Calibri;Consolas;Times New Roman;  Today's afternoon of panel discussions and exchange is part of our Academy Evenings series of talks held throughout the state and here in Madison.  This fall we are focusing on the theme perspectives on a post-9/11 world, and we hope you will join us for other events mentioned in our season schedule, and we hope you'll feel free to take one of those on your way out or else just visit our website at www.WisconsinAcademy.org for further information about all of our events and about becoming a member of the Wisconsin Academy.  The Wisconsin Academy is an independent non-profit dedicated to creating spaces for civil discourse on urgent issues facing our state.  And that's why we're all here today.  So thank you so much for joining us.  Our second panel of the afternoon, Islam and American: Citizenship and Democracy, brings together three extraordinary individuals, Louise Cainkar, associate professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Studies at Marquette University.  Louise, you want to raise your hand? Charles Cohen, on the other end, UW Madison professor of history and religious studies and director of the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions, and Asifa Quraishi, and assistant professor of law at UW Madison.  How about I start with Louise and go down, but then Charles is going to lead off our panel, and we'll leave at least a half an hour for your questions so that we can respond and learn together from those.  So Louise Cainkar's area of expertise includes Arab American studies, Muslim American studies, and immigrant communities, fields in which she has published extensively. 

 Her recent award winning book, Homeland Insecurity: The Arab American and Muslim American Experience After 9/11, draws upon an analysis of national security policies and historic stereotyping.  She has conducted research in Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Palestine, and Yemen.  She recently completed six months research in Jordan and Yemen and Palestine for a comparative study of second generation Arab Americans who are raised transnationally and was in the New York Times today.  >> Friday.  >> Friday.  Friday.  Charles, well, we'll skip Charles and go to Asifa first because she's in the middle.  [LAUGHTER] Asifa specializes in comparative Islamic and US constitutional law, and her recent publications include articles on comparative legal theory, Islamic criminal law, and Muslim family law in United States courts.  She has served as a public delegate on the United States delegation to the United Nations commission on the status of women and many others.  She is currently on the governing board of several organizations including the National Association of Muslim Lawyers. 

 Professor Quraishi holds a doctorate from Harvard and other degrees from Columbia Law School and the University of California at Davis and the University of California at Berkeley and has served as law clerk in the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th circuit.  And lastly but not least, who's leading off our panel, Charles Cohen, who came to UW Madison in 1984 with a BA at Yale and his PhD at the University of California Berkeley.  A scholar much in demand as a speaker around the world and an award winning teacher, Professor Cohen is the co-editor of Theology and the Soul of the Liberal State.  He is currently co-editing a book on religious pluralism in modern America for Oxford University Press.  He's inaugurated three major programs at UW Madison including the Lubar Institute for the Study of Abrahamic Religions, which opened in 2005 and whose mission is to create better understandings of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam by encouraging ongoing discussion of these traditions and their interrelationships among scholars, members of those traditions and the general public.  So we have just a great treat for all of us, and I'm looking forward, I'm sure as you are, to the question and answer session at the end of their, each about 10-minute, presentations.  So thank you very much, again, for being with us.  Thank you panel for taking the time and giving the time today to be with us.  Thank you very much.  Charles. 

 [APPLAUSE] >> Thank you.  There seems to be differing interpretations of how long we're going to be, so I'll compress what I had tried to say, and I'm sure some of these remarks can come up later in the discussion.  If nothing else, 9/11 has focused Americans' attention on Islam and Muslims who went from being a relatively invisible minority of Americans to becoming one of the most interrogated and, according to the polls, suspected groups of Americans that one could find.  As a historian, I want to provide some of the historical context for evaluating concerns that my colleagues will then address.  I want to start off by saying that Muslims are not by any long shot the first religious minority to receive Americans' collective civic evil eye, and I want to suggest that throughout our history these concerns have been far more political than they have been religious and to suggest that what we're seeing now is not something new.  It's something that's deeply embedded in the historical dynamic of American religious pluralism.  I think as I look out on the debates since 9/11 about Islam and about American Muslims, I see very little debates about tenets of Islamic theology.  So that, for instance, Islam poses a radically monotheist vision in the Koran directly opposed to Christian trinitarianism.  How often have you heard that on Fox News? [LAUGHTER] Probably not much.  Nor, for that matter, have I seen a great deal of debate about, say, Muslim religious practice. 

 Boy, those folks pray a lot, don't they? In some countries, France, for example, has had some issues about Muslims praying in the streets, etc, etc.  That has not happened here.  In other words, I would suggest the issues that trouble Americans about Islam are not about religion particularly.  I think they have more to do with political control.  The obvious ones are terrorism.  People who have attacked us in the name of Islam.  They have killed many people, including, of course, Muslims.  And so that's one concern.  But more insidiously, I think, American debate has come to focus on a number of things, but I'll pinpoint one and that is Sharia.  Muslims want to turn the United States into an Islamic state. 

 They want to impose Sharia.  And behind this discourse I find a certain logic that as far as I can deconstruct it, because it's not always apparent or there's some ellipses in it, but I think it goes something like this.  Islam is necessarily an expansionist religion.  It has been and continues to be allied with state power, and where it does not have it, it seeks it.  Muslims try to impose Sharia wherever they live.  Sharia is a system of law that is incompatible with American legal customs and values.  Therefore, and the syllogism then presses on with this logic, all Muslims want to impose Sharia, and, therefore, and here I think is the kicker, Muslims can't be good citizens.  They cannot be part of the American civil polity because their primary political and legal values are very much counter to what we see as the values and legal processes of the American national state.  I think there is a minor chorus of a critique that Islam is a false religion, that it teaches a dubious morality, but I think the major concern, again, is what I would call political.  Muslims want to deprive Americans of their rights. 

 And so the questions that Americans ask and which this panel addresses, and I think the title of the panel is absolutely apt, is Islam compatible with democracy? And I think even more potent for us, can Muslims be good citizens? I want to approach this, again, as a historian by providing some of the historical background because these questions have been asked before and not of Muslims.  Religion has often been seen as a political threat in the history of the United States.  I'll give you two examples.  You're probably familiar with both.  One, and then there are more than two but there are two at least major ones.  One, of course, are Roman Catholics.  Particularly in the 19th century those battles became bloody.  In 1834, a mob burned an Ursuline convent in Boston because of the supposed doings that were going on in secret between nuns and men whom they were supposedly leading astray.  Nothing you can't see on the internet now, but in 1834 it was a big deal.  They were also bible wars, sometimes just dealing with whose bible should be read in the schools, but in the 1840s those became mortal conflicts as well. 

