Our nation has been blessed in many respects — not least in its
ability to assimilate so many bickering nationalities and faiths
into a new people as if cut from whole cloth. While some
multiculturalists may regard the melting pot as (in Philip
Gleason’s words) “some sort of waspish cauldron, which
cannibalistically devoured the immigrant’s past and his ethnic
identity,” it has nonetheless enabled people of various sects,
tribes, clans, and ethnic groups — or their children anyway — to
progress from clubbing each other over the proper way to dunk a
convert in a creek, to clubbing each other over a parking
space.
The Jamestown settlers, the Puritans, Quakers and Dutch
Calvinists who established the 13 Colonies brought with them a
desire for economic gain and religious freedom, but also their Old
World prejudices. Protestant Europe’s contempt and distrust of the
Catholic and the Jew thrived for decades on American soil, though
it would dissipate here faster and more completely than elsewhere.
Martin Scorsese’ Gangs of New York is a reminder how the
Irish Catholic had to fight his way, tooth and nail, to gain
respect and equality. And even the whores of HBO’s
Deadwood will not endure the presence of a Chinaman.
With the increase in Hispanic immigrants the morality of the
melting pot has been hotly debated, with those defending the
tradition labeled nativists or likened to Klansmen and
Know-Nothings. Hispanics, however, have arrived without sectarian
and ethnic baggage, and for the most part blend in well with their
Anglo neighbors. Indeed, with the exception of the
intermittent race riot, stoked by some perceived injustice to some
minority group, America has been blissfully free of sectarian and
ethnic violence.
That may be about to change. The nearly fourteen-century-long
brawl between Sunnis and Shiites has begun to spread to the U.S.,
particularly to college campuses and Muslim enclaves like Dearborn,
Mich. At present there are 2.5 million Muslims in the U.S.
(two-thirds of whom were born overseas), and some of these
newcomers seem to have packed their religious and tribal hatreds in
their luggage next to their Koran and tighty-whities.
“You have people who recently arrived from other places where
things may have gotten out of hand,” Sheik Hamza Yusuf, the
U.S.-born co-founder of the nation’s first Muslim seminary,
told USA Today. “It takes just one
deranged person with a cousin back home who died in a suicide
bombing to create trouble here.”
The problem is more serious than the simple refusal of some
Sunnis and Shiites to pray together or the usual tiffs over who
leads prayers. Rather it is about legitimacy and heresy, and is
stoked by the war in Iraq and by a fundamentalist Wahhabist form of
Sunni Islam imported from and funded by Saudi Arabia.
As radical Islam watcher Stephen Schwartz reported in Frontpage.com, “the Islamic Society
of Rutgers University has established a little Saudi Arabia on the
Rutgers campuses, in which Muslims are required to abide by the
authoritarian whims characteristic of Wahhabi governance.” The
International Herald Tribune this year reported that in
numerous universities Shiite students, banned from leading prayers,
have broken away from the Sunni-dominated Muslim Student
Association to form their own groups. It is worse in the prison
system — both state and federal — where Muslim clerics are
exclusively Wahhabis and routinely victimizing Shiites, writes
Schwartz.
Recently groups encouraging Islamic divisions, like the
ironically named Islamic Thinkers Society, have gone on the
offensive, distributing leaflets in major cities that urge their
Sunni brothers not to traffic with Shiites. Meanwhile Shiites have
founded their own national lobbying groups, the result of national
organizations like Islamic Society of North America and the Council
on American Islamic Relations being slow or reluctant to criticize
Sunni verbal and physical attacks.
THE SECTARIAN DISDAIN cuts both ways. In Sunni enclaves like
Dearborn, Shiites purposely angered the majority Sunni population
by celebrating the execution of Saddam Hussein, a dictator whose
official policy was to marginalize and occasionally torture and
kill Shiites. In January, following Saddam’s hanging, four Shiite
mosques were vandalized, and a dozen Shiite shops vandalized,
doubtless by pro-Saddam Sunnis.
Islamic organizations are adept at telling the media what it
wants to hear, and what it wants to hear is that Muslims have
created teams of religious leaders aimed at fostering
“understanding” between sects. However, understanding is not the
problem. Sunnis and Shiites understand each other all too well. The
problem — which goes back to the 7th century — is one of
intolerance and centuries of tit-for-tat reprisals. It is a battle
that has been ongoing since Mohammed’s passing, and erupts anew
wherever Sunni bumps up against Shiite.
Muslim spokesmen like CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper can always be
counted on to show up on CNN calling for a form of “Big Tent Islam”
that “encourages dialog,” while launching “peace initiatives,”
etc., etc., designed to give the non-Muslim audience a sense that
positive change is in the air. Nothing, though, is ever mentioned
about assimilation, nor about following the example of the
Christian infidels who — even in today’s Northern Ireland —
manage to get along. Meanwhile, if you cannot count on college kids
to endorse peace and dialog, your prospects are bleak indeed.
“Shiite students [at the University of Michigan] set up a forum for
all Muslims to discuss their differences, but no Sunnis who had
endorsed the e-mail message…showed up, and the group eventually
disbanded,” reported the Herald Tribune.
Pollyannas note that increasing numbers of American Protestants
are discarding their traditional Methodist, Baptist, or Lutheran
affiliations and joining popular non-denominational churches.
Therefore, the supposition goes, it is reasonable to predict that
American Muslims will likewise trade Sunni or Shiite Islam for a
generic, non-sectarian Church of Islam. If so — and if the
multiculturalists do not object — it will be something more than
another American melting pot success story. It will be a
miracle.
