In Defense of Cultural Islam

Why American Islam Needs Roots to Grow

What should Islam look like in America?

I’m not asking how Muslims should practice. That’s fairly concrete. The basics of Islamic law and theology aren’t up for discussion. They are the Islamic content without which Islam isn’t Islam.

I’m asking what should it look like socially, culturally, and linguistically? How visibly different should it be from mainstream American culture? How much influence (if any) should overseas Muslim cultures have on American Muslim culture?

Islam has a relatively long history here. Besides the hundreds of thousands of Muslims forcibly brought here through the slave trade, Islam as an identity began to rise in the early 20th century with the numerous black identitarian movements such as the Nation of Islam and Moorish Science Temple that emerged in cities like Chicago and Detroit. Then with the opening of immigration in 1965, thousands of born Muslims, hailing primarily from Arab lands and the Indian Subcontinent, came here and began to establish the organizations and masjids that served as the pillars of Islam in America throughout the 20th century. On top of that, continued conversion, particularly over the past 20 years has had a significant impact on Muslim demographics.

But now as the community matures into the 21st century, it finds itself at a crossroads of identity. There are some who would argue that Muslims must create a uniquely American form of Islamic culture, one that is untethered from the old norms of Arab, Desi, African, and other cultures. They argue that if a Muslim should wear his best clothes on Friday, then it ought to be a bespoke three-piece suit; that the old nashīds and qawwalis should be replaced with English-language poems and religious songs; and that everything from names to cuisine, architecture, family relationships, and gender roles ought to be reimagined through the lens of American culture.

Islam, Culture, and History

This mentality is one that betrays an extreme form of American exceptionalism. Historically, Muslim cultures do not develop in a vacuum. There has never been a society that adopted Islam and then proceeded to only reform their religious practice while insulating themselves from adopting cultural traits from other, older Islamic societies. Take for instance the Indian Subcontinent. Conversion to Islam there didn’t simply mean giving up the Hindu gods and now praying five times daily towards Mecca. It involved adopting aspects of Persian and Turkic culture as part of their way of life. The words that many Subcontinental languages use for concepts like prayer, fasting, and even basic greetings are often direct borrowings from Persian. Biryani, perhaps the most quintessentially Indian dish, has its origins in the Turkic rice dishes of Central Asia that the Timurid Mughals brought with them. The resulting culture was one that was surely native to the Subcontinent, but also strongly influenced by newcomers who taught Islam in Lahore, Delhi, and Hyderabad.

India is not unique in this regard. Balkan Islam is heavily dependent on the cultural hegemony that the Ottomans brought with them throughout the 14th to 19th centuries (an influence itself rooted in older Seljuk and Persian traditions), which manifested in language, clothing, and architecture. The Swahili Coast and the entire Indian Ocean rim as far away as the Malay Archipelago remain closely connected to the Yemeni cultural and intellectual milieu, with the madrasas of Tarim filled with students wearing Yemeni izars, Indian lungis, and Malay sarongs that show the cultural continuity across the Indian Ocean. The arches of the Great Mosque of Cordoba, built by the Umayyads at the height of Andalusi Muslim power, strongly evoke those of the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, a monumental structure that itself blends older Byzantine forms with the emerging styles of early Islamic architecture.

The examples are endless and need not all be listed here. The larger point is that as new societies enter into the Muslim fold, they necessarily adopt aspects of the culture of the Muslim societies they’re most in contact with. This is a natural process of cultural diffusion that cannot be engineered artificially, nor prevented.

Islam as Civilization Value

Yet the most enduring bonds between Muslim societies aren’t merely visible in language, aesthetics, or food—they’re felt in values, habits, and sensibilities that shape daily life. There’s a form of Muslim cultural values that diffuse from one society to the next as well. These are things that Muslims identify with without necessarily being a part of Islamic law and theology.

Having spent time in Turkey, a country constantly grappling with how “Islamic” it is in the first place, I’ve seen this in action numerous times. Whether it’s the vehemently secular Turk who hasn’t prayed a single prayer in decades making sure to wipe up every last crumb from his plate because “I’m Muslim and we don’t waste” or the Kurdish socialist who will open his home to you without question because you’re a traveller and travellers are meant to be taken care of, there is an Islamic ethos that underpins the entire social fabric, whether it’s intentional or not. These aren’t laws or doctrines—they’re the ambient ethics of a society shaped over centuries by Islam’s moral imagination. Gratitude, hospitality, reverence for food, and a visceral identification with the global ummah aren’t legislated, they’re inherited.

Moreover, it connects Muslims at an emotional level in a way that isn’t possible without a shared cultural consciousness. The Prophet ﷺ commanded us to act as “one body” and to feel the pain of fellow Muslims as if it were our own. We are not meant to splinter into provincial identities that view one another only through what is Islamically mandated or politically expedient. Most Muslims don’t even need to hear that Hadith report to feel this way in the first place. It’s embedded in the cultural reality of Muslim society. It doesn’t need to be taught. It’s who we are.

These are cultural values that don’t necessarily need to be taught as religious doctrine. They are part of the social fabric by virtue of being a historically Muslim society. We often say that Islam is a “way of life”, a true statement although a bit of a platitude. But being Muslim truly does go beyond simply following the letter of the law in our daily lives. There’s an intangible element to it. One that connects Muslims across borders of language, culture, and nation-states. Sure, it’s comforting to enter a masjid in Malaysia and see the same acts of prayer that you’ll find anywhere else. But you truly feel like it’s your home when you spend time with Malays and despite language barriers, you feel like you know them - their mindset, their values, their mundane actions and body language - because it resembles what you’ve experienced throughout the rest of the Muslim world and what you do within your own home.

American Islamic Culture

Returning to the place of American Islam, we must recognize that not only is it in contradiction of Muslim civilizational history for American Muslims to try to isolate themselves from other Muslim cultures, it runs the risk of losing the cultural element of Muslim society that binds the ummah together. Such approaches are often driven by a strong current of American exceptionalism and nationalism. America, the “shining city on a hill”, the antithesis of European old world mentalities and constraints, the polity that began as an experiment with entirely new and unanchored political theory, cannot help but always view itself as the exception.

But the reality is that it is no exception. American Islam will (and must!) be intimately connected with older lands of Islam. To be sure, attempting to simply transpose an Arab, Perso-Indian, Turkic, African, or Southeast Asian culture into America wholesale and remain isolated from the cultural hegemony of American society is a futile task and short-sighted. Simultaneously, however, we must not delude ourselves into trying to create an “American Islam” that is untethered from the cultural moorings of societies that have been Muslim for centuries.

This process of cultural diffusion and development is already happening anyways. It’s embodied in the butter chicken crunchwrap (seriously, try it), in the crossover kurta/work dress shirt, and in the middle school hifz kids chucking up 3-pointers and playing zero defense at the masjid gym during their breaks (this was a problem in the Muslim community well before Steph Curry ruined the NBA). It’s messy, organic, and completely authentic. And that’s exactly how real cultures are born.

American Islam won’t be a carbon copy of older cultures, nor should it be. But if it hopes to root itself, to feel like a home and not just a legal structure, it will need to breathe in the ethos of the lands that carried this faith before us. That’s not regression. That’s how Islam has always moved, by carrying the scent of past homes into new ones.