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Muslims in the United States Today:
Malika Zeghal
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In the United States, after 9/11, a new generation of American Muslims, born and educated in the United States, is questioning Islamic apologetics and literalism in order to grant more complexity, context, and historicity to their religious experiences and theologies. They contest the "West vs. Islam" divide, and thus the clash of civilizations thesis. They argue that violence used by Muslims is the result of their mistaken interpretations of Islam. Muslims, they believe, must work from their own rich heritage to condemn and dissolve violence, while avoiding apologetics. They must also rewrite the gender logic, starting from the Qur'an: for many of them, women should be the equals of men, standing in the same room in prayer, and more rarely, even leading men in prayer.
Very different figures characterize this trend. Asma Gull Hassan --a pro-Bush, media-savvy graduate of New York University's law school, and "self-proclaimed Muslim feminist cowgirl" --writes, "I do not think the Qur'an and God are asking me to wear hijab. I could be wrong, but I believe modesty comes from the inside-out, not the outside-in." Scholar of Islamic Studies Omid Safi, political scientist Muktedar Khan, poet Mohja Kahf, and novelist Asra Nomani are among a diverse, intellectual, and often caustic group of new voices that have reverberated on a global scale since September 11. Amina Wadud, a female African American Muslim professor of Islamic studies at Virginia Commonwealth University, publicly implemented her theological reform by leading, as an imam, a controversial gender-mixed prayer in New York.
Beyond North America, both self-proclaimed and institutionalized Muslim authorities have sought to discuss, accept, or confront these new practices, making new national and transnational spaces for debate on race, ethnicity, and gender. The Muslim "repertoire" is expanded along the lines and languages of Western liberalism, but not without internal and external conflicts and differences. These interpretations of Islam are publicly exposed, and not defined from outside Islam but from within it. Before September 11, these voices remained implicit, silent, or isolated. They felt that conservative mosques and organizations were too hegemonic to let them offer their own definitions of Islam and mobilize a new audience. The violence of September 11 propelled these voices into the public arena. It remains to be seen if they can truly find their place in America and beyond.
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