Islam & Muslims in the Post - 9/11 America
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Book Review by Dr. Jesse Ortiz
I am honored to provide a short review of Islam & Muslims in the Post 9 -11 America. The book offers a view of what the 8 million American Muslims are experiencing post 9-11.
Over American history certain types of people have been unjustly treated due to the color of their skin, language, and faith.
The most recent group that will go down in history as part of experiencing these injustices and hatred is the American Muslims.
This book provides a unique perspective of these American Muslims and the troublesome attitude and civil rights violation toward their faith and them as a people.
With the Muslim faith being one of the major faiths in the United States the importance to understand, accept, and include them within the American fabric is needed now. Sattar Ghazali does an excellent job in the nine chapters of defining who the Muslim population is and the issues they face daily in America. The book does an excellent job in looking at demographic data and immigration to the United States.
The very important Chapter Two titled Islamophobia provides an in-depth view of how a conservative political base and the mass media continues to provide damaging false information against Muslims with the primary role of spreading hatred or for the sake of political gain. The book provides insight of defining those who lack understanding of the Muslim faith. Adding to the negativity is the stereotyping that comes in the media that is referred to in Chapter Six.
The book provides a good overview in particular for the novice wanting to understand the Muslim experience since the tragedy of September 11, 2001. The nine chapters are broken down to include experiences and examples of the theme of each chapter.
We who describe ourselves as progressive Americans have let down our American Muslim brothers. Where is the national leadership that is defending and standing side by side with the Muslim community. We as Americans need to be reminded of past injustices in our history and not forget that if some are treated with discrimination we all lose.
The view that members of a religious minority are not to be trusted — that they are predisposed to extremism, disloyalty and violence; resist assimilation; reproduce at alarming rates, and are theologically compelled to impose their backward religious laws on their adopted home — is not new. From the 19th century on, distrust, violence and, eventually, immigration restrictions were aimed at waves of Roman Catholic immigrants.
For seven decades Roman Catholics and East European Jews were widely regarded as disloyal, impossible-to-integrate members of an outside civilization. One of the bestselling books of the period, American Freedom and Catholic Power by Paul Blanshard, argued that Catholic culture is “a survival of mediaeval authoritarianism that has no rightful place in the democratic American environment.” Surprisingly, the book was endorsed by philosopher Bertrand Russell and scientist Albert Einstein, and had great influence in Congress as well as in academia.
We have forgotten this history. And we have forgotten that the same things were said about the waves of East European Jewish immigrants before the war. The phrase “Judeo-bolshevism” was that era’s equivalent to today’s “Islamo-fascism,” and was frequently directed against Jewish immigrants.
American Muslims are falling victim to the same misunderstandings and fallacies that threatened earlier waves of non-Protestant immigrants.
The purpose of this book is to show that all of claims against the Muslim Americans are demonstrably untrue, and are based on the same mixture of honest misunderstandings and darker fallacies that greeted earlier waves of poor immigrants from different religious cultures.
Sattar Ghazali has given us the important information to understand the Islam & Muslim faith; it is now our responsibility to do the right thing for the benefit of all of America.
Dr. Jesse Ortiz is the Superintendent of Schools of Yolo County CA
The Journal of America Team:
Editor in chief:
Abdus Sattar Ghazali
Senior Editor:
Prof. Arthur Scott
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