United States

Most of these books are about Muslims in the United States, in a wide variety of different genres. The final selection is a history of US actions in the Middle East since the end of World War II.

Muslims in America

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, What’s Right with Islam Is What’s Right with America: A New Vision for Islam and the West (2004). In September 2001 Abdul Rauf was the imam of a mosque just twelve blocks from the World Trade Center. His book seeks understanding, sympathy, and a sense of commonality between the Muslim and American worlds, including the Muslim American immigrants in congregations like his. Indeed, American Muslims seem to be one of Abdul Rauf’s primary intended audiences. Abdul Rauf argues that core Islamic values are the same as core American values, but that neither Muslim societies nor the United States have fully lived up to their values. Democratic capitalism, he argues, is the best institutional expression of the commandment to love thy neighbor as thyself, and the Muslim world has much to gain from embracing American economic and political institutions. He also criticizes the United States for often supporting oppressive regimes and practices that betray the country’s values, and challenges what he sees as widespread religious illiteracy. I found his vision inspiring, and was disturbed by the nation-wide controversy in the summer of 2010 over his mosque’s desire to build a nearby community center for their expanding membership. Anyone who claims Abdul Rauf is an extremist has not read this book.

I first encountered this book when I visited an open house at an Islamic Center near me, where they were giving away copies for free. The edition I have was partially funded by the International Institute of Islamic Thought and the Islamic Society of North America. No one would claim that all American Muslims are affiliated with or agree with these groups, but their sponsorship suggests that Abdul Rauf speaks for more than just himself. More recent printings have shortened the title to What’s Right with Islam: A New Vision for Islam and the West.

Leila Ahmed, A Quiet Revolution: The Veil’s Resurgence from the Middle East to America (2011). This valuable book is far broader than its title suggests. I recommend it highly for anyone who is interested in Muslim women or Islamism, and is willing to read a well-written scholarly book. Ahmed grew up in Egypt and now teaches at the Harvard Divinity School, and she started with the question of why more women are wearing hijab now than a generation ago, in the United States and around the world. Answering this question led her not only to exploring the multiple reasons individual women offer for wearing and not wearing different forms of veils, but also to writing an extremely helpful history of Islamism in Egypt, where the Islamic Brotherhood was founded in the 1920s, and the United States, where Islamism-influenced women are now at the forefront of challenging gender hierarchies. Islamism puts the pursuit of social justice and service to others near the core of Muslim practice. Traditional forms of Islam, in contrast, tend to have a more personal, spiritual, and ethical focus. Because Islamism urges its members towards organization and activism, and because of financial support from Saudi Arabia, Islamism has grown rapidly and is increasingly able to define itself as the “true” Islam. Islamism has changed the symbolic meaning of hijab, and for many Islamist women, wearing hijab now signifies their commitment to social justice. In the 1970s the leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood repudiated violence as a means for achieving their goals, but not all Islamists agreed with them and some broke away to create militant groups, which are a small minority but more likely to make the news than the peaceful Islamist mainstream. Most American Muslim institutions have Islamist roots, but most American Muslims are not Islamist. 9/11 has had a huge effect on American Muslim organizations, making them more open to diverse opinions and challenges to hierarchical leadership. In the US, the Islamic call to justice has extended to gender justice among many, but probably not a majority, of American Islamists. Such a brief summary does not do justice to the depth of Ahmed’s work, but suggests the breadth and importance of her story.

Geneive Abdo, Mecca and Main Street: Muslim Life in America After 9/11 (2006). Who are American Muslims? Abdo, a journalist, set out across the country to meet, interview, and get to know a wide variety of American Muslims and introduce them to her readers. Immigrants, second-generation immigrants, and native-born (often but not always African-American). Parents, teens, and elders. Men and women. Wearing the hijab and bare-headed. Devout, secular, and everywhere in between. There is a lot of variety among American Muslims, but all of them wonder about their place in American society after 9/11. And many of them confront the ancient question of immigrant generations: How can people hold onto what is most valuable about their ancestral traditions while also living in and adapting to a new society, a new world?