 So certainly there's a long history of protestant theological disagreement with Catholicism and vice versa, of course, and I wouldn't want to minimize any of that.  But a lot of the critique of Catholicism was, and continued to be into the 20th century, though it was a little more polite than it was in the 19th century, is that Catholics could not be citizens because their premier loyalty is to a foreign potentate: the pope.  And so the pope is viewed as not simply or primarily a religious figure but as a political figure to whom Catholics must give their foremost alliance, and since they are allied, they cast themselves as presumably citizens of a foreign power, they cannot be American citizens.  A second example is Mormons.  Let me quote from Governor Lilburn Boggs of Missouri who in 1838 said that the Mormons must be treated as enemies and must be exterminated or driven from the state if necessary for the public peace.  They're outrages are beyond all description.  Now, there were certainly issues about Mormon theology and even more Mormon practice, particularly once Joseph Smith begins to unveil his vision of celestial marriage, but there was a great deal about Mormon political practice and presence that also disturbed people.  Mormons would be accused of voting in blocks.  They'll just outvote us, even as politicians, from first one party and then another, sought their votes.  And then when they go to Utah, well, to Deseret, excuse me, at the time, they begin to create their own court system, and basically a state within a state. 

 So is there some reality, political reality, to these threats? I think we have to say yes to some degree.  The pope was historically a potentate.  His lands had shrunk by the 19th century, but he still had the papal states.  In the past, the pope had excommunicated protestant rulers and, although this was back in the 16th century, had said that any Catholic who assassinated Elizabeth I would not have committed a sin.  Mormons claimed a vast swath of the Intermountain West.  If you look at the maps that Mormons had hoped that the state of Desert would occupy, it's basically now everything from the front range of the Rockies to parts of the west coast.  San Bernardino was originally a Muslim town.  And in this area they set up their own state, and at least a couple of them used terms like theodemocracy that rang rather oddly in American ears.  In yet, I think history proved that those threats were well overrated.  The papacy never controlled Catholic votes, nor for that matter did the Catholic hierarchy which steadfastly refused to take positions, at least in the 19th century, over slavery, for example, when protestants were very busy taking positions because they didn't want to be politically involved. 

 Catholics melded into the American political system, and one of them, it's rumored, even became president.  [LAUGHTER] Mormons were also integrated.  Indeed, their religious and political institutions were suppressed by the protestant national state.  I don't think it's too strong to say that basically they were blackmailed, that Utah would never would have become a state as long as Mormons exercised polygamy and there were, over a 20-30 year period, there were major attacks on the legal system that Mormons had set up.  Moreover, when we start looking at why Catholics came to this country, they came for a lot of reasons, mostly because they wanted better economic opportunity, which is why most people came to the Untied States.  They saw it as a land in which they could prosper.  The history of the Mormons is more complicated, and I'm not going to treat it in 12 seconds, but, ultimately, Mormons have adapted to the United States, as has it to them, and we now have two, not one, Mormon presidential candidates.  So I would suggest that the dynamics of American religious pluralism means that religious bodies and the American national state have adapted to each other.  I see the conflict, or at least the discussions about Islam now, as another instance of that.  Is Sharia a threat? Well, first we have to understand what Sharia actually involves. 

 I'm going to let Professor Quraishi, who's and expert on that talk.  One of the issues or one of the strategies about being on a panel is choose your colleagues well so that they can take all the hard ones.  But I think it's fair to say that Sharia isn't necessarily what most of us think it is.  And even if it is what we think it might be, I don't hear a whole lot of American Muslims clamoring to establish Sharia law.  Though there is a terrible fear in the American polity right now which is manifesting itself in states passing laws, or at least statements against the imposition of Sharia law.  What I do hear Muslims saying, and Professor Cainkar will, I'm sure, address this, is they want to practice their religion in a way that is consonant with America's highest ideals of religious freedom.  I'd say to the rest of us, to non-Muslim Americans that we should not assume that Islam is a unity in the same way that we should not assume that Catholicism or Judaism or that any religion, that the adherence of any religions think of themselves in the same way, nor should we think that American Muslims all want to impose an Islamic state that will set Sharia over all of us.  I think I'm asking you then, as a historian, to be sensitive to the capacities of our own religious history.  American Muslims, for their part, I think have to learn how to function as a religious minority in America, but I would say they've picked an opportune place in which to do that.  So let me end by giving some short answers to the questions that I think this panel poses. 

 Is Islam compatible with democracy? At the global level, I think that's a very interesting question.  I think we're going to have to see.  The events of this year, the so-called Arab Spring, I think leave us with great open-ended questions.  As a historian, I'm not a prophet.  I don't know how this will turn out.  But if you asked me if Islam is compatible with democracy in the United States, I would have to answer, on the basis of what I see and the basis of our religious dynamic historically, yes, indeed.  And can Muslims be good citizens of the United States? I would say of course, they already are.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Very nice.  Thank you.  I feel short here. 

 Can you see me? [LAUGHTER] Okay, I'm going to look at this topic from a little bit different angle.  I have just returned from six months in the Middle East studying transnational Arab American Muslim teenagers whose immigrant parents brought them back home for high school.  I was interested in learning how these overseas experiences affect these teenagers sense of being American.  American Muslims as a group are often held up to question for the loyalty to the United States which is, to me, after decades of research and many, many personal interactions, a baseless question.  And also baseless according to research and recent poles.  It is clear that there are some interested parties who, for their own reasons, seek to exclude Muslims from full American citizenship and who prefer such charges to build support for their objectives.  Of course this attempt to exclude a newer and growing religious group is not a new phenomenon in the United States, so we just heard about that.  Okay, upon the occurrence of the Fort Hood murders in November 2009, perpetrated by a clearly highly disturbed second generation Arab American Muslim, and after responding to many media calls on this matter and to questions about what might be the effects of Muslim American transnational ties and visits to the parents' homelands on being American.  I thought, well, we can offer up all sorts of examples to prove that American Muslims feel good about being American and that transnational ties and visits to the homeland somehow do not turn American born Muslims against their place of birth, but we really didn't have any systematic research on this.  So I proposed such a study for which I received funding. 

