American Religion

American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 24–29 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.06 Internal Outsiders? American Religion Beyond American Belonging Zaid Adhami Williams College, Williamstown, USA Let me begin with a rather counter-intuitive way of formulating my response to the questions at hand: Through most of its history in this country, Islam has been a thoroughly “American religion” precisely insofar as Muslims have generally been excluded from national belonging. Furthermore, even when Muslims themselves have actively sought to separate themselves from broader US society and instead identify themselves with global Muslim, racial, ethnic, and national collectivities to which they could genuinely belong, this has been a deeply American expression of Islam and Muslimness. It is not a question of whether Islam can be an American religion. It undeniably has been an American religion, because it has participated in and been formed by the broader conditions and constructions of religion, race, and nation in the US. In what follows, I offer a narrative of some significant shifts in how many Muslims have conceived of their place in the US. I show that these shifts are tied to the evolving construction of “Americanness” and national belonging (and its relation to religion and race). My aim in providing this narrative is not only to illustrate an affirmative answer to the question at hand (is Islam an American religion?), but also to demonstrate how attention to critical genealogies of religion and race provides us with crucial insights into the formations of “American Islam.” *** Zaid Adhami 25 Let me begin this narrative by considering the modern Euro-American construction of religion. It is widely recognized that the liberal tradition (drawing on its Protestant foundations) has constructed the category of “religion” as fundamentally a matter of individual conscience and belief. At the same time, however, it is crucial to recognize how religion was also constituted through constructions of collective identity and belonging, rather than being an expression of each individual ’s deepest internal convictions and dispositions in relation to God. Thisisapparentwhenweconsiderhowconstructionsofreligion,race,national belonging, and civilizational identity were all co-constituted in the modern period. In the US in particular, for much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, “Americanness” was constructed through a “conflation of race, religion , and progress,” such that the US was understood “as an essentially white, Protestant country, uniquely committed to progress.”1 In this imagination of the nation, Protestant Christianity was intimately interconnected with the AngloSaxon race, civilizational superiority, and the American project.2 The conflation of Americanness with white Anglo-Saxon Protestantism “functioned as a matrix into which others could define their own identities.”3 Groups that were excluded in this matrix had to either find ways of sufficiently fitting themselves into this identity, or otherwise construct identities as internal outsiders to this national identity. As a result, many Muslim communities throughout the twentieth century sought to identify themselves with global Muslim collectivities to which they could genuinely belong, as a mode of “counter-citizenship” and “alternative imagined community to the nation.”4 Most often this did not mean that such groups entirely rejected any sense of citizenship or political participation in the US. But at the very least, they had an ambivalent or conflicted sense of belonging to Americanness, and sought out parallel modes of belonging beyond the nation. We can see this clearly when we examine the construction of Black identities through much of the twentieth century. As Black Americans continued to experience fundamental exclusions from the nation, with no meaningful or non-degrading belonging in the US, the early to mid-twentieth century saw a 1 Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 99–101. 2 See also: Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 442–488. 3 GhaneaBassiri, A History of Islam in America, 101. 4 Zareena Grewal, Islam is a Foreign Country (New York: New York University Press, 2014), 83. American Religion 2:1 26 proliferation of movements seeking to remedy this dehumanizing lack of political belonging. These movements constructed...