society. Still, only recently have many Americans begun to grasp that Islam,
along with Christianity and Judaism, is itself a "Western" religion. Most
scholarly as well as popular writing continues to slip easily into the dichotomy
of "Islam and (or, over against) the West." But information about Islam and
Muslims is increasingly available through the media, and it is difficult not to
notice the presence of Muslims in American cities and towns. Most Ameri-
cans, however, remain only vaguely aware of the size and significance of the
Muslim community in America and know little if anything about the religion
itself. Before an introductory talk I gave on Muslim faith and practice recent-
ly a woman asked me, "Where is Islam?" supposing it to be a country. For the
most part, Americans have little concept that approximately as many Muslims
as Jews live in America and outnumber many of the mainline Protestant
denominations.

Harvard historian of religion Diana Eck's Pluralism Project, available
on CD-ROM, ² provides a fascinating look at what she calls comparative
religion in the making. Eck's students have documented and photographed
evidence of the recent and not-so-recent arrival of Muslims, Hindus, Bud-
dhists, Jains, Zoroastrians, and many others to the urban and rural areas of
America. A major segment of her project deals with Muslim communities
across the continent, and the viewer is treated to the contrast of Muslim
farm workers and day laborers with physicians and other highly successful
professionals, and to images of storefront mosques alongside some of the
striking new Islamic centers constructed in the last several decades. Such
resources as this, along with the sharp rise in scholarly studies in the field of
American Islam, the addition of materials on U.S. Muslims in a number of
university courses, the increased attention to Islamic religion and culture in
high school curricula, and opportunities for Muslim children to talk about
their holidays to their classmates at the grade-school level, will make it dif-
ficult for those coming through the American educational system to need to
ask, "Where is Islam?"

"Today, the American Muslim community is comprised of people drawn
from a wide-ranging ethnic and professional mix. Whether they are immi-
grants, indigenous Americans, or converts, all are united in the unique the-
istic experience that is Islam. Whether they are physicians, lawyers, entre-
preneurs, professors, cooks or factory workers, all of them are making a
contribution to America's future." ³ These observations, from an address
given at the Thirty-Fourth Annual Convention of the Islamic Society of
North America (ISNA) in 1997, suggest both the heterogeneity of the
American Muslim community and the concern of many of its members and

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