 I had a one-semester sabbatical, and I launched into an ethnographic journey into the lives of nearly 100 Arab American Muslim teenagers, age 16 to 18, attending high school in Amman, Jordan; Sanaa, Yemen; and Ramallah, Palestine.  I learned many things from this research, but I will focus today on the points of relevance to our topic at hand: citizenship and democracy.  First of all, I learned that these youth recall very fondly their lives in the United States.  So they left generally around between age 10 and 12.  They spent their first 10 to 12 years of their lives here.  They spoke of the schools, the neighborhoods, of sports, of cousins, of shopping malls, of food, of friends, and all of which they missed very dearly.  In fact, the overwhelming majority said they were really upset when their parents told them they were leaving the United States to go to school overseas because this is their home.  Then they found out, upon living in these new places, that they really were American.  They thought differently, they dressed differently, the walked differently, and of course they spoke English.  In other words, living overseas crystallized their sense of who they were, and that was American. 

 What was America to them? A place where there is freedom, a place where there are many types of people, and a place where one can dream.  If that wasn't enough, they learned that everybody else saw them as Americans too.  We know how social groups, and especially teenagers, are eager to point out who is different, so at times they had to take some flack for being American, not because they were American or not because American was bad, but simply because they were different.  Boys wore their pants slung lower.  Girls preferred comfortable clothing to high heels and tight jeans.  So you could tell by the way somebody dressed, actually, walking down the street if they had come from America.  The majority of these American Muslim youth enroll in private high schools that have an all-English curricular stream, many of which were built just for teens like them.  And in two of the three countries I studied, the Ministries of Education accepted two exams as equivalent to the required comprehensive high school completion exam to facilitate their return for university education in the United States.  In other words, these Muslim American teens end up attending schools with teens just like themselves, all of them trying to figure out who they are as persons.  Over a period of time, this process becomes complicated. 

 Your parents want you to learn the language of their homeland.  To develop your pride in your Arab roots, your parents want you to understand what it means to be Muslim, and each teenager goes through their own process of figuring out this mix.  Nearly a hundred percent of these youths said they plan to return to the United States for the rest of their lives, and especially to go to college.  They have big dreams of a college education and a career, males and females alike.  They hope to marry and start families in their mid to late 20s when they're stable.  And they want to marry and American and a Muslim just like themselves.  Initial data analysis shows that many of these youths said they would return to the United States with a deeper and more confident understanding of who they are.  While there was no single answer to the question, who am I, responses ranged from I'm an Arab American, I'm a Palestinian American, I'm a Jordanian American, I'm a Yemeni American, I'm a Muslim American to I don't know, I have no idea, or I don't fit any category, which is a position they think the United States has plenty of room to accommodate.  They see this as one of the great things about the states is it's such a mix of peoples so you can be who you are.  In addition, many of the youths stated they had increased level of understanding and pride on the part of themselves they knew only peripherally in the US, the part that is denigrated in American culture. 

 For example, I just have two quotes here.  One young woman said to me, "Before I came here, I didn't like being Palestinian because I did not know what it was.  I just thought we were weird and we weren't allowed to do anything because we lived in America.  But when I came here, I really learned what being Palestinian means and it's a really good thing, actually, and I'm very proud now, and I wish I could take this back to America and tell everybody what it's like to know who you are." And another young woman said to me, "I now, after this experience, have the courage to say yes, I'm an Arab American.  I want to be able to stand up and say I'm proud of who I am.  I want to be able to wear a hata," that's the checkered Arab scarf, "and not feel that I need to take it off and be ashamed.  I want to be able to say Arabic words in public." I learned that when they left for the Middle East, they had highly negative views of their own self.  Like I asked them what they expected when they moved to these countries, and they expected terrorists and they expected backwards people and uneducated people and economies that weren't developed.  They had very negative self-images.  And these were developed from the American and some of the Arabic media too. 

 So, seeing that they had these negative images of who they were, these journey sojourns to the Middle East really have positive outcomes.  So, they will return to the United States stronger persons, feeling good about being American and about being Arab and Muslim.  And hopefully they will be better able to handle the troubles that may face them as young adults.  But what will they return to? The United States has changed since they left three or four years ago.  Alongside all of its economic issues, there are powerful campaigns, even social movements, seeking to exclude American Muslims from American democratic life, from social, cultural, and political citizenship.  These campaigns and movements have ramped up anti-Muslim sentiments among the American public.  These are not negative views holding on from post-September 11th days.  We were seeing much progress in acceptance of American Muslims in the years following 9/11, and we saw just a rapid increase in American Muslim civic engagement after 9/11.  No, these more recent social movements are cultivating hatred, they're leveraging 9/11 for their own benefit, and you see them performing as Koran burnings, Ground Zero Mosque opposition, anti-Sharia campaigns.  They're heightening is a recent phenomenon, and it gets more news coverage than all of the amazing accomplishments of American Muslims over the last 10 years. 

 I'm speaking about American Muslim youth group soup kitchens, civic action campaigns, get out the vote drives, reclaiming abandoned properties and build safer neighborhoods, Arab American filmmaking, Arab America music, Muslims also filmmaking, music, all these campaigns.  American Muslim, despite the pressures and challenges, or perhaps because of them, have risen to new heights of civic engagement and citizenship in this country.  But as I kept up with the American news while I was living in the Middle East, I could not help but be horrified by what's happening in this nation.  Observing from the outside, reading about all the hate promotion coming from a range of sectors, but especially disturbing when it came from elected officials and persons intending to run for the office of the President of the United States.  I had to ask what are we doing and where are we going as a nation? Is closing down democracy by excluding certain groups a positive step for this country? And I wondered how these youth that I had just spent six months interviewing, so convinced that the United States is their homeland, will manage this hatred when they come back.  And sometimes I wonder if this isn't what some of those hate promoters want, some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  On the measure of Islam and American democracy today, I can only conclude that the homeland these American Muslim youth dream to return to will not be a welcoming place.  Thank you.  [APPLAUSE]  >> I'm going to continue with some of that but try to turn it into some more real life examples of citizenship and democracy of American Muslims.  But I want to echo what we've just heard, that it seems to be getting worse, not better, since 9/11. 

