Muslims in these United States: Living up to the Ideals of the Greatest in the Shadow of Terrorism

Muslims in these United StatesLiving up to the Ideals of the Greatest in the Shadow of Terrorism Amir Hussain (bio) Keywords Immigration, Islam in the U.S., Muhammad Ali, terrorism On the evening of June 11, 2016, I went to bed in Los Angeles after watching a replay of the funeral of Muhammad Ali, which had taken place the day before. I woke up the next morning to news of a mass shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. News reports indicated that the shooter was a private security guard who had sworn allegiance to the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria and claimed to be acting in retaliation for the death of one of the group's leaders, Abu Waheeb. These are the opposite poles of Muslim life in these United States. One is the death of my boyhood hero, perhaps the most famous person in the world, and an American Muslim. In death, Ali was beloved, given the equivalent of a state funeral. However, in his younger days, just after joining the Nation of Islam and changing his name from Cassius Clay to Muhammad Ali, he was reviled. It's that same revulsion that is often seen in the present day to Muslim terrorists. That's the other pole: an American Muslim who murders people in this country. I think of those two poles as I reflect on both my academic work and my life as an American Muslim during the past 25 years.1 I grew up with Ali as a hero and watched his transformation from loudmouth to elder statesman in the public consciousness. And since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, I have been called on to talk about the issues of terrorism and violence among Muslims. Like many Americans, I am an immigrant to this country. I was born in Pakistan and arrived in Canada in 1970 when I was 4. At that time, there were fewer than 34,000 Muslims in all of Canada. I grew up in Toronto and was educated there, from kindergarten to the time of [End Page 360] earning my PhD. My parents and their generation were not pioneers of Islam in Canada. The first Canadian census in 1871 (the modern country came into existence in 1867) listed thirteen Muslims. But when my parents came to Toronto, there was only one mosque in the city and but one small store that sold halal meat. One of my mother's oldest friends told me that she met my mother around 1972, when my mother crossed a major city street because she heard this woman and her husband speaking Punjabi. My mother was so excited to hear a familiar language that she crossed a busy street to talk with strangers. Since then, the number of Muslims in Canada has grown tremendously; by 2001, there were 579,600, and in 2011, the most recent Canadian Household Survey, one million. Nowadays, it seems that one hears Urdu spoken everywhere, and the CBC broadcasts a Punjabi version of Hockey Night in Canada, something that would have been unimaginable in 1970. As a child, I never imagined that I would move to the United States, nor that I would become a scholar of Islam in North America. Growing up in the 1970s, racism was much more common, and I saw very few non-white people on television, let alone Muslims. The few I remember were Black athletes: Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, who had converted to Sunni Islam prior to his prodigious NBA career, and the Greatest of All Time, Muhammad Ali. Those were my childhood Muslim heroes, and over forty years later, they remain personal models for how to be a Muslim. At the age of 32, I moved to Los Angeles, where I have lived for the past twenty-five years. The American Muslims I observed were very different from those in European or Canadian Muslim communities, where we are also minorities in a Western context. Canadian Muslims do not have the same history as American Muslims. But the cultural dynamics are similar: at one pole, there are a select few Muslims who are beloved, and at the other, the reviled, anonymous Muslim...

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