economist/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/10/islam-america A very interesting piece on Islam in America. Yet as I was researching criticism of Islamic finance I kept coming across objections from Americans based not on these products rate of return or value offered, but because it legitimises and institutionalises Sharia law and because it has a political objective: to legitimise Sharia law in the West. The second objection is as silly as saying that selling kosher products in mainstream grocery stores has the political objective of legitimising Jewish dietary laws. Neither grocery stores nor banks are in the business of social activism: they sell matzo and sukuk because people want to buy them. The first objection is in essence a statement of fear: that a small set of financial products are uniquely threatening not because of what they do but because of their religious origin. It is in fact the sort of thing one could imagine Coughlin or Henry Ford saying about kosher-food sales 80 years ago. And that, strangely enough, is comforting: it suggests that America will inevitably reach the same accommodation with Islam that it has reached with Judaism. It will take time, of course—most American Muslims are foreign-born, so are in roughly the same xenophobia-provoking demographic position as American Jews were three generations ago. But already there are encouraging signs: Muslims appear to be far better integrated in America than in Europe, as measured by their share of non-Muslim friends and by the intermarriage rate. Their worldviews more closely resemble those of non-Muslim Americans than they do Muslims outside the United States. The alternative—that America does not reach the same accommodation with Islam that it has with Judaism and Catholicism—is unthinkable. Americas greatest strength is its elasticity: France is the land of French people, Germany the land of Germans, but America belongs to an ideal rather than a people, and that ideal of equal treatment is expansive enough to comprise and accommodate itself to anyone willing to live according to its precepts.
Posted on: Thu, 16 Oct 2014 04:09:55 +0000
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