 Basically, the attitude about are Muslims part of American democracy, can they be, and the kinds of examples you just gave, that it's a benefit to a presidential campaign to say you won't appoint a Muslim to your candidate or that a Mosque is a representation not of the spiritual home of Americans, some Americans, but it represent inherently something about terrorism, and, therefore, it's offensive to build it in some particular place.  So things have gotten so bad that even Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert find it relevant and necessary to address this.   >> Kareem Abdul Jabbar.   >> Sorry.  >> That's all right.  This is from the rally to restore sanity and/or fear, if you don't recognize that reference.   >> Kareem, my man.   Hey, Kareem.  Kareem Abdul Jabbar is Muslim.  >> Well, that's not fair, Jon. 

 That's not a fair example.  Kareem is cool.  We're friends.  >> Well, we're acquaintances.  You know, a real friend understands that no matter what religious position someone plays, we're all on the same team.  [CHEERS] >> There are terrorists and racists and Stalinists and theocrats, but those are titles that must be earned.  You must have the resume.  >> Okay, so I'm going to be cutting to a couple of different videos, so if you tolerate the dark room, I'll try to set them up.  Basically, I do have all the credentials that were listed, and I do teach Islamic law, and I could answer questions about Sharia and is Islam compatible with democracy, and I could tell you stories about and reasons why Islam is not a threat to the United States and how Muslims in America are very happy and proud to follow the laws of the land and how many of us, like me, are very proud to take an oath to uphold the Constitution as part of our job.  But I think what's really missing from these American conversation about all of this stuff is a face. 

 It's actual people.  So unless you happen to know a real life American Muslim, you have very little in your own knowledge and your own sort of awareness to balance out what's showing up in the news about terrorism, etc, etc, and so it's very difficult to then sort through what's hyperbole and what's real and what's really a threat and what's not, and you're very vulnerable to rhetoric that's often politically motivated.  So I want to use this time, rather than answering academic questions about those things, which I'm happy to do in the Q&A, I, instead, want to use this time to introduce you to some Muslim Americans.  I want you to see their faces, I want you to hear their stories, I want you to appreciate them as people and as fellow Americans.  So we see one of them, Kareem Abdul Jabbar, in this Jon Stewart video.  A lot of people know Kareem Abdul Jabbar is Muslim.  Some people don't.  There's many other famous people who happen to be Muslim.  Another sports hero is Hakeem Olajuwon.  Both of these individuals, by the way, it would show up in American awareness that they were Muslim if they happened to be playing a game during the month of Ramadan and then they were fasting through the game and then it was remarked at how amazing that was. 

 Also, Mos Def, the rapper, is Muslim.  Dave Chappelle, the comedian is Muslim.  And all of these are practicing, self-acknowledged Muslims.  But what about the not so famous? Most of us are not so famous.  So what I've noticed is actually lately what's newsworthy about Muslims is how unnewsworthy we really would be without the Muslim in our title.  We really are normal people, right? And it's really not that weird, our daily life and everything else.  So one of the really beautiful ways of describing this is a great movie that was just released in limited release this weekend called Fordson, and I want to show a brief trailer of that movie right now.   >> You have the chance to play football today.  You fight til the end.  You got that? >> Yes! >> Let's go! [CHEERs] >> That game plan at Fordson High School is similar to countless other prep teams in the country. 

 But it is also why this story is uniquely theirs to tell.  [SPEAKING ARABIC] >> Our kids, who are 90%-95% Muslim Arab American, are playing this all-American game.  You have some people that just don't understand and don't want to understand what Muslims are about and who they truly are.  >> I think people are just ignorant.  I think if people don't know what's going on or they don't know who we are.  They've never met us before and they're making judgments before they've even met us.  >> We're all teenagers.  We all have the same, we all like the same things.  We all have the same aspects in life.  >> Arabs as called terrorists, I still know how that feels. 

 >> They happen to be Arab American, they happen to be Muslim American, but they're American high school kids and these kids are playing football and football, just like it is in Texas, in Ohio, at Fordson is kind of a religion.  >> For generations, faith, family, and football have bonded the Arab American community at Fordson.  Football begins in August here, and in recent summers so too the holy days of Ramadan when Muslims fast from sunrise to sunset.  No water nor food mixed with the intense exercise created a challenge for those who practiced both sport and faith with the same passion.  The solution? The country's first overnight football practice.  >> I know we tweaked it because of religious reasons, but, quite honestly, it was more for safety than it was for anything else.  >> Five-minute water break.  >> Our coach would reassure us that we had to stay hydrated, and he would talk about things that happened in the nation with kids passing out because of the heat.  >> Players and families not of Muslim faith never questioned the decision to practice all night.  >> My coaches just called my mom and talked to her, just asked her could I practice at night. 

 She said that would be fine.  >> Whatever is better for the team is what I want to do, so I agreed with it and went through with it.  >> Even those guys are non-Muslim faith, they're still all family so what we do, they're going to do.  They're going to breathe the same air we breathe.  If we're going to practice at night, they're going to practice at night with us.  >> Give our guy a chance to catch the ball.  >> The midnight to 4:00 AM schedule has demonstrated the strength of this diverse community and proven to be stronger than any controversy challenging its practice.  >> People will send emails saying what's going on in Dearborn? You're practicing Sharia law.  You're doing it.  I say no, we're practicing constitutional law, thank you. 

 We're doing it.  >> We're following American laws.  We're following board policy, state laws, and federal laws.  And we're meeting the needs of constituency.  It's not different than the Christian faith wanting certain days off of school because they're important to their holidays.  >> If you're out there saying that Muslims in Dearborn are having to do things that are against America, there's just no evidence of it.  In fact, the evidence is quite to the contrary.  >> We're not evil.  Anything that you see in the mainstream media, like in the Middle East that happens, it's nothing like that over here.  We're just normal Americans. 

