Think about it: In Turkey, where the vast majority of the population is Muslim, you will not find a lawyer with a beard or a student at a university wearing a head scarf, but you can find plenty in New York City. In Tunisia, you won't see a religiously dressed physician at university hospitals – but you can in Alabama.Most of Kavakci's arguments focused on the legal rights that Muslims--and everyone else--has in the United States. Yet, I'm not so certain that I'd really want to be a Muslim in the United States. Last Sunday, God Talk with Brent Walters from KGO Newstalk 810 in San Francisco spent three hours discussing Islam. Following up on an idea that had come up many times previously on his weekly show, he opened with the question "Why is it that people are afraid of Muslims in the United States?"
The callers were revealing. Even in an area regarded as one of the most progressive in the United States, nobody questioned the premise of the question--it was accepted that Muslims were feared. Some callers demonstrated gross misunderstanding of the faith that Walter tried to address, most significantly the idea of the "infidel." Christians and Jews, as "people of the book," are not "infidels" to the Muslim. The underlying theme brought out many times over the course of the broadcast was that radical leaders were defining many faiths--not just Islam--inappropriately in the media, leading to broad misunderstandings.
The discussion rang true to me. There were Muslims in several of my dorms during my undergraduate years at Stanford University. It was clear to me that they had to constantly fight to be understood. Even as someone sensitive to their struggles, I sometimes contributed to the problem. As the editor of a weekly news summary that was fairly widely distributed on several college campuses, I would sometimes (usually very late on my Saturday night deadline) use "Muslim" when "Islamist" or a non-religious term like "radical" would have been the appropriate term, and there were multiple times I needed to send out a correction. The culture was so strong that I had to be on constant alert to not repeat mistakes made by other media organizations.
At the time, other than the individual efforts of the Muslims I knew, there seemed to be little organized effort to promote mutual understanding. That came out as a theme in the God Talk show on Sunday as well--Walters himself was trying to educate his audience, but he could point to few other places in the media where that was taking place. If I were a Muslim in the United States, the fact that the majority population feared my faith and efforts to promote mutual understanding were so few and far between, that would disquiet me, if not downright scare me.
There is at least one high-profile effort to promote mutual understanding in Canada. The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation runs a situation comedy entitled Little Mosque on the Prairie. The premise of the show is the struggle of Muslims to live a substantially non-Muslim world in the fictional town of Mercy, Saskatchewan. While the show is fundamentally a comedy, and rarely delves deeply into the cultural struggles, that's rather the point. The show is showing a variety of Muslim and non-Muslim characters interacting and learning about each other, showing that everyone's struggles are fundamentally similar. That probably does more to reduce fear of Muslims in Canada than anything other than interacting with Muslim neighbors could do.
Thus, I would take Kavakci's thesis and extend it one point further. The best place for Muslims to live just might be Canada--where they have the same civil rights they also enjoy in the United States, but there are at least some efforts to ensure that they will not be feared and might be better understood by the population at large.
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