American Dreamers

After the attacks "our responsibilities changed," says Mohiuddin, who emigrated from India when he was 17. "It forced people to say, 'Where do I stand? Either I walk away from the faith or I become more involved in defending the faith, which [is] under assault'." His children, he thought, needed to know they were Muslim and feel proud. Hindsight has given Mohiuddin more reason to feel glad of this decision; the boys are teenagers now, and Mohiuddin is thankful that they have more than a passing knowledge of the restraint required of an observant Muslim.

To combat the discrimination many were feeling, many Muslim Americans turned, in classic American fashion, to the courts. The Council on American Islamic Relations, an advocacy group, counted nearly 2,500 civil-rights complaints by Muslim Americans in 2006, a dramatic increase over the previous year. These are the kinds of stories that make news—women who sue for the right to wear the hijab in their driver's license photo—and Muslim Americans say they show how invested they are in the American system. This is important: history suggests that thriving civil societies tend to smooth the sharper edges of faith. Religious convictions are no less firm or real, but they are less likely to fuel the kind of extremism that can lead to violence. The six imams who were pulled off a US Airways flight last fall after praying openly at a Minneapolis airport gate have sued the airline and the airport commission for civil-rights violations. "I believe in justice in the United States, and that's why we've taken this case to court," says Didmar Faja, one of the imams.

For younger Muslims the attention of the world means they have to grapple in a very conscious way with what they call their hyphenated identity. The result has been an open embrace of their religion, but in a manner suited to the community's diversity. According to Pew, 60 percent of Muslims age 18 to 29 think of themselves as "Muslim first," compared with 40 percent of people older than 30, and they are much more likely than their parents to go to mosque every week. At the same time, they tend to be blind to ethnic and racial differences, and they dismiss Islamic customs about gender roles as so much cultural baggage. Sakina Al-Amin, a student at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who is active in the Muslim Students' Association there, says that sometimes "parents are too into culture, and then the child tries to find ways out of it." When a parent objects, for example, to an inter-ethnic marriage, Al-Amin says the children may argue that Islam does not prevent such a union. Idil Jama Farah, a 21-year-old Somali student at the University of Minnesota, is a case in point. She recently married a white Muslim convert from Boston, in spite of her mother's initial disapproval. "I don't think culture is very important. I think religion is important," she says.

In Muslim intellectual circles, imagining ways to accommodate these young people is topic A, but the reality is somewhat grimmer. There are so few homegrown Muslim clerics in America today—and almost no institutions for training them—that prayer in most mosques is led by a scholar fresh off the plane from Lebanon, say, or Saudi Arabia, someone with no connection to America and no affinity for its culture. The foreign-born imams "are at a disconnect with our new generation," says Maher Hathout, an Egyptian-born cardiologist and senior adviser to the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. "If you get the best scholar in Islamics, but he cannot connect with my child or my grandchild, it's a waste. It's the opposite of what we want."

More unsettling is the question of what these foreign-born imams preach. According to unofficial estimates by government investigators, at least 50 percent of American mosques may receive some funding from foreign governments or institutions, mostly Saudi Arabia. The danger is obvious: if Saudi Arabia is exporting its Wahhabi Islam to this country via imams, pamphlets, Qur'ans and buildings, how long before a warped version of this extremist ideology intersects with a vulnerable group of teenagers? So far, connections between Saudi influence and the handful of suspected terror plots hatched here since 9/11 have been tenuous, according to the public record. However, Hathout deems such gifts risky enough that the bylaws of his mosque mandate against them. Foreign money, he says, is "problematic to the point of being dangerous. It creates a dependence."

Whatever its source, fundamentalist Islamic ideology is readily available on the Internet as well as in U.S. mosques. In one poor neighborhood in Trenton, N.J., at the Masjid As-Saffat, which for more than 20 years had served a mixed community of Muslims from Afghanistan, Egypt, Somalia and the Palestinian territories, the presiding imam several years ago suddenly and inexplicably had an ideological change of heart. Whereas once people worshiped together in a communal, almost relaxed way, imam Sabur Abdul Hakim began applying rigid standards to prayer and worship. Last year he closed the mosque school, saying it wasn't sufficiently Islamic, congregants say. He began to preach a Salafi ideology, invoking the purity of the earliest Muslims and disapproving of any variation. In a perfectly American response, a group of Hakim's opponents sued him, demanding that he and his supporters be removed from the board of directors, that they turn over the mosque's accounting books and records and that elections be held to instate new trustees. The case is in mediation; Hakim and his lawyer declined to comment.