Why Virgil Goode is So Wholly Wrong
*Cross-posted from The Huffington Post
As Cenk Uygur has explained,
Virgil Goode's slur is a naked attempt to link terrorism, immigration,
and Islam in a way that panders to the ugliest kind of nativism. It's
worth stepping back too to look at why Goode is so wholly wrong.
For Goode is far wide
of the mark when he suggests that Muslims in the States are all
immigrants. Indeed, the history of Islam in America, as documented most recently by Genieve Abdo shows how Muslims, have been part of the American story from the very beginning, albeit sometime at the margins.
Muslims have been embroiled in the task of becoming Americans from
the very beginning of the nation. I'm certain that Goode is not alone
in forgetting that many Muslims were living in the United States before
there even was a United States--as slaves. Islam was common in the West
Africa (many Muslims were merchants in the region) when that part of
the world was a hunting ground for slaves. Records from the
Revolutionary era list slave names and reveal many Muslims among those
who made the Middle Passage. And Islam was not snuffed out by the
horrors of slavery. As late as 1837, a slave narrative by one Charles
Ball documents slaves engaged in the five daily prayers that Muslims
do.
A second wave of Muslim immigrants came as part of the effort to
conquer the American West at the end of the nineteenth century. The
first mosque in the United States was built, according to Abdo, in
Ross, North Dakota. A commemorative plaque in Quartzsite, Arizona
celebrates a Syrian immigrant known as "Hi Jolly" (in fact, Hajji Ali),
as "a faithful aid to the U.S. government."
Today, Hajji Ali finds his latter-day counterpart in the FBI agent
Ali Soufan: As Lawrence Wright has movingly recounted, Soufan came
within inches of unraveling the 9/11 plot, failing largely due to the CIA's failure to share its data hoard.
When Goode attacks Muslims as incapable of being Americans, he spits
not only on the grave of men such as Hajji Ali who have (quite
literally) built America, he also tars the dignity and loyalty of proud
government servants such as Soufan.
To say that Muslims or Islam is somehow "alien" to America is thus
at least ironic--and at worst the evidence of an ugly and stupid
prejudice.
Today, an accurate count of Muslims in the U.S. is hard to find.
Estimates ranging from 1.1 million to 7 million. About a third of
American Muslims were born in the United States, and many others are
non-citizens. Large Muslim communities now live in New York, Chicago,
Detroit, and Dallas/Fort Worth-Houston. They include Sunni and Shia;
they encompass the covert, the pious and the lapsed. There are no easy
stereotypes about the manifold ways of being a Muslim American in 2007.
Indeed, Islamic doctrines more broadly are also far more complex
than first appears. As Cenk explained, there is no doubt that there are
some pathological ideologies that claim to be Islamic--and these must
be marginalized and wiped out. But it should not need repeating that
the overwhelming majority of Muslims have no interest in or appetite
for political violence. The sheer number of Muslims in Europe and the
United States, set against the single-digit infrequency of ideological
violence, ought to give the lie to any such claim.
One hundred and fifty years ago, Virgil Goode might have made the
same speech - except where he used "Muslim" today, he would have been
using "Catholic" one hundred and fifty years ago. The now-defunct "Know
Nothing" party panders to fears about Irish and Italian immigration. It
invoked the specter of Northeastern port cities being overrun by the
papist lower classes. Know Nothing politicians accused Catholics of
"ultramontainism," that is owed a first and foremost allegiance to the
Vatican, and thus being incapable of being a loyal American.
Just as the Know-Nothings were proved wrong--and have largely been
left in history's dustbin--so too will Virgil Goode's smear one day
remain only as evidence that America can overcome its darker impulses.
Muslims, like any other community of faith that is rooted here, and
that has links overseas, have been and can be a part of the diverse and
shifting fabric that is today and will be tomorrow America.
