"New to America," the Muslim community "barely existed" here twenty years ago, noted Center president Hillel Fradkin in his welcoming remarks at a May 30 conference on American Islam, jointly sponsored by the Center and by Boston University’s Institute for the Study of Economic Culture. The question of how this community relates to American democratic society and its institutions is equally new, therefore, and was the subject of intense reflection by over two dozen scholars gathered at the St. Regis Hotel in Washington.

Focusing on civic involvement in the morning session, featured speaker Khaled Abou El Fadl of the UCLA School of Law lamented the lack of "honest discourse" in the American Muslim community. He cited the uniformity and seeming immutability of Muslim opinion manifest during a recent federal case in Florida involving driving-license requirements. A Muslim woman insisted that being photographed without her veil threatened her religious liberty, Abou El Fadl explained, and the Muslim organizations that supported her simply refused "to think seriously" about the state’s reasonable security concerns or "the interests of society as a whole." Their position was determined entirely by a fundamentalist ideology. Until more moderate Muslim voices are heard, the community’s commitment to American democracy is likely to remain half-hearted, he said.

The problem of intolerance was taken up by a number of conference participants. Writer Emran Qureshi pointed out that "the systemic exclusion of liberal voices within the mainstream of North American Islam" contributed to Muslims’ lack of "self-reflection and scrutiny" of their own tradition and practices. "Along with that," he added, "there is a normative hostility, within a small but vocal element of the community, toward the West." Radwan Masmoudi of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy questioned why moderate and liberal Muslims seem incapable of speaking up, becoming better organized, and attracting more followers. Peter Berger of the Institute for the Study of Economic Culture asked whether "Islamic values not already in the public discourse of American society" might possibly make a positive contribution to that discourse, and Earle Waugh of the University of Alberta emphasized the urgency of the matter because of the rapid growth of the Muslim population in the United States.

The afternoon session featured Qamar-ul Huda of Boston University, who discussed the diversity of America’s Muslim population. In addition to the African-American Muslim component, Muslims here include Sunnis, Shias, and Sufis from across Africa and Asia, but "the majority of Muslims living in the United States now" are not immigrants, Huda said. They are second-, third-, and fourth-generation citizens, and their connection to Islam is complicated by competing cultural influences. "In terms of citizenship, there are multiple identities within the American Muslim community," and it is difficult to generalize.

In the subsequent discussion several participants did generalize, however, particularly on the subject of education. Sohail Hashmi of Mt. Holyoke College stated that "Muslim youth are not properly educated." While other parochial schools give their students a "civic education" in American democracy, he said, Muslim schools tend to make their students indifferent to civic participation "or even hostile to American life." Writer Munawar Anees warned about the efforts of some Muslim educators who seek to infuse an Islamic perspective into every subject, including the natural sciences. But Michael Novak of the American Enterprise Institute claimed that "there is no reason to be pessimistic" because truly good ideas "reverberate with people" and have a power "not commensurate with might or numbers. . . . It cannot be right that liberty and dignity and equality are only for Christians and Jews and not for Muslims. They are human rights, they belong to everybody, and there has got to be a way of expressing them in Islamic terms."

Other conference participants and observers included Akbar Ahmed of American University, Ahmed al-Rahim of Harvard University, Zainab Al-Suwaij of the American Islamic Congress, David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values, Abdou Filali-Ansary of Aga Khan University, Susan Ginsburg of the 9/11 Commis-sion, Nader Hashemi of the University of Toronto, Robert Hefner of Boston University, Shaykh Kabbani of the Islamic Supreme Council of America, Paul Marshall of Freedom House, Ebrahim Moosa of Duke University, Edward Rothstein of the New York Times, and Lamin Sanneh of Yale University.