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Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid is making the case that Muslims don’t need to assimilate in America.
“The assimilation defense — look how well we’ve integrated — is satisfying to make. But it concedes a premise I no longer accept: that a minority community’s right to be in the United States depends on its willingness to converge with the cultural mainstream. It shouldn’t depend on that. It shouldn’t depend on anything,” Hamid wrote Wednesday.
Hamid, who is Muslim, titled his piece “I’m tired of proving I belong in America,” responding to rhetoric from GOP lawmakers like Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., who last month wrote on X, “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who recently said, “I’m ready to get rid of the Muslims.”
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“Over the past decade, surveys have shown that American Muslims are patriotic, civically engaged and more likely than the U.S. general public to say that political violence is never justified. You’d think that would be enough. Except it shouldn’t have to be. And this is where it gets uncomfortable — for me, at least,” Hamid told readers, citing various data.
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“Muslims are different in certain ways. How could they not be?” he later wrote. “Islam shapes how its adherents think about family, sexuality and what it means to live a good life. Simply put, Islam is also a more public religion than Christianity. Muslim prayer is visually striking and often communal. If a Muslim doesn’t drink alcohol or fasts during Ramadan, that will be more noticeable to others.”
“Moreover, practicing Muslims — despite being repeatedly asked to — can’t disavow ‘sharia’ even if they wanted to. Sharia, roughly translated as Islamic law, includes guidelines on how to pray, fast and otherwise observe what it means to submit to God in daily practice,” Hamid continued.
The Post columnist insisted Muslims have “increasingly integrated into American civic life” while maintaining their religious commitments versus other minority groups, which he says begs the question “Why do Muslims need to be like everyone else?” He went on to cite data showing rates of Catholics among the Latino community have drastically fallen and “American acceptance” led to the decline of the Jewish population in the U.S. and the rise of their intermarriage rates.
“What strikes me about these stories is how much they resemble each other,” Hamid wrote. “The deal is always the same: You can stay, but you have to become less yourself. Less distinctively Muslim, less traditionally Jewish, less recognizably Latino. The specifics of your faith and culture — the things that make your community a community rather than a collection of individuals — are treated as obstacles on the path to real Americanness. The left and the right enforce this expectation. The right says: Assimilate or get out. The left, more gently: Assimilate and we’ll celebrate you. But the endpoint is the same.”
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Hamid went on to suggest that Muslim Americans are “more resistant to the secular pull of American culture” and their defense “should not rest on how ‘mainstream'” they become.
“A Muslim who prays five times a day and believes homosexuality is sinful is not less American than a Muslim who drinks alcohol and hasn’t been to a mosque in years. An evangelical Christian who believes marriage is between a man and a woman and home-schools his children is not less American than a mainline Protestant who marches in Pride parades. These are deep disagreements about how to live, and a country that is serious about pluralism shouldn’t treat them as problems to be solved,” he wrote.
He added, “America was not founded on the assumption that its citizens would eventually come to agree on foundational questions. It was founded on the more radical proposition that they wouldn’t — that people who disagree about God, religion and the good life could share a country anyway. Not because they would converge over time, but because convergence was beside the point. The question isn’t whether Muslims, Jews or Latinos will change. They will. The question is whether America will let them do it on their own terms.”
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