 >> Ultimately, our youth are just like any other youth in the United States.  You look at any town, any city in this country, Friday nights, what are they doing in the fall? They're going to play a football game.  They're going to watch a football game.  >> So that was, how more American can you get? Football.  That happens to be in Dearborn, Michigan, where there's a very large population of descendents of Arab immigrants, large population of Muslim Americans as well as Christian Arabs also in that area.  So that demographic created that situation.  That is a feature from a local news channel about this team.  This team is featured in this movie called Fordson.  I think it's called Faith, Fasting, and Football or something like that.  It's released in limited play. 

 I think it's in Chicago right now.  So that's an example of we're normal, we're just like everybody else, but I'm aware of the other part of this title for this talk being citizenship.  And so, okay, you're normal but are you really good for America? Are you good citizens? Do you do anything that actually helps our society? And, of course, we do.  Just like any group of Americans, some do more than others.  There are many, many examples.  Louise also mentioned some just very briefly a list of things that are being done as good societal civic engagement by American Muslims.  I picked one as an example to feature here.  This is a video featuring the organization IMAN, which stands for Inner-City Muslim Action Network, based in Chicago.  And the text of this goes pretty fast, so I'm going to read you the text ahead of time so that you can then just take in the images.  So the text that you're going to see on the screen says: On Chicago's south side, food deserts have become the norm and liquor stores are the only place to quench your thirst. 

 Foreclosed homes and buildings riddle every block, threatening any sense of community, becoming hotbeds for gang activity, violent crimes, and drug abuse.  Unable to pay skyrocketing healthcare costs and with no insurance for support, many residents are plagued with chronic but curable illnesses reducing their quality of life.  For a generation looking to serve, IMAN is providing unique space to inspire Muslim and non-Muslim communities, the human community, to take transformative action.  We're working for health, wellness, and healing in inner-city communities, challenging the status quo of Muslim run liquor stores and no access to fresh foods.  There will be no more food deserts.  Our community will become an oasis for healthy foods.  We're helping brothers rebuild their communities house by house, erasing the stigma of an ex-offender while investing in a greener future.  We're attempting to provide a holistic clinic experience because we believe that healthcare is a basic human right.  We're looking toward the future to ensure another generation can share in our inspiration and hope.  IMAN is connecting the local to the global and striving to create a transformative model of service for the Muslim community and the world at large. 

  [SPEAKING ARABIC] >> That's Mos Def right there.  >> When you look at the -- campaign, we don't have access to fresh foods or we don't have grocery stores within a six-mile radius in communities that once had dignified businesses.  The store that we're working with has opted to say, look, I'll curve some of my business ideas of just making a profit to provide fresh vegetables and foods in my store.  We've talked to people who've lived in the neighborhood for 10 years, after receiving a smoothy from us saying, man, we're glad that you're here.  >> When you're looking at how marginalized things are around here, how impoverished things are, how tough just economical overall things are, and then we have so many dedicated and committed people that are from this community, that are in the community, it's really inspiring when you are focusing in on helping the collective or doing good work, you end up finding your own greatness.  What we're doing is we're doing -- and these are the differences that you can make possible.  They're lives, yours, mine, and the people around us.  We have the ability to influence in a positive way the direction and trajectory of their lives.  >> That's my doctor.  She saved my life. 

 >> As we move into this next new decade, we continue to ask that you keep IMAN both in your prayers and in mind as you think about the type of transformative work that is reflective both of our traditions and of the best of our values as we seek to work with some of the most marginalized communities and inspire them with not only they can become but what they can inspire in all of us.  >> So, that's IMAN.  There's many, many other organizations similar to that and doing other civic related things that aren't focused on inner-city kinds of issues.  These, by the way, all started before 9/11.  This is part of the natural evolution of American Muslims being part of our society.  There's a lot of things featured in there.  There's the free clinic.  There's the food service.  There's another free clinic run by Muslims that was started by medical students in Los Angeles in 1992.  IMAN's 1995, 1997. 

 So these have been around a while, and there's other earlier sort of collective action kind of things that have been happening as long as Muslims have been in the United States in various forms.  What I want to point out is that how much all of this is quintessentially American to me.  They exemplify the core idea of democracy that we all share in an ownership of everything around us, the good and the bad, and that we have a voice in how they are and how they should be and so that we, individuals, are as responsible as the next person.  So the idea that where you see a need, if you have an idea, want to fix something, you roll up your sleeves, you get a petition started, you run for office, you collect action in your local community, and not saying to yourself someone should really do something about that.  We have a sense that we're part of this.  We're all involved in this together.  It's that pride of ownership that I see is really the core concept of democracy.  That's America.  That's also Islam.  The problem is when we miss the American and the real what I think is the true Islam because of the Muslim stereotype, and we can't see past that stereotype ,and so we tend to make judgments based on fear and a lot of cases just misinformation, and we then attribute all of that to the person we see, and we're not unable to see all of these nuances. 

 I want to end with a short video from a Muslim American, the first Muslim American elected to congress, Keith Ellison, representing the state of Minnesota, I think it's the 5th district Minnesota.  By the way, when he took his oath of office, does anyone know what book, first of all, he took the oath on? Koran.  Who's Koran was it? >> Thomas Jefferson.  >> It was Thomas Jefferson's Koran.  Thomas Jefferson owned several Korans and donated them to the Library of Congress.  I thought that was a brilliant move to, again, show the historical relevance of Islam in the United States.  So he, like I said, serves in the House of Representatives representing Minnesota.  He, among others, but he's so public a politician that he's been accused just because he's a Muslim that he may in some way be some kind of part of the infiltration and threat of Islam to the United States.  And he's brilliantly responded to that.  The video I'm going to show here, some of you may have already seen it, it was his testimony during recent hearings on the radicalization of Muslims set up by Peter King. 

 And this is Keith Ellison's contribution.   >> Mohammad Salman Hamdani was a 23-year-old paramedic, a New York City police cadet, and Muslim American.  He was one of those brave first responders who tragically lost his life in 9/11 terrorist attacks almost a decade ago.  As the New York Times eulogized, he wanted to be seen as an all-American kid.  He wore number 79 on the high school football at Bayside Queens where he lived.  He was called Sal by his friends.  He became a research assistant at the Rockefeller University and drove and ambulance part-time.  One Christmas he sang Handel's Messiah in Queens.  He saw all of the Star Wars movies, and it's well-known that his new Honda was the one that read with the young Jedi license plates.  Mr. Hamdani bravely sacrificed his life to try to help others on 9/11. 

