COVER STORY: “Tension between Sunnis, Shiites emerging in USA,” by Cathy Lynn Grossman, USA Today, 25 September 2007, p. 1A.
ARTICLE: “Suicide bomber attacks meeting of Shiites, Sunnis,” by Associated Press, USA Today, 25 September 2007, p. 9A.
Only natural that things get more tense over here between Shia and Sunni. But our country is a rare place for Islam, an environment where Shia and Sunni regularly and unremarkably pray together in the same mosques, something that stuns Muslim journalists when they cover our scene.
As one journalist from India recently put it:
“It is something we never see at home. They want to kill each other everywhere except in the USA.”
You think he really said “USA,” or did the paper tweak that quote?
But yeah, you’re going to see splintering and fracturing of Muslims here in the States, because the environment simply allows it, which is why the spread of the concept of “big tent Islam” is so crucial and fascinating to watch.
We’ve seen this with Christianity in the past (indeed, Stephen Prothero argues that the rise of non-denominational Christianity in the USA [damn, now they’ve got me doing it!] was fed by, and fed into, the rise of public schooling in the early 1800s) and with Judaism (we’re all one big happy, Judeo-Christian family, are we not?) and with Buddhism (which is being secularized beyond recognition in some quarters) and with Hinduism (just check out yoga at the YMCA).
And so it’s going to happen with Islam here in America: the religious “reformation” people are looking for will happen.
Read on:
At a time when rising numbers of American Protestants are attending non-denominational community churches and referring to themselves simply as Christians rather than Baptists, Methodists or Lutherans, a similar thing is happening among Muslims in the USA.
“It’s a whole new era,” says [Muslim sociologist Eboo] Patel. “The bulk of the American Muslim community is overwhelmingly young, under age 40. And they are experiencing a huge momentum toward ‘big-tent Islam.’”
“We don’t want to be defined by the classification of history and the Middle East. The Quran is our authority,” says Salim Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Al-Marayati, a Shiite married to a Sunni, expects to see 10,000 Muslims of all sects celebrate the Eid [feast at the end of Ramadan] with the Islamic Center of Southern California next month in Los Angeles.
He calls himself “Sushi,” the popular term for a combination of Sunni and Shiite. Once the glib nickname for the children of intermarried couples, it has become shorthand for Muslim who blur sectarian lines.
Gotta love “Sushi.” Yet another example of Japan’s successful cultural exports! Seriously. A term people choose for themselves because the word strikes them as cool.
None of this is to suggest that America grows less religious, because just the opposite is true. But don’t confuse rising religiosity (more faith and more practice) with rising religion (the institutions and hierarchies and sectarianism that come with them).
The rule set on religion gets looser in America even as people get more intense about it. It becomes more personalized and direct and about “the book.”
And it becomes non-denominational as a result.
Read Stephen Prothero’s history of faith in America in his Religious Literacy, and you’ll see the argument plain as day.
Yet another reason why I do not worry about losing any “Long War.” The outcome was never in doubt. Just our belief in ourselves.
Thursday, September 27, 2007 at 3:01PM 