Ranya Idliby, Suzanne Oliver, and Priscilla Warner, The Faith Club: A Muslim, A Christian, A Jew – Three Women Search for Understanding (2006). Three New York women came together after 9/11 to explore their own and each others’ religious traditions. In this written conversation/shared memoir, they discuss with remarkable honesty their encounters with each other, their spirituality, their religious communities, their self-questionings, their ignorance, their growing comprehension, their struggles around statements and unspoken assumptions that seemed to reflect broader prejudices, their growing friendship, and their shifting relationships with their own religious traditions. This book is well worth reading and would provide an excellent basis for a book group discussion.

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007). This unusual and powerful novel portrays a one-sided conversation in which a Pakistani man, Changez, tells his life story to an American whom he meets in a cafe in Lahore. Changez experienced youthful success as an immigrant to the United States: he graduated from Princeton, landed a job with an elite firm in New York City, and fell in love with an American woman. September 11 and its aftermath, however, changed his understanding of himself, the United States, and his place in the world. Tightly written and compelling, The Reluctant Fundamentalist explores the depths of love and fear.

Eboo Patel, Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (2007). Patel is an American Muslim (Ismaili) of Indian birth and the founder and director of the Interfaith Youth Core, which organizes youth of many faiths for conferences and service projects. The reason totalitarian religion is expanding, he argues, is that totalitarian religious institutions are doing much more than pluralist religious institutions to reach out to youth and young adults, answer their questions, help them form their identities, and give them things to do and ways to be of service to the world. Who we become, he argues, is to a large degree a result of the influences we encounter. Many youth are uncertain and questioning and somewhat disaffected, wanting to explore questions of ultimate meaning, and eager to make a difference in the world but not sure how. Patel tells the personal stories of many young people – Muslim, Christian, and Jewish — who became terrorists. He also tells his own story, which led to a doctorate in the sociology of religion from Oxford University and interfaith youth organizing, but so easily could have turned out differently. His memoir is inspiring and thought-provoking.

Malcolm X with Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1964). This classic American autobiography should, I believe, be read by every American. Malcolm X was one of the early leaders of the Nation of Islam, a distinctively African-American form of Islam that has a complicated and not always close relationship with world-wide Islam. He was transformed by his experience of Hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca that all Muslims who are able to are supposed to undertake at least once in their lives, and which Malcolm X completed just a few months before he was assassinated. This memoir is not a representative introduction to Islam, or even to Islam in America, but it is a compelling story of one man’s deep engagement with race, religion, and the question of how to forge a good life in an often hostile world.

Amina Wadud, Inside the Gender Jihad: Women’s Reform in Islam (2006). This book doesn’t belong cleanly to any genre – it is partly theology, partly history, partly stories from Wadud’s life as a woman, mother, scholar, teacher, and activist. An African-American woman who converted to Islam as a young adult, Wadud is a professor of Islamic Studies who became a figure of controversy in 2005 when she led a mixed-gender group in prayer. Inside the Gender Jihad covers a wide range of topics, from the meanings of important theological terms found in the Qur’an, to the difficulties of working in the field of Muslim women’s studies, to motherhood, prayer leadership, and HIV. The writing is uneven in accessibility, but if you are interested in contemporary Muslim women’s theology or African-American Muslim women, this is an important book.

The US and the Middle East

Douglas Little, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945 (2002). Any book on the United States’ relationship with the Middle East will be incomplete and have its flaws. American Orientalism offers, however, a decent introduction to the goals and actions of American corporations and American governments during the critical era from the end of the second world war to September 11, 2001. This book is more academic in tone than most of the others I’ve recommended, but a certain level of detail and rigor is necessary when dealing with such complicated and politically loaded topics. And Little has a good sense of the motivations and ironies of American attempts to promote our own security by wielding power in the Middle East.