Islam in the United States

• NEW YORK, July 21, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- Girl Scouts of the USA (GSUSA), the largest girl-led organization in the world, announced today that current board member Noorain Fatima Khan has been elected to the role of National Board President, effective July 19, 2023, for the 2023–2026 triennium.
• "We are thrilled that Noorain will serve as our National Board President.
• As National Board President, Khan will lead a 30-member National Board of Directors , which reflects the diversity of this country and Girl Scouts' Movement through their expertise and backgrounds.
• Additionally, there are five non-board members on the National Board Development Committee who work in partnership with the National Board throughout the triennium.

• This is the second time since 2021 that the Supreme Court has cited CAIR's work in its opinions.
• In Americans for Prosperity v. Bonta , the Supreme Court cited a CAIR amicus brief in a decision protecting the privacy of donors to nonprofit organizations.
• "Today's Supreme Court ruling is an important victory for all people of faith, including American Muslims.
• "We are gratified to know that when CAIR speaks on behalf of American Muslims, the Supreme Court listens."

• May 2023 marks 98 years since the birth of civil rights leader Malcolm X, formerly Malcolm Little.
• Malcolm X was a spokesperson for the Nation of Islam, or NOI, and helped to lead the organization until he left in 1964 – the year before his assassination.
• Thanks largely to Malcolm X, the NOI is now a household name, but its teachings remain controversial, particularly among Muslims.

A radical alternative to Christianity?

• Fard, a peddler by day and preacher by night, established the NOI in 1931 in Detroit, Michigan.
• He taught that God was a Black man who taught the first human beings Islam.
• Fard also taught that Christianity was “the white man’s” religion and a corrupted form of Islam used to promote white supremacy.

Malcolm X and the NOI

• Malcolm X joined the NOI while incarcerated in 1952.
• Malcolm X was suspended from the NOI in 1963 for his comments about President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.
• Malcolm X was assassinated on February 21, 1965, during an OAAU event in New York.

A new era

• In 1977, however, a protégé of Elijah Muhammad’s and Malcolm X’s named Louis Farrakhan “restored” Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam.
• Fard, the NOI’s founder, and his successor Elijah Muhammad did not seem to know much about Sunni or Shiite Islam’s teachings.
• As the group grew after World War II, Muhammad and other leaders became more familiar with mainstream Islamic tenets.

Not universally considered Muslim

• The NOI’s unique theology is one of the reasons the group is not accepted into the Ummah.
• Other forms of Islam maintain that God is eternal, nonhuman and singularly divine.
• NOI Muslims did not practice Ramadan until 1988, when Farrakhan instructed members to fast “with the entire Islamic world.”

Changing attitudes?

• For example, in 2000, NOI members prayed with Houston Muslims during Ramadan, allowing the NOI to connect with other American Muslims.
• The lack of sustained pan-Muslim events might suggest that, even when religious practice aligns, there remain obstacles to the building of relationships between mainstream and NOI Muslims.

• In 2022, Joe Biden made history as the first U.S. president to recognize the month, which he did again in 2023.
• States such as Illinois and Virginia have passed legislation to make the celebration an annual event, and dozens more have commemorated it.
• From TV stations to entertainment media, people of Arab descent are often stereotyped as violent, oppressed or exotic.

Arab Christians

• For many in the United States, this overlap seems natural, given how often Islam is conflated with Arab identity.
• But just as most Muslims around the world are not Arab, not all Arabs are Muslim.
• During the first significant wave of Arab immigration to the U.S. in the late 19th century and early 20th century, families more often than not were Syrian, Lebanese and Palestinian Christians.
• While the Arab community in the greater Detroit area, a short drive from where I live and work, is majority Muslim, that sets it apart from many other Arab communities in the U.S. Arab American Christians are themselves diverse, identifying as Protestants and Catholics, and with a variety of Eastern Christian traditions, such as Antiochian and Coptic Orthodoxy.

From Mizrahi Jews to Shiite Muslims

• Arab Jews, often called Mizrahi Jews, have existed since ancient times and helped shape Arab heritage through their philosophical, poetic and political contributions across centuries.
• To be sure, Israel’s establishment and its occupation of Palestinian territories has complicated Arab Jewish identities, with new forms of antisemitism becoming more common within many Arab communities.
• Over half identify as Sunni, 16% as Shiite and the rest with neither group, according to a 2017 Pew poll.
• Finally, many Arab Americans identify with no religion at all, or with other faiths beyond the Abrahamic traditions.

Many nations, one box

• Arab heritage not only includes a variety of religious traditions, but encompasses a wide range of ethnic and racial identities.
• It is difficult to make generalizations about Arabs, whose skin tone, facial features, eye colors and hair textures embody the rich histories of human migrations and settlements that characterize western Asia and northern Africa.
• And Arab identities in the U.S. are becoming only more complex, given the diversity of national backgrounds reflected in the more recent waves of Arab immigration from the 1960s to today.

Complicated identities

• The term Afro Arab is growing as a term of self-description for Black Arab Americans seeking to make space for their multifaceted identities and heritage.
• Black communities are a part of every Arab country, from Iraq to Morocco.
• These dual identities are still fraught, given the pervasiveness of anti-Black racism within some Arab communities, which often stems from the legacies of the trans-Saharan and Ottoman slave trades.
• Still, Tunisia’s president recently provoked outrage after he gave a racist speech targeting African migrants and Black Tunisians.

500-year journey

• Based on true accounts, Lalami narrates how he was enslaved and brought to current-day Florida by 16th-century Spanish colonizers.
• If heritage months are an opportunity to celebrate the diversity of America, the diversity of the Arab community itself should not be overlooked.