American Dreamers

While the schism within the mosque is on the surface ideological, it is also at least partly racial and ethnic. The majority of the congregation is foreign-born. Hakim and most of his supporters are African-American. And while the community lived and worshiped together peacefully for almost two decades, Hakim's new stance elicited powerful, dormant feelings about whose Islam is authentic. Gulgai Masuod, a 62-year-old immigrant from Afghanistan, had been close to Hakim for years, but strongly disapproves of his changes. Hakim and his cohorts, says Masuod, "have no knowledge of Islam ... My father and great-grandfathers have been Muslim for 1,400 years. You are not telling me how to practice Islam."

African-American Muslims say such reactions are common. Growing up African-American and Muslim in Chicago, Ismail Mitchel says he never fit in. Black Muslims are in a "no man's land," says Mitchel, a 21-year-old student at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "We get flak from Arabs and we get flak from other black people." Neither group, he says, wants to embrace him. "It's like we're the black sheep of the whole community, literally."

Muslim American advocates have critiqued the press coverage of the Pew study, saying it focused too much on the bad news and not enough on the good. The bad news, however, bears repeating: 26 percent of Muslims age 18 to 29 believe that suicide bombing can be justified. Thirty-eight percent of that group believe that Arabs did not carry out the 9/11 attacks. These data, combined with the rising religious conservatism of young Muslim Americans, have led some experts to argue that differences between Europe and America have been overblown, that affluence and education do not inoculate a society against radicalization. "This idea that all those who are middle class are exempted from extremism has always been false," says Geneive Abdo, author of "Mecca and Main Street." "The leadership of the extremist movements have always been highly educated Muslims."

It's impossible to underestimate the emotional nature of anti-Israel sentiment among Arab-American youth, argues Ismael Ahmed, executive director of the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services in Detroit. "I think the poll miscaptures what's being said," he says. "There is such a thing as legitimate resistance to oppression, and there is terrorism on both sides. It's wrong, but there's also the right to resist." The poll numbers, in his view, don't point to a threat of homegrown suicide bombers, but to a passionate defense of a resistance movement—the way, 30 years ago, an Irish-American teenager would have supported the IRA.

The deeper problem is a growing sense of alienation among young Muslims, a sense that they don't feel part of the American story. According to Pew, 39 percent of Muslim Americans age 18 to 29 believe that newly arrived Muslims should remain distinct from society at large, compared with 17 percent of Muslims older than 55. Ferdous Sajedeen arrived here from Bangladesh in 1975 and built a successful pharmacy business in Queens. For years, Sajedeen imagined that he would eventually return to Bangladesh, but after visiting Dhaka several years ago, he realized how impossible that was; he didn't understand the jokes anymore, he didn't feel part of the culture. "I don't deny my roots," he says. "I am proud to be a Bangladeshi, but at the same time the reality is I am a Bangladeshi-American." September 11, he says, was "one of the saddest stories anywhere in the world."

His son Autri, who at 21 is in his fourth year of pharmacy school and lives at home with his parents, does not feel his father's patriotism. "When we grew up, nobody ever looked at us like we were Americans," he says. On 9/11, "it sounds bad to say, but I remember thinking that I didn't care that it happened. A lot of my friends didn't care. I think it's because we're Muslim." For him, the bombing of Afghanistan that followed was much more tragic and painful. Fundamentalists are "crazy," he adds emphatically. He would never condone terrorism.