American Dreamers

Nearly six years after 9/11, the story of Muslims in America is one of overwhelming success. The National Intelligence Estimate released last week warned that Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda continue to have their sights set on an attack within the United States. The report also notes a growing radicalism among Muslims in the West. But at a press briefing, intelligence officials were particularly concerned about the threat of homegrown terror cells within Europe's Muslim communities. America, the officials said, has so far provided relatively infertile ground for the growing and grooming of Muslim extremists. "Most Muslims in America think of themselves as Americans," says Charlie Allen, intelligence chief at the Homeland Security Department.

In fact, Muslim Americans represent the most affluent, integrated, politically engaged Muslim community in the Western world. According to a major survey done by the Pew Research Center and released last spring, Muslims in America earn about the same as their neighbors, and their educational levels are about the same. An overwhelming number—71 percent—agree that in America, you can "get ahead with hard work." In stark contrast, Muslims in France, Germany and England are about 20 percent more likely to live in poverty.

The alleged terror plots uncovered since 9/11 are a sign that this success cannot be taken for granted. Ire among Muslim Americans at U.S. policies in Iraq, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories is at a peak, and thanks to satellite news channels like Al-Jazeera and the Internet, that dissatisfaction can spread like fire. As the Muslim community expands and becomes more established, tensions within the community are also growing—between young and old, immigrant and native-born. Across the country, second- and third-generation Muslims are visibly grappling with how to be Muslim and American at once, while their parents look on with pride—and, like Siddiq, concern.

There are 2.35 million Muslims in America according to Pew, though many estimates put that number much higher, and 65 percent of them are foreign-born. These Muslims began coming here in large waves after 1965, when U.S. law changed to allow increased immigration from countries beyond Western Europe. Over the past four decades they have come from South Asia (Pakistan, India and most recently Bangladesh), the Arab world (the Palestinian territories, Lebanon, Egypt), as well as Europe and Africa. They came for education and advancement, but also to follow family, and—as in the case of the 35,000 Somalis who began arriving in the 1990s—to flee war and oppression in their home countries. The pull of the American dream remains strong. "The U.S. is founded on the idea that we're all connected to a set of ideas, not a set of histories," says Keith Ellison, the Democrat from Minnesota who is Congress's first Muslim. "For all our criticisms, the idea of America is an amazing thing—a society organized around a set of principles instead of around racial or cultural identity."

Most of the Muslims who were born here are African-American converts and descendants of converts. But a fast-growing number are the children of immigrants, and this last group is extremely young; nearly half are between 18 and 29. In this melting pot, no one group is significantly bigger or more powerful than any of the others—it is, Muslim Americans like to say, the most diverse group of Muslims anywhere except in Mecca during the annual pilgrimage, or hajj.

This profound diversity and relative affluence sets the Muslim community here dramatically apart from those in Europe, where Muslims came from their native countries as many as four generations ago largely as factory workers or laborers. "The Moroccans, the Turks, they were recruited for their illiteracy, for their strong hands and good teeth," says the provocative Dutch singer Raja el-Mouhandiz, whose parents were from North Africa. When the factory jobs went away, Europe's Muslims continued to live in ethnic ghettos, isolated from the larger society—a society that tended to be white, homogenous and, on some basic level, impenetrable. In most European countries, Muslim employment is 15 to 40 percent below the population at large.