US News Hub Misryoum columnist says Muslims shouldn’t assimilate
Have Americans been asking the wrong question about belonging? Muslim assimilation has become a flashpoint again after US News Hub Misryoum columnist Shadi Hamid published an essay Wednesday titled “I’m tired of proving I belong in America.” He challenges the idea that staying in the United States must come with cultural convergence.
Hamid admits the “assimilation defense — look how well we’ve integrated — is satisfying to make. But it concedes a premise I no longer accept: that a minority community’s right to be in the United States depends on its willingness to converge with the cultural mainstream. It shouldn’t depend on that. It shouldn’t depend on anything,” he wrote Wednesday. He wrote as a Muslim responding to recent rhetoric, pointing to GOP lawmakers who have stoked the debate, including Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., who last month wrote on US News Hub Misryoum, “Muslims don’t belong in American society,” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who recently said, “I’m ready to get rid of the Muslims.”
Hamid cited surveys from over the past decade showing American Muslims are patriotic, civically engaged and more likely than the U.S. general public to say that political violence is never justified. He argued those statistics should matter less than the simple fact of membership. “Muslims are different in certain ways. How could they not be?” he asked, pointing out that visible religious practice changes how communities are seen and understood.
“Islam shapes how its adherents think about family, sexuality and what it means to live a good life. Simply put, Islam is also a more public religion than Christianity. Muslim prayer is visually striking and often communal. If a Muslim doesn’t drink alcohol or fasts during Ramadan, that will be more noticeable to others,” Hamid wrote. He added, “Moreover, practicing Muslims — despite being repeatedly asked to — can’t disavow ‘sharia’ even if they wanted to. Sharia, roughly translated as Islamic law, includes guidelines on how to pray, fast and otherwise observe what it means to submit to God in daily practice.”
Policymakers and civic leaders now face a practical choice: defend pluralism as a principle, or continue measuring belonging by how closely groups resemble a perceived mainstream. This framing will shape debates in the months ahead.
Hamid compared the expectation placed on Muslims to pressures other communities have faced. He noted data showing rates of Catholics among the Latino community have drastically fallen, and that American acceptance contributed to the decline of the Jewish population in the U.S. and the rise of their intermarriage rates. “What strikes me about these stories is how much they resemble each other,” he wrote. “The deal is always the same: You can stay, but you
have to become less yourself. Less distinctively Muslim, less traditionally Jewish, less recognizably Latino. The specifics of your faith and culture — the things that make your community a community rather than a collection of individuals — are treated as obstacles on the path to real Americanness. The left and the right enforce this expectation. The right says: Assimilate or get out. The left, more gently: Assimilate and we’ll celebrate you. But the endpoint is
the same.”
He drew a direct line from those observations to a broader defense of pluralism: “A Muslim who prays five times a day and believes homosexuality is sinful is not less American than a Muslim who drinks alcohol and hasn’t been to a mosque in years. An evangelical Christian who believes marriage is between a man and a woman and home-schools his children is not less American than a mainline Protestant who marches in Pride parades. These are deep disagreements about how to live, and a country that is serious about pluralism shouldn’t treat them as problems to be solved,” he wrote.
“America was not founded on the assumption that its citizens would eventually come to agree on foundational questions. It was founded on the more radical proposition that they wouldn’t — that people who disagree about God, religion and the good life could share a country anyway. Not because they would converge over time, but because convergence was beside the point. The question isn’t whether Muslims, Jews or Latinos will change. They will. The question is whether America will let them do it on their own terms,” Hamid concluded. The Muslim assimilation question he raises forces communities and leaders to decide whether belonging means sameness or space to remain distinct.