Dean's World

I don't think so, Aziz. If you were assimilated as you claim, you wouldn't be ambulating around the USA with a name like "Aziz". However brought you have from the islamic land of your origin (India, I suppose?), would have given a thoroughly american name, even if he/she/they took you to a muslim place of worship each week.

I read the article you cited very carefully. The reporter cited strong evidence that american Muslims are feeling increasingly alienated since September 11, 2001, with a feeling -- probably justified -- that events are making the United States and most of its people outright enemies of Islam. The response of many islamic young people around this country to identify with world Islam, not with the culture of the west in general and the United States in particular.

All those headscarves among islamic women, for instance. As the man at the vegetable counter hinted to one of the women interviewed by the reporter, that being dressed like that gives the wearer an appearance of a freak in the middle of an american super-market.

Likewise, the increasing attendance at focus on strictly-islamic patterns of social behavior. In short, most of your co-religionists are beginning to act the same as did the Jews of Europe, who made themselves even more socially isolated with each passing generation. In the end, they feared and hated all the "goyim", and all the goyim grew to despise the Jews all the more than they would have if the Jews had simply assimilated to the local cultures.

If all this keeps up, your people here in the West are headed for a great crack-up. The more your numbers grow, the more some of your people may become emboldened to threaten the fundementally christian and western societies around them. Isn't that exactly what has been happening with second and third-generation Muslims in the United Kingdom, along with their native-english wives? At which point, all of you, regardless of your personal leanings, will be treated as outright enemies. Then matters will slide rapidly downhill from there.

I know all this sounds ugly. And I also know by now that you are a square shooter working to make it as both an American and a Muslim. And I'm not just saying that because you told me you were born in my home town.

But some day, the way things are going, you probably will be pressured by societal directions outside your control to choose the predominance of one or the other. I hope that pressure, if an when it comes, doesn't crush the essential Aziz Poonawalla.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Mike, we might not agree often, but you nailed this one. Your response is better than my post. I am humbled.

Funny, most of my Polish relatives have not opted to change their names after moving to this country, and yet few are accused of not assimilating.

We have a fairly large Orthodox Jewish community here, where the men and women wear traditional garb that makes them stand out somewhat in crowds. No one treats them like freaks. Ditto the Amish.

Freedom of religion is one of the things that makes us most uniquely American.

And what has the problem been in France and the United Kingdom? That they've done the exact opposite--they've embraced a weak-tea "multiculturalism" which instead of stressing the universal values of their country tended instead to treat each immigrant group as a distinct, separate culture. Which resulted in failure to assimilate, and instead into ghettoization--with all the attendant sequalae that ghettoization always brings (crime, alienation, "us vs. them" thinking, and etc.).

Dean, the orthodox jewish community are even less assimilated than their muslim counterparts. And they way they dress for the street makes them look like freaks, too.

But if all the Jews in this country acted, dressed, and isolated themselves into the modern version of east european stetls as do many of the orthodox, the Jews in this country would be as shunned here as they were all across the old jewish homelands of eastern Europe.

But orthodox Jews are not the people plotting secretely to plow four jet civilian airliners, laden with inflammable fuel and helpless passengers, into both towers of the World Trade Center, the headquarters of the US Defense Department, and probably the US Capitol, which was the likely target of the fourth aircraft.

Nor are Poles or french Canadians considered to be members of an alien and mostly hostile civilization by most Amreicans, which is becoming the univesal status that Islam is sliding into.

I say again. Large numbers of islamic persons have settled into western societies. External events have put western civilization into a state of conflict with Islam. If not all Islam, enough of it to cause feelings of fear and xenophobia toward the rest of them on the part of many -- and almost certainly a growing number -- of persons among the populations that western civilization comprises. It is now at the point that a planeload of Englishmen -- real Englishmen -- will not fly with people who may be as english as them, but whose appearance is that of Pakistanis, Arabs and other islamic middle easterners.

Nor is there anything on the horizon likely to reverse any of this. We are not just sliding into war with them. We already have been at war with them for a long time. Go read the latest commentary by Arnaud de Borchgrave. It will give you all a somewhat better perspective.

I am certain the time will come when each Muslim in this country will have to choose between Islam and America, as the ones in Europe will have to make the same choice.

