The North American contexts

In North America, unlike Central and South America where Islam remains an insignificant force, Muslims are overtaking Jews as the principal non Christian minority group. Canada and the United States have certain similarities: both are predominantly Christian nations with relatively high levels of religious belief and practice and neither country has an establishment church. The twentieth century saw important changes in the religious landscape of the two countries. The mainline Christian denominations so important in the Anglo Saxon Protestant world have been weakened, in the US by rising educational levels, intermarriage and movement to new localities, and in Canada by growing numbers of people disassociating from organised religion. A second trend is the growing importance of women in religious arenas traditionally dominated by men. Women in America arguably participate more in Christian religious activities and institutions and exercise greater moral authority in religious and civic institutions. Third, particularly in the US, special purpose religious groups have increasingly organised along conservative and liberal lines, mobilising political coalitions on issues like homosexuality and abortion. Fourth, the public dimensions of religious culture in both countries have expanded.1

Initial scholarship on Muslims in America saw similarities between the Muslim communities in Canada and the US. Scholars focused on Arabic speaking Muslims in the eastern and midwestern US and Canada,2 partly because both immigrant Muslims and scholars of Muslims in America

1  Ann Braude, 'Women's history is American religious history', in Thomas A. Tweed (ed.), Retelling US religious history (Berkeley, 1997), pp. 87 107; Robert Wuthnow, The restructur ing of American religion: Society and faith since World War II (Princeton, 1988); Daood Hassan Hamdani, 'Canadian Muslims on the eve of the twenty first century', Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, 19, 2 (1999), pp. 197 209.

2 Abdo A. Elkholy, The Arab Moslems in the United States: Religion and assimilation (New Haven, 1966); Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Adair T. Lummis, Islamic values in the United

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Overlooked the indigenous African American versions of Islam developing in the US and partly because early organisational efforts by Arab Muslims linked Canadian and US immigrant populations. The Federation of Islamic Associations (FIA) was founded in 1953; the Muslim Students’ Association (MSA) was founded in 1963 and developed into the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) in 1982 (see Table 9.1).

The composition of the Muslim populations and the national policies shaping their development in Canada and the US also differ. The religious landscape in the US has historically been more diverse and decentralised than that of Canada. National ideologies are differently nuanced: the US sense of 'manifest destiny’ has Christian religious overtones, while Canada’s churches teach that good Christians make a 'good’ nation.3 By the end of the twentieth century, scholarship on the two nations and their Muslim populations fol lowed national boundaries. Recent scholarship in the US may still emphasise immigrant Muslims or treat African American Muslims separately,4 but there is a tendency to see US Muslims as an evolving national political community. In Canada, scholars emphasise specific regional Muslim populations and tensions between categories based on religion and ethnicity.