 After the tragedy, some people tried to smear his character, solely because of his Islamic faith.  Some people spread false rumors and speculated that he was in league with the attackers because he was a Muslim.  But it was only when his remains were identified that these lies were exposed.  Mohammad Salman Hamdani was a fellow American who gave his life for other Americans.  His life should not be identified as just a member of an ethnic group or just a member of a religion but as an American who gave everything for his fellow Americans.   >> Thank you very much.  [APPLAUSE]  >> Well, it's now a time for you to ask questions, and please feel free to address any of the panelist or all of them but do wait for the microphone so that everyone can hear and it can be properly recorded.  So thank you so much.  >> My name is Alan Weisbard.  I'm a colleague of Chuck's and Asifa's at the university. 

 Asifa, you used a phrase that I think resonated with the presentations of all three of you, and that was quintessentially American.  And what I want to ask is what we should and should not learn from the experiences of European democracies facing challenges that are similar to those that Louise particularly identified but resonated in each of the presentations? How much are the questions we're struggling with broadly about participation in democratic societies, how much are their special features of the American experience that will distinguish how things play out here from how they're playing out in other parts of the world? >> A topic I love to talk about.  I'll be brief.  It's part of the social movements in these campaigns to exclude Muslims in the United States really came out of Europe.  Muslims in Europe have a totally different situation than Muslims in the United States.  They came there, historically, for very different reasons.  Most of them were guest workers.  They were not by and large citizens or offered citizenship, and in many of those countries that remains the case.  They're low income.  They're ghetto. 

 It's a totally different social demography.  So the issues of Europe are not the issues of the United States, but a lot of these people, these organized social movement people to try to stimulate anti-Muslim notions in the United States try to make that connection so people here get scared.  But I really, there's nothing demographically, historically, politically, civically similar about Muslims in Europe, and of course in Europe there are variations between countries, and Muslims in the United States.  >> I would just add to that that in my observation, I don't know how much this is a total, complete description, but my observation is that religious freedom in the United States means something a little bit different than religious freedom in Europe.  And the idea of secularism is something different here than it is in Europe.  And so secularism in many European countries means assimilation to the existing ethnic national norm.  And the United States, because of our own history of immigration and accommodation of difference, I think the best of America is when we accept and embrace that difference and come together and find out common ground, and that's our voice rather than those who are different must become like us, and then we have a debate over who is the us.  And I think that, to me, that's the biggest difference in how our democracy does and should operate.  >> I think to that I'll just add a historical note.  I think that the values of religious freedom are deeply, deeply engrained in this country, constitutionally but historically and culturally. 

 They're deeply rooted in the 18th and in some places even in the 17th centuries.  I think that may be in part why the issues about Islam, at least, again, as I identify them, are not religious.  That is, people aren't saying we can't accommodate these people religiously, we can't accommodate them politically.  But I think that that value, which I think is part of the better angels of our political nature, is always there and always rubs up against the counter-tendencies that all of us have been talking about.   >> Hi.  Thank you very much.  I have read that there are some folks who practice the Sunni type of Islam.  They believe that 60 years of tyranny is better than a day of chaos and that democracy is inherently chaotic and messy.  I hope what I've heard, what I've read, a tiny little bit about is wrong or that I've not gotten it correct, but that there are elements of the Koran when fundamentally interpreted that say that democracy is forbidden, inherently evil, counter to Islam.  I'm not sure where that, is there anything like that in the Koran? Where would the fundamentalists, the Taliban, be finding that, and where does that distortion come from? >> Wow, you got time for a class? That's a lot in one question. 

 So, first of all, there isn't anything specific about democracy in the Koran.  There couldn't be.  It would be anachronistic to try to have a concept that's so modern have been addressed in a scriptural document from 1400 some years ago.  So there is commentary about just government, and it identifies past rulers as good and bad.  Some of them also in the Bible, by the way.  Islam believes in all the same prophets as the Bible.  So Solomon and Queen of Sheba and things like that.  So there's indications of a good governor and what a good governor would do, but nothing very definitive.  In fact, the difference between the Sunnis and the Shias in the beginning was a political difference over who should rule, and that's what started some eventual theological differences.  And so there isn't any direct about how a government should be. 

 In fact, that is why there is so much debate within the Muslim community about that, and the quote that you gave is one of many political theorists about what a government should be like.  What's a good caliph, what's a good ruler, what's a good imam, and there's a debate.  One person felt very strongly that keeping social order and keeping people safe, even if it was a dictatorship, was better than the anarchy of unsafety and chaos and violence in the streets which is what often results with total chaos to anarchy.  He wasn't speaking about democracy being total chaos.  He was just saying the opposite.  And there were many Muslim political theorists who disagreed with that and then ensures the entire volumes of political theory within Muslim legal discourse.  Why do people, like the Taliban, make up some kind of connection between these things? Well, why does any political leader to do anything to try to grab things that have religious resonance with people to make a political point? So they couldn't be pulling off of anything Koranic about democracy, but you could, I don't actually know if the Taliban have used that particular quote, but say, oh, see, chaos is bad and isn't democracy chaos, look how chaotic democracy is, and then make an argument.  Well, you can pick apart any one of those premises and disagree.  And, in fact, many Muslims have disagreed, and I think the discussion of the Arab spring was brought up, and I have said many times that the antidote to Bin Laden is what is going on in the Arab revolutions today.  Those are dignity-based revolutions based on their human desire to govern themselves, which many argue there is evidence in Islamic history that is supportive of that concept that is counter to whatever dictatorships we've had in the past and in the present. 

 And it is, I think that is an indication that anybody's who's arguing against democracy, they're going to see the real life reality of, the workability of changing your society based on that kind of peaceful resistance as a better way than violence.  And I think the entire Arab world is seeing the success of that and being energized by it.  >> I just want to add that you can't judge people by a sentence in a book.  I just came from living in predominantly Sunni Muslim part of the world, and everybody's talking about democracy.  So they don't seem to be any sentiments among Sunnis against democracy in the real world.  >> I think finally, too, a couple of points about thought patterns that we have in trying to make sense of these things.  One is let me ask you to fill in the blank: 1.3 billion blank think that...  Now, let's put Christians in that instead of Muslims.  1.3 billion, or let's take out the Shiites, let's take out the protestants, so something like 1.2 billion Catholics think all the same.  So one issue is be very careful to essentialize the thinking of any group about anything. 

