Challenging students to identify and analyze diverse perspectives is a key objective in any Middle East studies course. This article describes an assignment used in a history course which asks students to compare and contrast articles from Middle Eastern online newspapers. Comparing multiple articles on the same topic exposes students to contrasting views on significant issues. The easy availability of online newspapers “de-centers” students’ perspectives by requiring use of materials from outside the United States. This assignment teaches specific analytical skills, such as finding relevant articles, reading them critically, writing effective summaries, and developing synthetic comparisons. Through an analysis of this assignment, this article discusses the advantages, as well as limitations, of this approach, using students’ own evaluations to assess the achievement of desired learning objectives.

The historical study of Muslim-minority communities in regions commonly associated with “the West” is a field in its infancy. It was not until the 1980s that the enormously diverse groups who adhere to Islam in Western Europe, the United States, and Canada came to be categorized primarily by their religion rather than by their varying races, ethnicities, nationalities, class, or status as immigrants or colonials. This new categorization resulted largely from the recognition of a religious resurgence in public life that was punctuated by the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the “Rushdie Affair.” It was also informed by histories of modernity and experiences of European imperialism that pitted a “modern West” against a “Muslim Orient.” Consequently, as Yasemin Soysal (2001: 165) and many others have noted, “at issue” in the study of Western Muslims has been “the compatibility of Islam—its organizational culture and practice—with European categories of democratic participation and citizenship.” Not even the study of African American Muslims escaped this binary opposition between Islamic identity and democratic citizenship; early studies of the rise of Islam among African Americans generally explained the separatist tendencies of African American Muslim nationalist organizations, such as the Moorish Science Temple and the Nation of Islam, in terms of their appropriation of an Islamic identity. Whether writing about immigrant or indigenous Muslims, scholars have been preoccupied with determining whether Muslims pose an anti-democratic, anti-modern threat to Western societies or if they are yet another addition to the religious, cultural, and political diversity of Western nation-states.

Islamophobia was originally developed as a concept in the late 1990s by political activists to draw attention to rhetoric and actions directed at Islam and Muslims in Western liberal democracies. In recent years, Islamophobia has evolved from a primarily political concept toward one increasingly deployed for analytical purposes. Researchers have begun using the term to identify the history, presence, dimensions, intensity, causes, and consequences of anti-Islamic and anti-Muslim sentiments. In short, Islamophobia is an emerging comparative concept in the social sciences. Yet, there is no widely-accepted definition of the term. As a result, it is extremely difficult to compare levels of Islamophobia across time, location, or social group, or to levels of analogous categories like racism, anti-Semitism, or xenophobia.

Are Western Muslims integrating? Can Western Muslims integrate? Over the past 20 years, significant attention has been invested in examinations stimulated by the extensive public commentary addressing such questions. This brief review aims to demystify the examination of Western Muslims’ integration in the interest of re-embedding this subject matter in the broader scholarship about immigration and settlement. Within this expanding field of study, Western Muslims can (and should) be examined at the community level, where specific ethno-cultural groups represent but case studies among hundreds of Western Muslim communities that differ in their immigration context, countries of origin, sects, and ethno-cultural backgrounds. Simultaneously, the collection of statistical data should be used to test hypotheses that are developed in studies of such communities. The dialogue between qualitative and quantitative approaches provides research openings to more rigorously push the state of knowledge in this area, and I describe some of these openings below.

Suspicion of Muslim minorities in Western countries did not start with the attacks of September 11, 2001. The post 9/ll period, however, amplified existing prejudice. Muslims have come under intense scrutiny on the chance that they might be terrorists and have been targeted by most of the counter-terrorist measures adopted since then. In the United States, the initial objective was to catch foreign radicals, as illustrated by the FBI’s massive investigation called “PENTTBOM” which sought to identify aliens involved in the attacks. Additional measures such as the Absconder Apprehension Initiative (AAl) and the implementation of the National Security Entry-Exit registration System (NSEERS), adopted in 2002, targeted foreign Muslims. The enactment of new statutory provisions designed to identify and apprehend foreign terrorists was soon followed by a catch-all strategy targeting all Muslims living in the US. Furthermore, the broad definition of what constitutes a terrorist threat (as developed by the 2001 PATRIOT Act, the 2005 REAL ID Act, and the 2007 Protect America Act) has allowed US authorities to extend the list of terrorist offenses–leading to increased infringement on civil liberties in the name of security. Governmental discrimination also fueled prejudice against Muslims by providing ajustification for anti-Muslim sentiments. A large section of the public welcomed racial/ethnic profiling and various measures limiting the civil rights and the civil liberties of Muslims as a way to improve homeland security.

Muslim minorities in the West have become the improbable targets and tools of the discourses of some politicians in the search for votes, right-wing newspapers and tabloids seeking enlarged readerships, and Conservative activists advocating for their causes. These discourses have often taken bizarre twists, such as the surprisingly successful attempt during the 2007 Democratic primaries by a right-wing organization to depict (the Christian) candidate Obama as a Muslim who attended a “Madrasa” as a child. While the hoax was soon exposed by CNN, surprisingly many mainstream media outlets (e.g. Fox News) uncritically adopted the story and 12 to 18 percent of the American public continues to believe that President Obama is a Muslim.1 Some other recent curious political events that instrumentalize Muslims include vociferous attacks on elected female politicians who choose to wear a headscarf in Belgium, the use of racist language towards Muslim minorities by European candidates and politicians in several countries, and the framing of Muslims as a danger to welfare in Denmark or gay rights in the Netherlands.