Professor Abou El Fadl on the Intellectual Climate Amongst Muslims in America

The United States, at least for me, represented a further opportunity for pondering, weighing, and balancing, and for exploring the outer limits of thought. The air of unfettered freedom to think and write in the United States, without fear of arrest or torture, was nothing short of exhilarating. Of course, in the same way that my teachers back home had underestimated the power of Wahhabism in the Arab world, I had over-estimated the commitment of the United States to freedom. But there was another reality that I had grossly misunderstood in the United States, and that is the role and reality of the Muslim movement in the United States. Naively, I had assumed that the freedoms afforded in the United States, and the relative absence of political persecution, would allow for a Muslim intellectual re-birth. [...] Instead, what one found among Muslims in the United States was a remarkably arid intellectual climate. Far from freeing themselves from the burdensome baggage of their homelands, American Muslims reflected all the predicaments of their countries of origin, but in a sharply exasperated and pronounced form. By the 1990s, the same puritanism that was overcoming many parts of the Muslim world had become quite prevalent among American Muslims. For a variety of reasons, this puritanism was well suited for the American context - for a beleaguered minority searching for a sense of distinctiveness and autonomy, it provided a simple, straightforward, and aspirational dogma. Furthermore, it distracted this minority from its fears and worries about assimilation and loss of identity, with the comforting assuredness of privilege and distinctiveness. It dangled the ideal of the true, purified, and irreproachable Islam before the eyes of this minority, providing American Muslims with the means to escape confronting their intellectual an sociological insignificance. Furthermore, this ideal functioned as a tranquilizing narcotic, alleviating the anxieties of a minority living in a society that suffers from, what is at times, an intense Islamophobia. In addition, and perhaps most significantly, the Wahhabi brand of puritanism, in particular, has found a great deal of acceptance in a community that suffers from a fairly superficial knowledge of the Islamic intellectual tradition. The immigrant Muslim community in the United States is comprised largely of professionals who immigrated to the United States primarily for economic reasons. [15] There are no serious Muslim institutions of high learning, and the field of Islamic Studies does not attract the brightest students. [16] The few Muslims who do become accomplished in Islamic Studies are often perceived by the Muslim community to be a part of the secular paradigm, and are, therefore, alienated and marginalized. [17]

-And God Knows the Soldiers: The Authoritative and Authoritarian in Islamic Discourses, pg. 12-13