Allah in America

I finally got to look at the Pew Forum survey of American Muslims that came out last week. The picture it painted was a community "largely assimilated, happy with their lives, and moderate."

The blog Get Religion bemoaned the PC treatment of the survey received. But the stories I remember reading, like the one in the San Francisco Chronicle last Wednesday, stressed the one most disturbing finding:

About 1 in 4 young adult American Muslims says suicide bombings against civilian targets "to defend Islam" can be justified rarely, sometimes or often, according to a new Pew Research Center poll -- a finding that disturbed American Muslim leaders and thinkers across the country.

"It's something that the Muslim community should be aware of -- it's a phenomenon we should be concerned about," said Farid Senzai, a Fremont resident and director of research for the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, which helped shape the questions on the survey. "It is very troubling."

Writer Ali Eteraz had an interesting post about this in the Huffington Post, and wondered if this was because of how the question was phrased. Take a look. But he also wonders if there should be increased oversight in the Muslim community for information that enters mosques - where, bucking the demographic trends of the rest of America, young people are more likely to attend than their parents: "50% of those under 30 go to a mosque at least once a week (presumably the Friday prayer), while only 35% of those above 30 do so."

This alarming fact aside, the numbers show a Muslim population that is prosperous and comfortably American.

Prosperity. I often cynically wonder how long it will be until the deep schism that now exists between America and the Muslim world is smoothed over by global economics. I did a piece last winter about International Atomic Energy Association Mohamed ElBaradei, and the specter of the "Muslim bomb." Prosperity, he said, was the way forward on the dangerous road of a nuclear Middle East - Muslim terrorism is not theological but economic.

Whether that's true or not, I am more optimistic about our business progress than our diplomatic progress over there. Last Thursday, I had a friend camp out on my sofa. He was on a temporary furlough from the middle east paper where he has worked the business beat for the last year. He's spent time in UAE and Iran following the boom of the building and tech industries. We had dinner with another friend who just attended a bio-research conference, where investors from Dubai painted a very attractive picture for western projects.

There is a pro-business strain in Islam that is moving this along and which I would love to read more about. The prophet Muhammed was a successful businessman - he met his wife Khadija when she took him on as an agent. The Quran states that "God has made business lawful for you" and does not uphold the ideal of poverty taught in the Christian gospels, for example, but a fair economy in which alms are mandatory and merchants are the "trustees of God."

American as apple pie.

And in that spirit - check out this recent article in the Christian Science Monitor about Islamic investment funds.