Ugly? You betcha. And certain to get a lot uglier. But ignoring all this is as foolish as it was for the Jews of Germany or the rest of Europe to try to pretend that the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in Germany was anything but the harbinger as well as the instrument of their coming destruction.

The clash of civilizations between the West and Islam is as real as the rising of the ocean levels of the world. Nothing any of you can say, or anything that George Bush can say, or all the islamic-american public relations councils can say, that will stop the stormwave now building over this. For Muslims in the west, for westerners, for everybody.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI

Arnold - read this. hopefully that will convince you to go out and buy this.

The point of assimilation isn't to accept all the values and behavior of the majority culture/civilization. It's to acknowledge that other people's views on things are as valid as your own, even if repugnant or obnoxious.

In some areas of law, the state has supremacy, no question about it. It can seem to ride roughshod over certain religious or moral or civil values, but it is done to preserve some very basic majoritarian or constitutional values.

As I noted, Female Genital Mutilation is simply not going to fly in the US, legally. Equally, even if your religion demands that you eat the brains of your ancestors, you can only do so by breaking a law.

But these are extreme examples. In most cases, some form of accommodation can be found, whether it's changing regulations to permit the wearing of a turban instead of a helmet, or wearing a beard when company policy prefers a clean-shaven look. The latter, though, can be demanded if safety or hygiene require it.

Prayer breaks can often be accommodated, but not always, particularly in production processes that cannot be interrupted easily.

In these cases, it's the individual (or his/her group) that needs to do the accommodating, perhaps by not seeking to work in particular jobs that place particular, unacceptable demands on behavior or attire.

But assimilation also requires the ability to understand that everything that happens that displeases or offends you is somehow directly targeted at you or your group. This is where CAIR goes sadly astray.

if the muslims in America had, en masse, loudly rejected and condemned bin Laden at the time of 9/11 and kept on doing it

you are such a colossal idiot!!!

Aziz, per your suggestion, I consulted the review of Jonah Blanks's book about your particular shi'a sec, the Daudi Bohras. The reviewer suggests that the limit of their assimilation to the cultures of western civilization is the point at which those cultures conflict with your particular daudi bohra shi'a interpretation of the commandments of Islam.

But I hope you understand this is exactly what a homogenizing culture such as that of the United States of America requires in order to make citizens and Americans out of immigrants and their offspring. It has happened with Germans, Swedes, Chinese, Irish, Jews, Croats, Greeks, Italians, Indians, Japanese, and on and on.

And if this is so, then I would have to ask you what any of your sect feel is so special about your culture or beliefs that you would want to perpetuate them indefinitely within a non-islamic land.

Or do you want want to endure another perpetual circumstance that is a handmaiden to the exclusivity that I have described above, in which members of the same Daudi Bohra sect get unceremoniously thrown off international flights because people fear to fly them?

In the long run, you can't have it both ways. You can be an American. Which sometimes requires a lot of extra work and patience in dealing with prejudiced fools. Or you can be anything else. Which means that in the end, your entire being will seethe with hatred against this society, its culture and its people.

Because you know as well as I do that is the end result of an "us vs them" mentality. Treat everyone else like the "goyim", and that's exactly what they will be.

I know this is difficult, and in a way, I feel sorry for you, your culture with its faraway roots that mean nothing to all the Americans, and the fact that this society, this culture, this civilization is obviously in long-term conflict with Islam, it political and religious manifestations, and no small number of its devotees.

By the way. Because of you and John Burgess, I picked up enough interest about shi'a Islam to read in some depth about the tragic but heroic story of the great Imam Hussein -- he of the martyrdom outside Kerbala. I always have celebrated bravery in personal conduct above most other virtues. Which enables me simultaneously to acknowledge the bravery of the jewish fighters in the Warsaw ghetto in April 1943, and the bravery of the last battalions of the Waffen SS defending Berlin in April 1945.

I think I understand the depth of emotion your co-religionists feel over that terrible incident, enough to shape their faith around Hussein and his struggle against stupid, fat, vainglorious and treacherous Yazid.

Would shi'a Islam permit a motion picture to be made of Hussein's life? or would that start just another religious war between your folks and the Sun'a? I think a lot more people around the world would understand your branch of Islam if such a film were made, and if it accurately projected shi's concepts of history, life and religion.

Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI