10 Minutes With … Paul M. Barrett

c. 2007 Religion News Service (UNDATED) A new book by Paul M. Barrett, a Business Week editor and a former Wall Street Journal writer and editor, introduces readers to a range of Muslims who struggle to live their faith in the U.S. In “American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion,” Barrett profiles […]

c. 2007 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) A new book by Paul M. Barrett, a Business Week editor and a former Wall Street Journal writer and editor, introduces readers to a range of Muslims who struggle to live their faith in the U.S.

In “American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion,” Barrett profiles several Muslims: an imam, a scholar, an activist, a webmaster, a newspaper publisher, a feminist and a pair of mystics. His subjects are as different from each other as any handful of Muslims gathered from across the United States.


In an interview, Barrett discussed what he’s learned about American Islam and what he’d like other Americans to know.

Q: What surprised you as you learned more about Islam?

A: I was surprised by the basic foundational information. I didn’t realize that, as a group, Muslims are as assimilated as they are, as prosperous and as settled in. In an environment where everyone is agitated _ since 9/11 and terrorism and the debate about how to deal with these things _ Muslims are exemplifying the traditional immigrant story.

Q: At the end of the book, you do make suggestions on what the government and the general population might do to ease tensions with Muslims.

A: Yes. As a society, there are things that can be done. The casual bigotry one encounters on this subject _ that is exacerbating things. To the degree that individuals can ameliorate it, whether working formally with interfaith groups or on a personal level, helps. It would be very meaningful to Muslims in this country if political leaders would answer or condemn the bigotry that you hear all the time.

Q: Why do you think Islam is so decentralized, and why does that seem to disturb so many other Americans?

A: I think it goes back to the founding of the faith, that it was presented to its original adherents by its great and final prophet as a religion that could be understood by individuals through grappling with the word of God. No one said, “Here is a faith and here is a hierarchy, and they’ll explain it to you.” And Islam is an extremely international faith, one that spread very quickly, and different versions began to evolve across vast geographical distances.

It does seem that Americans are frustrated by this, that they can’t go to a single source to find out the official authoritarian answer to questions. I don’t know if there is a way to resolve that tension. Over time, it’s likely Americans will get more used to Muslims being here and less uneasy. I don’t think the reaction is any more complicated than the garden variety of anxiety that people feel toward others who are different.


Q: Are you speaking from your own experience?

A: I’m Jewish. My family on both sides were immigrants not too far back. I’ve seen old photographs from the late 19th- and 20th-century Lower East Side of New York: people in traditional dress, with beards and headgear, and they looked very different. But within a generation or two, old languages were gradually shed in favor of English, most people moved toward a more modern version of the basic religion _ and some stuck with Old Country ways. Muslims today look no more different from the mainstream than my forebears looked.

Q: You argue in your book that the Saudi Arabian government is behind the spread of fundamentalist Islam in the world and here in the U.S. _ helping build mosques and train imams _ and yet they are seen as our political allies.

A: It’s a tremendous paradox. American society is so tightly bound with the society of this tiny country that is only one of a number of tiny principalities in that part of the world. That relationship is rooted in oil and, to a somewhat lesser degree, in the history of the Cold War. The fact that we are tied because of oil is frustrating to many Americans.

(Nancy Haught writes for The Oregonian in Portland, Ore.)

DSB/PH END HAUGHT

Editors: To obtain a photo of the cover of Barrett’s “American Islam,” go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug.

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