Most Americans Know Little About Islam

Sept. 14 -- A Muslim specialist says our acquaintance with Islam has just begun, and in the wrong place.

John Esposito, raised a Roman Catholic in Brooklyn, N.Y., is the director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He spoke to Beliefnet.com producer Paul O'Donnell after the attacks on New York and Washington. Here is an interview with Esposito.

How did Islam get this reputation for violence?

Americans have very little background about Muslims. Historically, Muslims were not visible in this country. Academically, too, Islam was not put with other [monotheistic] faiths, but with Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism. It was foreign. So you end up with generalizations. It's like if all you see is headlines about the Mafia, all Italians all become Mafia.

When the American public first experienced Islam, then, it was as the oil embargo in the early 1970s, and the Iranian revolution in 1979, both of which were experienced as threats. The Iranian revolution was seen not in a political context, but as Islamic, as the work of the ayatollahs. And Ronald Reagan and later Dan Quayle put radical Islamic action beside the Soviets as the world's great evils.

How do these people, Islamic fundamentalist terrorists, fit into the larger picture of Islam?

Let me ask, how do Christian fundamentalists who blow up clinics fit into a Christian context? How does someone like Baruch Goldstein, who shot Muslim worshippers inside the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron in 1994? How did he fit into the Jewish context? The analogies are many: when we have David Koresh, whose group died at Waco, or when Mr. [Yitzhak] Rabin was assassinated, Americans frame it as extremism. The media talk about Christian cults, for instance. This [recent attack] is not a legitimate act by a resistance movement.

What do you think of the Muslim response to the attack?

What's different from past events is how major Muslim leaders are condemning it. The fatwa against Salman Rushdie [after his novel Satanic Verses was condemned as blasphemous] brought more mixed reactions. They created a gray area. Now the Muslim mainstream is going on the record as saying this is not only irrational but un-Islamic. They are setting the stage for the possibility that this turns out to be a Muslim terrorist. They want to distance themselves.