toledoblade.com --

The freedoms enjoyed by U.S. citizens put American Muslims in a unique position to influence Islamic practice and understanding throughout the world, according to a report issued this week by the Carnegie Foundation.

But in a subsequent press conference, several Islamic scholars said the events of Sept. 11 have reversed decades of progress made by Muslims in the United States.

"Muslims in America: Identity, Diversity, and the Challenge of Understanding," released Wednesday, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation in 1998 to improve the understanding of Islam in America. (The study is available online at www.carnegie.org.)

In light of current events, it is even more urgent to improve that understanding, said Sam Afridi, a former speechwriter for President Clinton who wrote the study.

"Islam in America is now safer than in its lands of origin ... where the impulse of the power structure is to control Islam and manipulate it for political use," Mr. Afridi wrote. "Here, Islam is free to be Islam."

In Wednesday's audio press conference, which linked a panel of Islamic experts by phone with journalists from around the world, the speakers expressed concerns that freedoms and civil liberties are threatened by the U.S. government's response to the terrorist attack.

Some said that "Islamaphobia," a fear of all things Islamic, has increased in the United States after reports that the terrorists who attacked New York and Washington were Muslim extremists.

American Muslims, they said, have been subjected to increased government surveillance and interrogation, racial profiling, and stereotyping by the public and the media. Many Muslims have withdrawn from the community at a time when their voices and participation are most needed to promote understanding, the scholars said.

"The Constitution and the Bill of Rights are in jeopardy," said Dr. Muqtedar Khan, director of International Studies and assistant professor of political science at Adrian College. He called Sept. 11 "a watershed moment" that has "pushed back the development of civil rights in this country by several decades."

"We're becoming a police state like those nations we abhor," said Dr. Aminah B. McCloud, a professor of religious studies at DePaul University.

The study, which was undertaken well before the Sept. 11 attacks, focuses on "the multi-racial, multi-ethnic, and multi-faceted" diversity of America's 5-8 million Muslims. It looks at how they are adapting to and assimilating into Western culture and the impact on American society.

"Many Muslim immigrants have never experienced living among different Muslims," the report stated. "Now they find themselves having left majority status behind in their homeland to become a minority in a non-Muslim land."

Neither isolation nor absorption into the community is the goal of most U.S. Muslims, the report said. The main issue is "how does one become part of the fabric of society without losing one's identity," Mr. Afridi wrote.

"A major task for Muslims," Jane Smith, a professor of Islamic studies at Hartford Seminary, said in the report, "is to clarify what matters are flexible and may be reinterpreted in the Western context, and what issues are so clearly part of God's design for human life and response that they can't be renegotiated."

Islam is a "living faith" that has been shaped by devotees over the centuries, the report said, and "the decisions American Muslims make about how to understand and practice the faith in a Western context will significantly define Islam in the 21st century."

Disagreeing with that finding was Dr. Akbar S. Ahmed, professor of international relations at American University. In the press conference, Dr. Ahmed said that in his travels he has found that American Muslims have little influence on Muslims elsewhere except in major cosmopolitan cities.

He also said that while the events of Sept. 11 may have changed the United States, they have not changed most of the world, where people have lived much of their lives with ethnic tensions and fear of terrorism.

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