The United States: Muslim diversity

A nation of immigrants like Canada, the US has the largest foreign born population in the world, 19.6 million in 1991. However, this figure is only 8 per cent of the country’s total population. The US Immigration and Naturalisation Act of 1965 reversed decades of discrimination against non Euro American immigrants, setting annual quotas by nation of origin for immigrants with preferred skills or those seeking family reunification. In the US version of cultural pluralism, equal rights are extended to all citizens but the state has a 'laissez faire’ approach to ethnic communities and plays no major role in recognising and supporting ethnic cultures. The substantial black population and a heritage of racism based on slavery and 'frontier society’ encounters with Native Americans and Chicanos combines with a strong emphasis on individualism to set the parameters for identity politics.

Muslims in the US are not only numerous8 but come from many back grounds. African Americans, South Asians and Arabs are the largest groups. African Americans constitute some 30 to 42 per cent of American Muslims.9 African American Muslims led the way in securing legal rights for Muslims in the US and African American men are the single largest source of converts.10 African

7 Noor Grant, 'A new Islamic center in Canada’, The Minaret, November 1995, p. 18; Shahnaz Khan, Muslim women: Crafting a North American identity (Gainesville, 2000); Amir Hussain, The Canadian face of Islam: Muslim communities in Toronto (Toronto, forthcoming).

8  Religion is not reported in the US census: see Karen Isaksen Leonard, Muslims in the United States: The state ofresearch (NewYork, 2003), pp. 4,147 (n. 1), for estimates ranging from 1 to 8 million Muslims.

9 Fareed H. Numan, The Muslim population in the United States: A brief statement (Washington, DC, 1992), puts African Americans at 42 per cent, South Asians at 24.4 per cent, Arabs at 12.4 per cent, Africans at 6.2 per cent, Iranians at 3.6 per cent, South East Asians at 2 per cent, European Americans at 1.6 per cent and 'other’ at 5.4 per cent. Ilyas Ba Yunus and M. Moin Siddiqui, A report on the Muslim population in the United States (New York, 1999), puts 'Americans’ at 30 per cent, Arabs at 33 per cent and South Asians at 29 per cent.

10 Kathleen M. Moore, Al MughtaribUn: American law and the transformation of Muslim life in the United States (Albany, 1995).