 The second point might be if we look at some of the 17th and 18th century Anglo-American thinkers whom we revere as founders of our smaller republican government, they weren't always thrilled by democracy, whatever democracy might mean to them.  [INAUDIBLE] >> In others, as a historian I would say we need to approach these issues looking at the longer term.  And I think one of the difficulties right now is that both the urgency of the moment and the terrible actions of 9/11 still resonate so strongly and because we live in a world of instantaneous communication and global networks that we expect things to happen right now.  Right now.  Now.  Now.  In fact, I'm behind myself.  [LAUGHTER] Actually, historical change sometimes works more slowly.  We're seeing Islam in America at a particular point in time.  Just one point to illustrate that about ecclesiastical institutions. 

 In the long-term, I think we can see certain behaviors, the desire to have imams who are trained in the United States so they can speak to American Muslim congregations, the pattern noticed on a big book on American religion last year, American Grace, that Muslims are acting, they're joining congregations, sort of like Presbyterians.  That is, the ecclesiastical makeup of Islam in America is starting to look kind of like American normative religious practice.  And we're in the middle of that, and I think it's going to go towards completion, but we're so attuned to right now that we don't see it.  So I guess this is a warning: don't essentialize and don't dehistoricize.  >> That begins to answer the question that I was going to ask about looking ahead from all three of you.  We heard from Louise a concern about how unwelcome things were going to be for these young people coming back after having been there, a concern about the direction things seem to be going.  From Asifa we heard there's lots of good things going on that Muslim Americans are involved in doing.  And then our historian was talking about how we've had these kinds of religious hatred issues in the past.  Are there models for what happened then that is now going to happen now in what's coming up next? Is it going to get worse before it gets better? >> Historian, do you have a model? >> Historians have models? No, of course not.  [LAUGHTER] And a historian is the last person you want to ask about the future. 

 [LAUGHTER] But since you ask...  [LAUGHTER] I'll say something.  And that is my family will not recognize me in the role of an optimist.  [LAUGHTER] That's them, that laughter.  And nor will my staff.  And I won't say that this is easy, but I do think that the historical record suggests that we are in one particular historical moment.  We might be where Catholics were in the 1840s or where Mormons where in the 1830s and '40s and '50s and '60s.  And because we tend to focus so much on the now, we miss the larger trajectories.  Now, I'm not going to say that this is going to turn out well because I don't know.  I just think that there are many forces among which, and I would go back to American values of religious freedom which even people who don't like other people say they adhered to and I tend to accept them at face value that if the dynamics of our history play out as they often had or have, we're going to get through this. 

 The difficulty is that right now we're trying to do it under the threat of terror, and that puts a different political cast on the situation.  >> I just want to add, I actually am an optimist but not about this situation.  I've tried to be but I think that it's going to be hard to wish this away, and I think this is a way it's different from prior experiences in this country is that Muslims are tied into all sorts of wars in foreign policy issues in the United States.  So how is antipathy against Muslims going to wither away when there are significant American military operations in Muslim majority countries.  That, to me, is a problem.  >> There's a question over here.  >> Can I? [INAUDIBLE] >> Yeah, she's saying they're similar to Germans in the wars.  I was going to add the Japanese experience.  And I have gone back and forth between being optimistic and being pessimistic, and often it depends on who I'm talking to.  Sometimes I'm very inspired by openness and willing to learn, and other times I'm very discouraged by fear and building upon that. 

 I teach constitutional law.  I teach the Korematsu case.  That makes me scared.  In fact, when 9/11 happened, I was scared for my child and wanted to know if maybe he could hide if I had to hide him because I was aware that legally speaking we have never overturned the idea that detention camps might be justified in the name of security.  So I'm very aware of that, and I'm very inspired though when people like the Japanese American population see the pattern and come out and speak in support and on behalf of the threat that they see happening to Muslim Americans, and they see the pattern from their own experience, and very famous Japanese Americans have been a part of that.  It goes back and forth.  For me, what happens in the future to me is about how much can we all learn from our own past.  [INAUDIBLE] >> Sorry, there's a question over here.  I'll come down to you.  >> I have run into two people who have told me that on page 207 of the healthcare law Muslims are not going to be required to get mandatory health insurance, that that was put into the law, and I don't know if there's any truth to that. 

 I checked the internet and there were citations on it both ways.  Do any of you three know anything about that? >> I have no idea.  I wonder why.  If it were true, what would be the rationale? Is it survival of the fittest? Let them die off on their own.  [LAUGHTER] I don't know what that would be.  >> Their religion would not allow them to have health insurance.  >> On, no, no, no, no.  If that's the question, is there anything in Islam that would prohibit a Muslim from getting health insurance, no.  That's not the case.  >> Well, just a brief comment first. 

 Even as great a liberal democrat as Hubert Humphrey was a proponent of building concentration camps for suspected radicals during the early Cold War a period.  Also, I wanted to point out that a suspicion of Catholics as we know endured right up to the elections of 1928 and 1960, and I think that suspicion may also have been a factor in that the US was one of the last major countries to establish diplomatic relations with the holy see.  I think there was still that paranoia as late as the 1980s when relations were finally established.  My question is this, it's my understanding that in Islam the concept of separation of church and state simply does not exist.  I'm not saying that it's good or bad necessarily, but it's just that there's this cultural misunderstanding because that concept has never been a part of Islamic society.  >> Again, to answer that really well, I'd have to spend many more hours here.  In brief, I don't like that phrase because it is so European, and I think it has us look at law and government and religion through a European lens that it is not possible to have any kind of interactive relationship between religion and government without degenerating into theocracy and without having the state church controlling the government.  And that is simply not the Muslim experience of law and government and religion.  Not because there is or is not a separation of church and state, I don't find that that translates exactly right either way, I would say yes and no.  But to better understand it, first there is no church for Muslims. 

