by Hugh Fitzgerald
Muslim Travel Ban? There Has Never Been an America Without Islam or Muslims
That’s the headline for an article by Dawud Walid, Executive Director of CAIR in Michigan, here.
I am an American Muslim, and like thousands of American-Muslim families, my family has been in America for over 10 generations. I am also one of tens of thousands of American-Muslim military veterans. I served honorably in the U.S. Navy, earning two Navy and Marine Corps Achievement medals while deployed abroad. Like other service members, I swore to uphold our Constitution.’
A handful of Muslims, not even a half-dozen, are known to have served in the Revolutionary War; 292 Muslims apparently served in the Civil War; perhaps as many as 15,000 Muslims, it is estimated (there is no way of knowing, since “Muslim” was not a category on dog tags), served in World War II, and in recent years, 0.45% (5,500) of soldiers in the American military have been Muslims. This is less than half their share of the general population. And let’s not forget that many, possibly most of them, are Black Muslims (that is, members of the Nation of Islam, which is not recognized as Muslim by orthodox Sunnis or Shi’a). If we were not to count Black Muslims as part of the population of orthodox Muslims, the Muslim percentage of the military today would be much less, possibly 1/3 or 1/4 of 1%. The Pentagon has made great efforts to recruit Muslims, but the results are not impressive. It is doubtful, pace Dawud Walid, that there now are “tens of thousands” of Muslim military veterans.
It is in defense of our Constitution and its promise of religious freedom that I joined several other American-Muslim citizens in suing President Donald Trump within days after he issued his first Muslim-ban executive order in January 2017 because it is unconstitutional and discriminatory. Our lawsuit, as are the many others filed against the Muslim bans, is about religious freedom for all.
Trump’s Muslim bans are clearly intended to exclude Muslims from the United States. Indeed, the underlying message of the third Muslim ban is the same as that of the original Muslim ban: that Muslims are somehow less American than people of other faiths.
However, as one of millions of African-American Muslims whose ancestors were brought to our shores centuries ago, I know this is based not only in malice and hatred but also in ignorance of basic American history.
There has never been an America without Islam and Muslims. Islam is rooted in America from its earliest beginnings. Muslims are indigenous to the American story. American Muslims have helped build our nation and have been part of America since before it was a nation.
This business about Muslims always “being part of America’s story” is now a staple of Muslim propaganda. The claim sometimes starts with Christopher Columbus. Muslims explain that the two Pinzon brothers, one of whom was the captain of the Nina and the other the captain of the Pinta, were Moriscos (Moors who converted to Christianity). There is no evidence for this. A further claim, that Columbus employed two Muslims in his own crew, one as an interpreter and the other as a navigator, has been made by Muslims who failed to realize that both men, though they knew Arabic, were in fact conversos — Jews who had converted to Christianity. Finally, some Muslims insist that signs of Islam was already to be found in the Caribbean before Columbus arrived. Columbus, they claimed, said that he had seen a “minaret” on one of the Caribbean islands; in fact, what he reported was that he had seen a hill “that in shape resembled a minaret.” That’s a big difference.
The same kind of baseless claim is made by Muslims who insist that 30% of American slaves were “Muslims.” This figure keeps being repeated, from website to website, but if you take the trouble to track down the story to its lair, you discover that no reputable historian has endorsed it, that it seems to be a figure plucked out of thin air, and so often repeated by Muslims, each serving as an authority for another, that the claim has taken on a life of its own on the Internet. There are a handful of stories, about a dozen slaves with “Muslim-sounding names,” which may have some basis in fact. But even if those dozen Muslim slaves came to these shores, they arrived without Qur’ans, had no mosques, nor madrasas, that is, had no way, in short, to hand their Islam on to others, including their own children.
If 30%, or 15%, or even 5% of the slaves had been Muslims, wouldn’t many have recorded it? Yet we do not find any accounts by non-Muslim slaves, taking note of all these Muslims. More telling, wouldn’t the slave owners have noticed all these supposed Muslim slaves in their midst? Isn’t it likely that if 30%, or even 10%, of the slaves were Muslim, this would have been cause for considerable comment? A handful of reports, about a dozen named Muslim slaves, is the most history has recorded. Why should we now believe the numbers being bandied about, without sources, by Muslims intent on backdating, and greatly magnifying, the Muslim presence in America?
Yet here is Dawud Walid, self-assuredly repeating a tall tale as the truth:
Up to 30 percent of enslaved Africans brought to these shores during the transatlantic slave trade were Muslim—banned from practicing Islam by slave masters. Today, millions of American Muslims are descendants of those brought here in bondage centuries ago.
