Quote from Dr. Jackson's Islam and the Blackamerican 2

And yet, it is only and precisely by virtue of their conspicuous participation in the American constitutional order that Blackamerican (and other) Muslims can qualify to enjoy the kinds of rights and protections that make protest and the creation of alternative modalities of Americanness even possible. In fact, it may be these very protections that afford Muslim-Americans that greatest ability to rise to their highest selves. For only these - and no other - American protections can sustain the possibility of their expressing the kind of religious commitment to which they feel scripturally bound, on the one hand, and which they hear conscientiously expressed by other American religious groups, on the other. To take just one example of such non-Muslim-American religious expression, Stephen Carter proclaims in his recent manifesto:

I write not only as a Christian but as one who is far more devoted to the survival of my faith - and of religion generally - than to the survival of any state in particular, including the United States of America. I love this nation, with all its weaknesses and occasional horrors, and I cannot imagine living in another one. But my mind is not so clouded by the vapors of patriotism that I place my country before my God. If the country were to force me to a choice, and, increasingly, this nations [sic] tends to do that to many religious people, I would unhesitatingly, if not without some sadness for my country, choose my God.

[footnote 77: Carter, God's Name in Vain, 3.]

It may be a while, given present realities, before the dominant culture in America is prepared to hear such words from a Muslim. But America as a political arrangement makes it possible for Muslims to speak these words now. Indeed, in the final analysis, it may be that of all the Americans, Muslim-Americans have the greatest stake in a constitutional order that enables them to "protect their protection." And, given all that has been said, it may be, from the perspective of the law of Islam, more a duty than a right to uphold and fully support that order, as a matter of fact if not as a scriptural imperative.

[footnote 78: This distinction between recongizing deeply entrenched factual realities on the one hand, and attempting to invoke scripture in order to vindicate more inchoate, ideological would-be facts on the other, underscores a fundamental distinction between Muslim-Americans who seek to vindicate democracy in America and Muslim-Americans who seek to vindicate it in the Muslim world. The former are simply attempting to process Islam on the basis of inextricable facts; the latter are attempting to use scripture to justify the creation of certain facts, as if such were a scriptural imperative. Moreover, beyond the congenial confusion between fact and law (read scripture), their tendency to equate American facts with universal facts in an exercise in invoking false universals.]

-pg. 167 of Islam and the Blackamerican

This man is just brilliant!