-cultures in the Muslim community and most masjids are geared towards one ethnicity and the khutbah is in that language.
Good post. I am one such white American male convert to Islam that is married to an Arab. My wife is on the way home now from a friends house, white convert of 25 years married to a Jordanian/Palestinian lady.
I agree with your idea, problem is the US wont restriction immigration from many of these places because they rely on their pool of engineers and the like. It is because of the brain drain they want the Muslims.
Also, there are large enough immigrant communities here to keep the intermarriage thing going for years.
This is a sad reality of the American Muslim community. Muslims are divided in so many ways and it is quite sad to see racism and a sense of “cultural supremacy” in the community. Islam came to eradicate racism and such divisions, but yet our community is teeming with it. Not that it’s bad to have pride in your culture, but religious pride and identity MUST come first. It is always shocking to me to hear of Muslims from one country or another who are racist against Arabs - the Prophet, salAllahu alayhi wa sallam, was Arab - how do they reconcile that?! The converts, on the other hand, come to the community without much of the back-home cultural baggage and embrace the diversity that Islam teaches. We need to speak out in our communities against these un-Islamic practices and show people that the sunnah teaches us to come together as one MUSLIM community, regardless of race and class.
Assalaamu alaikum,
I love the idea of families from all different backgrounds, and most - just about all - of my friends are in marriages like that.
But what is this “American Muslim” identity that’s so important? What does that mean exactly?
Also, I’m not sure I agree with some of your assumptions. My Irish grandfather came to the U.S. in the early 19th century, and I thought there were a lot of immigrants still coming then. And as far as I know, Italians and Irish (also Greeks and Polish, etc.), for example, still married within their own communities until at least the 1940s; I don’t think this changed because of iimigration policies.
wa alaykum as-salaam Sister Ann I also like the idea of families with diverse backgrounds, but I am also a realist and I know that it will not happen in most of the Muslim world. However, it is more prevalent in the American Muslim community because America now has a culture that is more open to marrying another ethnicity or race.
On the American Muslim identity, this just means a distinct Islamic culture that theoretically develops out of the mesh of people that are currently here as happened in places like Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mindanao and other places. My argument is that it seems that we will more likely become a bunch of mini-cultures in America, rather than one solid one.
Asalaam aleikoum
MashAllah, a great insight into the reality of Muslims in todays world. Ghetto Islam I like to call it, is prevalent more than ever but if you note it is not simply a narrow mind but a racist mind that is within Muslims these days. I hardly see a Palestinian married to a Pakistani. I have heard of a christian lebanese convert and marry a pakistani though. In the UK, a Bengali lady married an Irish convert though. Im sure the children will really capture Islam in all its true beauty and not simply the culture version of it. Converts usually get it right - so what went wrong with the born Muslims? Hopefully the younger generation will be able to conquer the ‘old school-of-thought’ where you must
inter-marry to preserve Islam and not simply an ethnic identity. I am seeing this amongst younger Muslims. Here’s hoping that they will put right what we did wrong. Excellent article.
as-Salamu `alaykum wa raHmatu Allahi wa barakatuh
I agree with most of your points, and agree fully with your goal of integration of American Muslims into a single community. For economic reasons, I disagree with your views about immigration — perhaps because I am myself an immigrant, but mainly because immigration is what made this country what it is, and without it the country (including its Muslim community) will stagnate.
More importantly, though, I do not see new immigrants as the primary impediment to integration of our American Muslim community. Afterall, the influence that I see of reverse immigration (e.g. American born converts and children of immigrants going to study in Saudi Arabia, and returning with an anachronistic and alien view of Islamic society that is also unforgiving toward other non-Wahhabi and equally valid Islamic paradigms that are certainly more suitable for the life of a Muslim minority).
Watching the fascination with Al-Maghrib Institute (Saudi Wahhabi/Hanbali doctrine in Americanized garb), Al-Zaytuna (West African Maliki doctrine in Americanized garb), etc., I see the majority of our youth participating in this reverse migration, and increasingly alienated from their surrounding American society. We cannot be successful Muslims without being part of the surrounding society, and serving that society with love and compassion. (See my postings on difficult questions and easy answers, and separatist triumphalist attidudes).
If we stop the reverse migration, importation of foreign scholars, reverse migration of our youth, etc., then we can ask new immigrants to integrate into our way of life. Just like Imam Abu Hanifa would pray according to the Madhhab of Imam Malik and not issue fatawa in Madina, so the new immigrants will have to accept that it is their responsibility to fit within our established American Muslim community, not to fragment it as they try to shape it according to their own country-of-birth or reference-country models.
wa s-salam,
Mahmoud.
[...] - Muslims moving to US in ‘droves’
mashalla tariq your idea is good, but its real life application is going to be a bit of a struggle.
[...] Nelson made a pertinent point on his blog, I am of the controversial opinion that increased interracial/intercultural marriage is one of the [...]