“Millions of American Muslims are descendants of those brought here in bondage”? This is preposterous. That would only be true if we were to accept his figure of “30% of slaves were Muslims” — for which, it cannot be too often repeated, there is no evidence. If Dawud Walid offers no credible evidence that “up to 30 percent of enslaved Africans were Muslim,” he also fails to offer any evidence that Muslim slaves were “banned from practicing Islam by slave masters.” He tells us that there were millions of supposed Muslim slaves, and yet he he cannot provide even one example of a Muslim who was “banned…by slave masters” from “practicing Islam.” Why?
Despite this, mainstream news and entertainment media have, for years, falsely portrayed American Muslims as outsiders despite Islam’s and Muslims’ history in America. Now Trump has tried to exploit this misrepresentation and to further that false idea when promoting his Muslim bans.
Walid writes as if he has irrefutably made his case — without feeling the need to supply any sources — about this supposedly rich early history of Muslims in America. If it was so rich, where were the dozens or hundreds of mosques we would expect to find in the 18th and 19th centuries? What we know about mosques in America is this: there are two rival claimants to being the very first purpose-built mosque in the United States. One is a tiny structure erected in 1929 in Ross, North Dakota. Another, the so-called Mother Mosque, was built in Cedar Rapids, Iowa in 1934. If those are the first mosques in America, dating from 1929 and 1934, just how far back can Islam be found in this country? And how many Muslims were there actually in America in 1860, or 1900, or 1930?
This week, the Supreme Court turned a blind eye to the Trump administration’s blatant bigotry. This decision green-lights religious and ethnic discrimination that runs counter to the inclusionary principles that our country aspires to.
Rather than reinforce the notion that America welcomes people regardless of where they were born, what they look like or how they pray, the Supreme Court instead upheld a ban, driven by anti-Muslim sentiment.
The hysterical tone of bigotry unleashed is entirely unwarranted. The Court’s decision in Trump v. Hawaii does not “green-light religious and ethnic discrimination.” As Chief Justice Roberts said, the Proclamation issued by the President was directed at the question of information-sharing — countries deemed too lax in this area were put on the list, and so, too, were those countries that demonstrated some connection to, by harboring or promoting, terrorists. Any country that demonstrated an improvement in its information (i.e., intelligence) gathering about its citizens could be removed from the list. That’s exactly what happened to Iraq and Chad, taken off the list when they demonstrated better information-gathering about their nationals. Again, one more time: if the ban were, as Dawud Walid wants us to believe, “driven by anti-Muslim sentiment,” why were 95% of the world’s Muslims exempted? And why were two non-Muslim countries included in the ban? And why were two Muslim countries dropped from the ban?
The Supreme Court has been wrong on major decisions before, and the Roberts court has joined that sad legacy.
In the case of Dred Scott, the court ruled in favor of slavery, and in the case of Korematsu, the court permitted the incarceration of thousands of Americans and their families and children based on their Japanese ancestry.
Dragging in Dred Scott and Korematsu, two Supreme Court decisions that are now universally deplored, in order to suggest that Trump v. Hawaii is similarly deplorable, is meretricious. Trump v. Hawaii is not about race or religion, but about national security, and whether the President was within the scope of his authority in denying entry to people — not Muslims, people — coming from countries where the security vetting apparatus was deemed, not by the President but by several government agencies, to be insufficient. And that’s all it was about.
In the Muslim-ban case, Trump v. Hawaii, Trump set out to ban Muslim families, and the highest level of our judiciary just allowed it to happen, empowering this president and future administrations to discriminate on the basis of religion.
This week’s decision attacks Muslim communities and opens the door to government- and court-sanctioned discrimination of other ethnic and religious groups.
The Muslim bans aren’t just about denying visas to people from certain Muslim-majority countries. They also take away the constitutional rights of American citizens, including those whose ancestors have been in America for centuries.
There has been no “taking away the constitutional rights of American citizens.” No American citizens, coming from anywhere, are affected by the travel ban as set out in Proclamation 9645. Has Dawud Walid actually read the Presidential Proclamation by which the citizens of seven countries were barred from entry? Has he read Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion? Here is the most important part of that opinion, explaining the basis of Proclamation No. 9645:
“…The President issued Proclamation No. 9645, seeking to improve vetting procedures for foreign nationals traveling to the United States by identifying ongoing deficiencies in the infor- mation needed to assess whether nationals of particular countries present a security threat. The Proclamation placed entry restrictions on the nationals of eight [now seven] foreign states whose systems for managing and sharing information about their nationals the President deemed inadequate. …After a 50-day period during which the State Department made diplomatic efforts to encourage foreign governments to improve their practices, the Acting Secretary of Homeland Security concluded that eight countries—Chad, Iran, Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, and Yemen [Chad and Iraq have now been dropped from, and Somalia added to, the list] — remained deficient.
With his words and actions, the president has sent the message to American Muslims that they are less favored by the federal government than Americans of other faiths. This is a clear violation of the U.S. Constitution’s establishment clause.