 There's not entity that speaks on behalf of the religion.  That's sometimes good and sometimes bad for political social reasons.  Where is your pope saying terrorism isn't Islamic? There isn't one.  So it's hard.  On the other hand, it makes it accessible to anyone to learn and be a Muslim and have many alternative visions and articulations of what Islamic scripture says and means.  So, historically, there was a separation of rulers and religious scholars, and the religious scholars were never really in control of the government.  They were a separate entity.  So in that sense you could say there was a separation of religious scholars and the rulers because it was not theocratic in the sense of religion defining the law that the state was making.  However, the rulers identified as Muslim and they did things with Muslim values, and all of that infused into what they did.  So in that way it's not secularism and separation of church and state. 

 So it is and it isn't true.  I think the better way is to try to approach it from the perspective of what Islam says rather than the perspective of what Europe says about law and religion.  While I'm here and on the topic, Sharia, anybody want me to define Sharia? >> Yes.  >> Okay.  So Sharia literally means a street or a way to go.  In the Koran the reference is talking about god's way.  So basically what it is in the Koran is identifying the divine path, how you should live in your life to be a productive human being based on divine inspiration.  Not an unusual concept for any spiritual person.  And so as a legal term of art, the question becomes what actual rules then govern that life choice? What I find, personally, very inspiring about Islam and Islamic law in particular is that that interpretation of scripture has always been done by human beings, religious scholars, but that those religious scholars identified themselves as human and fallible.  So all the way through the legal rules that are extrapolated from that scripture of identifying the Sharia, the path, god's way, were awareness that they may or may not be right in their articulation. 

 So the actual rules, the actual legal doctrine, if you want to know how people decide to live what they put in their will and how they get married and then at the higher levels of what witnesses are required for this kind of a case prosecution, those depend on which school of Islamic law you're actually looking at.  There's actually quite a diversity of Islamic law, actually laws, that define what those ways to live are.  So Sharia is the big concept of the way to be, god's way.  The specifics, you actually shouldn't be using the word Sharia.  Actually, the word is fekh which literally means understanding, and that elaborates that idea that the human beings doing this extrapolation were given their best understanding of god's way.  They could right, they could be wrong, there are many other scholars who had alternative understandings.  And so as a Muslim if you're looking at what rules to follow, you would pick a school or you might develop your own school based on your own expertise.  And that is a more accurate description of the laws.  So the idea that Sharia is some kind of a code of behavior that is monolithic and uniform is a very inaccurate way of thinking about Islamic law for Muslims.  And, again, I think it has to do with seeing it through European experience of one way and it's dictated by one singular human being that is telling you religiously how to behave, and then in some way if they can get control of the government than they can really control everybody. 

 And for Muslims, historically, there was never really one articulation of Islamic law that was implemented on everybody.  It was an accommodation for all these different schools by the government.  In fact, including an accommodation for other religious communities like Jews and Christians because for them to follow their own legal rules wasn't an affront to the overall system because the overall system was itself pluralistic.  So to accommodate the Jews coming in Spain, a height of Muslim Jewish relationships, it didn't challenge the legal system to have accommodation for other groups.  So Sharia is the way or the ideal, and the specifics you have to go much deeper into the actual legal doctrine.  >> We have time for one more question.   >> Thank you very much for all of your comments.  I have a question about what you would see the role of the press, media institutions, and the educational institutions in helping to resolve some of these problems.  I've always been bothered that when Timothy McVeigh blew up the building in Oklahoma City no one said a Christian extremist terrorist, but anything that happens somewhere else, if the person is a Muslim that's the first thing you hear, a Muslim extremist terrorist.  But we have lots of other religious extremists terrorists around, but they don't seem to get quantified that way. 

 And then in terms of education, seven years ago I attended the first conference that I've ever attended about Christianity and Islam, and I was really surprised and chagrined to learn that I had not known this that the largest population of Muslims is in Indonesia and that India, which is basically a Hindu country, has more Muslims living their than Pakistan does, which is an Islamic country.  So I think the educational problem is very large, that people do not really know even just basic facts.  And last week on National Public Radio they had story about how Muslim community centers in schools are now having to teach their children about 9/11 because they weren't born when 9/11 happened, and so they're having to figure out how are we going to teach our Muslim children about this incident.  So I'm just wondering if any of you have comments about how our institutions could better serve us.  >> I'll make a quick response to the education one because I did a study of this after 9/11, and also note that these kids I interviewed, the worst experiences they had as kids was either with teachers or school administrations who were operating on faulty ideas about Muslims and Muslim women, like their mothers are always humiliated it seems is the common story I hear at schools.  But when I did the study, I found out that the teachers just don't know because they go to high school and they go to college and they get a bachelor's and there still aren't that many classes on these topics.  And Muslims are not integrated into our curricula on whether it's, there's starting to be about ethnic groups or whatever, so teach the teachers is what I came out of that with.  >> There have been efforts and I've been a part of efforts, is this on? It doesn't sound like it.  I've been a part of many efforts and I know colleagues of mine who work specifically in improving the textbooks, specifically California schools but it was expanded to the rest of the country to correct things based on inaccuracies that the kids were experiencing, bringing it home and the parents being surprised and then continuing education programs by various local Muslim community centers doing basic education about Islamic history and Muslims in America, Islamic values.  What I've noticed is the problem is part of this backlash of the fear of Muslims that a lot of these efforts are being opposed because it is some kind of, again, an infiltration of Sharia into our curriculum. 

 And when I hear this I would laugh if it weren't so sad.  And so there are efforts and then there's the counter-effort.  Same thing with the media.  There was some acknowledgment that Anders Breivik in Norway was doing this from his understanding of his Christian ideology, and then it went away.  And then there were those who defended, Christianity, of course that's not Christianity, but you know very few, except for Jon Stewart and others at that level, made the point that how ridiculous it is that we would do it in one case and not another.  So I actually think the media is being better served by Jon Stewart right now than many others.  [APPLAUSE] And it's also a matter of this quick response kind of media that we have now and there isn't time for reflection and accuracy.  >> And, sadly, we are out of time again on a very important topic, and I know there are many more questions in the audience, and we invite you to come into the lobby and have some punch and cookies and ask our speakers a few more questions if they can stay a few more minutes while we set up for our final panel about arts and how arts help us deal with tragedy.  So thank you all so much for coming, and let's thank our speakers.  [APPLAUSE]