Challenge: Have Islam viewed as "legitimate" a US religion as Judaism by 1899

Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to have Islam viewed as equivalently "legitimate" in US cultures as Judaism was by 1899. Yes, it is "foreign," and "non-Christian," it isn't even "white." That goes without saying. They're basically "Irish," but what they're not is "black." They're people who believe in the same fundamental God as Protestant Americans, even if they're wrong and doomed to hell.

So how can Islam, and Islamic Americans, migrate and be integrated to an equivalent extent to European Jews by 1899 in the United States.

yours,
Sam R.

_____

Of course, here I must note that the social categories of the time aren't my choices.
 
An interesting question, but I think its hard to answer because I'm not sure that your premise is correct here on two counts:

1. Islam had a long history in the Americas, well back into the 1700s, and although Muslim immigration on the 10,000s scale did not occur until the 1890s-1900s, I wouldn't say that it was considered non legitimate - indeed, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Founding Fathers understood Islam as an established world religion on a par with Judaism. Of course it suffered from an Orientalist/Arabesque prejudice, with people alarmed and fascinated by it as something different, but that didn't prevent early Muslim migrants integrating into US society. Or, at least, made their integration significantly more difficult than that of Jews, Orthodox Christians, etc.

2. I think you might be underestimating the prejudice that existed towards Judaism in late c19th America. Remember that in any society feelings about a religion are bound up with cultural, social, and other factors. The influx of major immigration from Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire in the 1880s-1890s changed how many people in America felt about Judaism. Suddenly it was much more associated with a foreign [remember migrants would have been using Hebrew or Cyrillic script - even their market and street signs and newspapers would have looked alien] mass of poor, urban, immigrants. Indeed, I think part of the problem is you are asking if US Muslims can be integrated to the same extent as US Jews at a time when this second group was becoming less integrated.

Hope this helps...
 
An interesting question
Cheers.

1. Islam had a long history in the Americas, well back into the 1700s, and although Muslim immigration on the 10,000s scale did not occur until the 1890s-1900s, I wouldn't say that it was considered non legitimate - indeed, I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that. The Founding Fathers understood Islam as an established world religion on a par with Judaism. Of course it suffered from an Orientalist/Arabesque prejudice, with people alarmed and fascinated by it as something different, but that didn't prevent early Muslim migrants integrating into US society. Or, at least, made their integration significantly more difficult than that of Jews, Orthodox Christians, etc.

I'm talking about a kind of hegemonic / world-systems analysis of centrality to the metropole, or, in other language, of a position where Islam needs to be repeatedly referred to in local discourses or systems of oppression rather than being merely a baseline repressed religious view. While the founding fathers may have understood Islam to be a world religion, it wasn't present in an acknowledged form like British Judaism in the colonies, or as a result of the more radical church/state separations as a specific religion to be separated from the state (in the radical colonies). I'm talking about something more than integration, but the poly-culturalist perspective that Irish Catholicism or German Judaism received. Yes, I know here I'm glossing over the social relations that made Protestant derived atheism acceptable, or Protestant homogenisation sensible to the American. I'm not asking for an Islamic President: I'm asking for Islam being repeatedly mentioned in newspapers as a reason to restrict European migration in "code," of an absence of "redlining" but a failure to intermarry. Of a mass migration combined with discrimination.

2. I think you might be underestimating the prejudice that existed towards Judaism in late c19th America. Remember that in any society feelings about a religion are bound up with cultural, social, and other factors. The influx of major immigration from Eastern Europe and the Russian Empire in the 1880s-1890s changed how many people in America felt about Judaism. Suddenly it was much more associated with a foreign [remember migrants would have been using Hebrew or Cyrillic script - even their market and street signs and newspapers would have looked alien] mass of poor, urban, immigrants. Indeed, I think part of the problem is you are asking if US Muslims can be integrated to the same extent as US Jews at a time when this second group was becoming less integrated.

This is precisely what I'm getting at. I'm not fantasising some multiculturalist liberal utopia, but more interested in a situation where Islam is a "semi-accepted" position in the United States. "of the book" but foreign, wrong, possibly even "non-white," given how whiteness is construed varyingly. I'm not asking for a greater integration of Fred or Bob's import-export outlet. I'm interested in whether Malayan or Pakistani or Egyptian or Libyan Americans could be viewed as "at least they're not heathen," but "get them out of my neighbourhood and into a ghetto," whether there's an economic reason for significant migration that's sustainable, or whether this is completely out of bounds unless an Islamic revival happens inside the African American cultures.

Hope this helps...
I think it does, it clarifies much more specifically what I'm saying.
 
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I think this is achievable with a post 1900 POD as well. Have Israel either not exist or have it occupy Uganda or any other non-Muslim land. US foreign policy is still oriented to Muslim countries such as Pakistan and Somalia (the people there having a better opinion of the US because of no/different Israel). Alongside this, have a Stalin who lives longer kill millions of Jews and Muslims (a la Twilight of the Red Tsar) which makes America even more sympathetic to Jews, but there also emerges a sympathy for Muslims especially after the Muslim world tries to establish a broad Turkic Central Asian country (the individual ethnic groups are now too small to make a country). Also have a Muslim country collapse in a communist vs anti-communist civil war and have most of the refugees go to America. Eventually by the 2000s the number of Muslims in America are the same as Jews, and they are a solid conservative voting bloc as they were pre-9/11.

Either that, or you could have the Iranian revolution go differently and giving way to a democratic Iran, leading to little American distaste for the new Iranian government. Israel be a lot more aggressive in the Middle East and eventually there is an accident, with an Israeli jet bombing the American marines in 1983 instead of extremists, leading to America slowly drifting away from them. Israel feels betrayed and eventually adopts a fortress mentality vis a vis the Middle East, and eventually a government takes control which isn't fully anti-American, but very critical of the US (akin to some of the leftist governments in Latin America). However this new government is not a leftist one, and is a lot more aggressive with the Palestinians, leading to an infitada which is broadcast on American television, and the media shows mostly Israelis attacking Palestinians instead of the other way around, leading to even more American sympathy. Somalia staying together could butterfly the disastrous intervention, Saddam dying in the 1980s could lead to no Gulf War and no stereotypes of Arab leaders being like Saddam, and a Gulf War-esque intervention in Yugoslavia to save the Bosnians and Kovosars will endear America to the Muslim World. Russia becoming anti-American in the 1990s (be it controlled by a far-right or far-left government) will lead to American sympathy for the Chechens, as this Russia either goes through the same path or is even more brutal than IOTL. By 2010 the US is skewed towards the Arabs, Israel is distrusted and there is no Muslim extremism towards the US.

I know these are both post 1900 pods but I found these interesting, and they basically answer your question of "How can Muslims be viewed in a positive light?".
 
Im going to start thread in that chat know thats interesting as hell, need to know more.

Thing is though, by the 2000s even with no 9/11 it's probably too late. Iran still hates America and is a country which just stood by as extremists took over the embassy, Pakistan is viewed as a rogue nuclear state, Iraq is viewed as a rogue state which America went to war with, Israeli lobbying is still going on, America still went through that disastrous intervention in Somalia, and the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were already attacked, along with the USS Cole. It will take some time for Muslims to become Americanized in this setting (perhaps if Bin Laden is killed in the 1980s by a Soviet soldier, it could butterfly the attacks on the embassies and on USS Cole. Maybe have America intervene in Latin America in the 2000s for some reason instead of the Middle East, that might divert America's attention).
 
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