But the travel ban was not based — no matter how many times Dawud Walid insists — on a ban on Muslims. It was a ban on travel from countries that had “deficient information-sharing practices and presenting national security concerns.” Two of these countries are non-Muslim; five are majority Muslim. But the author keeps forgetting, and needs endlessly to be reminded, that 52 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations are unaffected by the ban. Also unaffected are Muslims who wish to enter the United States from any of a dozen European countries. Keep reminding the dawud-walids of this world: 95% of the world’s Muslims remain entirely unaffected by the travel ban.
The bigoted message sent by the president has also caused American families and children who are Muslim, as well as those perceived as Muslim, to become targets of increased hate attacks and discrimination.
Does the writer have any evidence that Muslims have “become targets of increased hate attacks and discrimination” because of this Proclamation about national security? Let him present it. And let’s make sure that the claimed attacks were not made up by, or carried out by, Muslims themselves, which is a phenomenon we have frequently encountered before.
Our Constitution begins with the principle of freedom of religion, which, as a nation, we continue to strive to make this foundational principle into reality. No one should fear for their safety because of the color of their skin or how they pray. Since we have no authority to dictate to people how they should pray, we cannot ban people based on their religion. Smearing an entire group of people based on how they worship God is fundamentally wrong.
Here the author is dragging in all sorts of unproven worries. Why does he attempt to suggest that Muslims “fear for their safety”? What “fear” do Muslims feel for their safety in this country? Given how many Muslims keep knocking at the gates to be admitted to the United States, it seems that that “fear” is being grossly exaggerated by Dawud Walid. Doesn’t he have it backwards? Isn’t it non-Muslims who have been attacked repeatedly by Muslim terrorists, and who are justified in “fearing for their safety,” not just in America, but in Europe? He talks about how “we cannot ban people based on their religion.” If he reads the opinion of Chief Justice Roberts in Trump v. Hawaii, he will see that no one was being banned “based on their religion” — if they had, not 5 but 57 Muslim countries would have been included in the ban, as would all the Muslims now living in Europe.
We will continue to fight for Muslim families and communities, to pursue legal avenues on behalf of impacted people and to demand that legislators take action to end the Muslim ban.
The author apparently doesn’t realize that once the Supreme Court makes its decision, there is no further “legal avenue” of appeal. As for his “demand” that legislators “take action to end the Muslim ban,” all any country needs to do to remove itself from the ban is to improve its “systems for managing and sharing information about their nationals.” Two Muslim states, Iraq and Chad, did just that, and were promptly taken off the list. But that’s not the kind of information that Dawud Walid wants you to know, for it undermines his steady tam-tam about implacable anti-Muslim bigotry.
Most importantly, we will continue organizing, mobilizing and defending Muslim communities from bigoted policies—whether or not they are endorsed by the Supreme Court.
Proclamation 9645 reflects the considered opinions of many people in many different departments having to do with national security, on the thoroughness with which other countries conducted their own information-gathering, and information-sharing, with the American government. It was those analysts, from the Departments of Homeland Security State, and Defense, and not President Trump, as so many seem to believe, who decided what countries should be placed on the list. We can and must repeat endlessly: only 5 of 57 Muslim nations are on this list; no Muslims from Europe are affected by the ban; no Muslims who are American citizens are affected by this ban. Keep one figure in mind when arguing with others about the so-called “Muslim ban” — 95% of the world’s Muslims are unaffected by this ban. Ask Muslims who claim to have been victimized to explain that.
But don’t try to argue with Dawud Walid. He’s beyond any appeal to fact or reason. He knows. It must be terrible for him to have to live in a police state, led by the anti-Muslim bigot Donald Trump and his private islamophobic Gestapo. Walid will not give up but will soldier on, will endure life in America, terrible as it must be for Muslims like himself. He will fight until this country — his country, for his family, he assures, goes back 10 generations — becomes true to its ideals. A profile in courage and idealism, is Dawud Walid. He can do no other.
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One Response
From day 1, the allegation that this was a ‘Muslim ban’ was a howler. If it was, it wouldn’t have touched a mere 10% of the world’s Muslim population. Instead, it would have included countries like Indonesia, Pakistan, Malaysia, Bangladesh, India’s Muslims, Turkey, Egypt and a lot of others.
I actually do fault the Trump Administration for not including countries like Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and Qatar from the list, given all the Jihadists who’ve come from the first 2 countries, and the fact that Qatar is in bed w/ both Iran and Turkey. Also, after the 2 Jihadist incidents involving an Uzbek and a Bangladeshi, they’ve focused on Visa Lottery and Chain Migration. While those aspects of immigration policy may be problematic, the root problem is that both Uzbekistan and Bangladesh are Muslim countries, and that’s the reason those 2 attempted Jihad.
I lauded candidate Trump in December 2015 after the San Bernardino shootings for calling for a moratorium on Muslim immigration. That’s precisely what needs to happen – either overtly or covertly.