American Dreamers

Significantly, one of the more notable cases in America—the young men from upstate New York, dubbed the Lackawanna Six, who were arrested in 2002 and pleaded guilty to having trained with Al Qaeda in Afghanistan—grew up in an environment somewhat analogous to that of Europe. Yemenites migrated to Lackawanna in the 1930s for jobs in the steel mills. Those jobs disappeared, but the Yemenite population, now fully American, grew and stayed, and the young people there continue to struggle with drugs, crime and unemployment. In the Yemenite neighborhoods of Lackawanna, about a third live below the poverty line.

An equally critical but perhaps less obvious benefit to U.S. Muslims is the religiosity of the American people. Even if a religious practice is regarded with suspicion in America, it is generally treated with respect. In a NEWSWEEK Poll, 69 percent of Americans said they thought Muslim American students should be allowed to wear headscarves in class. (The devout prime minister of Turkey, a Muslim country with a tradition of militant secularism, actually sent his daughters to America for college so they could continue wearing their scarves.) "When I say to an evangelical Christian, 'It's prayer time,' they might question the way I pray, but they understand viscerally the importance of prayer," says Eboo Patel, founder of the Interfaith Youth Core in Chicago. "When I lived in England"—which Patel did from 1998 to 2001—"and I said, 'It's prayer time,' people looked at me as if I was an alien."

It wouldn't be too much of an exaggeration to say that on September 10, 2001, the Muslim American universe was largely invisible. The only Muslims most people here knew by name were Malcolm X, Louis Farrakhan and Muhammad Ali. If their doctor or accountant was Muslim, the average American probably didn't give it much thought.

The Muslim community itself was partially responsible for this isolation—like the Italian, Irish and Jewish immigrants before them, many hunkered down in ethnic enclaves. They strove to fit in, but quietly. For decades, the Islamic Center of New England, in Quincy, Mass., was home to a growing group of Lebanese immigrants who came to America for work in the shipyards. It was a cozy place, where people with similar backgrounds came to meet, pray and gossip. The imam, a Lebanese man named Talal Eid, was a perfect fit—he understood the community's values and he shared their interest in becoming American. "I have a woman with a head cover and a Muslim woman without a head cover," he says of his congregation at the time. "I'm not here to judge which is good and which is bad. I am here to serve them all equally." (In the past decade, however, his congregation changed as new immigrants arrived from Algeria, Morocco, Egypt and Pakistan; Eid was ousted in favor of a more conservative imam in 2005.)

The relative peace that came with invisibility disappeared after 9/11. When Muslims became objects of fear, "people who had never recognized and seen themselves as Muslims had no choice but to see themselves as Muslim," says Muzaffar Chisti, director of the Migration Policy Institute at the New York University School of Law. Young women who had never before worn the traditional Islamic head covering—and whose mothers saw it as a symbol of the backwardness they had left at home—put on the veil. According to a 2002 study from Hamilton College, more than a third of Muslim American women now wear the veil every day.

The first thing Razi Mohiuddin and his wife, Tahseen, did after 9/11 was to host an open house for the larger community at their mosque, the Muslim Community Association in Silicon Valley. More than a thousand non-Muslims showed up. The next thing they did was take their children out of their elite private school and install them in the school at the mosque. Before the attacks, the Mohiuddins lived the lives of busy, successful professionals: he launched start-ups; she was a pre-K teacher. Their own religious observance, the backbone of their family life, was private.