There appears to be an apparent paradox within the modern Muslim conscience in the United States.
How is it that Muslims consistently ally themselves with the Democratic Party, despite the pervasive social divide between the two?
Indeed, it is difficult to argue against the fact that Democrats are the more secular party in America.
And it is difficult to question that the Democratic establishment comprises atheists, agnostics, and those generally averse to religious discourse, who occupy higher positions in far greater numbers than those of religious persuasion.
Radical conservative Muslims voting Democrat
At the same time, Muslims are seen as the most radically conservative in their religious and social outlook.
In addition to this, within the cascade of liberal values that inform modernity, Muslims remain among the least likely to adopt a secular outlook.
This is undoubtedly a point of general concern for the American intelligence apparatus, which has invested countless resources to tackle this complication otherwise hindering total assimilation.
So how does this align with Muslims’ political stance of a generally unyielding alliance with the American political left over the past two decades?
What happened when Muslims backed the GOP?
This support for the Democratic Party was not always the case.
American Muslims had once, to their own peril, allied with the Republicans.
And what soon ensued was the so-called War on Terror, antagonising a whole generation of young American Muslims from the political establishment of the time.
“Yes, we can” or “No, we couldn’t”
In 2008, a vote for Barack Obama was meant to be a resounding rejection of the status quo in US foreign policy. Arguably, this did not yield the same results American Muslims may have expected.
They were to learn — both quickly and rather harshly — that the establishment of both political parties were ultimately beholden to the military industrial complex and related lobbying interests that kept the political elite, of all colours, within its unrelenting vice grip.
Why many stay loyal to the Democratic establishment
Several questions remain.
Why, for over a decade, did American Muslims remain loyal to the Democratic establishment? Why do some continue doing so?
And why are more Muslims beginning to wake from their slumber, abandoning Harris and the Democrats at this juncture in particular?
And finally, what lies in the political future for American Muslims? Will this shift yield the rebirth of a Republican alliance? Will Muslims coalesce around a third party as some are currently promoting?
Will Muslims find a sustainable independent platform with which to identify politically? Or will they grow politically vagrant, perhaps reclusive, or even fragmented among themselves?
And ultimately, what do each of these possibilities spell for the social and religious direction of American Muslims going ahead?
Democrats initially offered a home for Muslim voters
The first question has perhaps a simple response.
In the Democratic Party, they found a home.
This seemed at first a symbiotic relationship; Democrats claimed a restrained foreign policy that less adversely affected Muslims. And in turn, their voter base grew in the millions.
But underlying this is an even more fundamental reason, and one which better explains continued allegiance to the party. It simply reflects the priorities of American Muslims in accordance with their basic needs of survival.
This point was one posited by Maslow in his hierarchy of needs, and it reflects the unique relationship immigrants in contemporary America — who tend to be from more socially and religiously conservative cultures — share with the Democratic Party.
Muslims and Latinos bear similarities with one difference
Both Muslims as well as Latinos pride themselves on their social conservatism and in remaining committed to religious morality and family values, a cornerstone of self-actualisation shared by the right.
However, their physiological needs, and safety and security as Americans — a hard-wrought economic paradise for immigrants and their immediate progeny often considered more fundamental to their existence — can feel threatened when the predominant rhetoric of the right, assisted by the left’s exaggerations, seemingly suggests that neither belong in the country in the first place.
For Muslims, however, faith plays an additional role.
The preservation of a Muslim’s life — an essential objective of divine law — is superseded only by the preservation of their faith.
This naturally leads to a palpable cognitive dissonance, where Muslims — who tie the value of family and conservative social mores as essential signifiers of their faith — find themselves at an impasse.
The life they have worked so hard generationally to build finds itself at odds with their very faith, and so ensues an identity crisis.
Questioning the “lesser evil” justification
This conflict has so far been assuaged through creative justifications for these unholy alliances, often borrowing from tenets of the faith itself.
Among the most prominent is the legal maxim of adopting the lesser of two evils or harms (akhaff al-ḍararayn).
Now employed by the Democrats themselves as a political fearmongering tactic to rally Muslim votes, one can often find this sentiment — regurgitated by Muslims without much introspection — as a proverbial Trump card to settle any dissent contrary to their alliance with the left.
Flaws with this approach
Of course, there are several flaws with the application of this otherwise legitimate principle within the current context, and perhaps some of these are more fatal than others.
First and foremost, one cannot help but reflect on the manner in which the principle is currently evoked and draw an analogy to the otherwise Orwellian doublespeak; begging one to question whether or not their political context can be summarised as dystopian, at the least.
- When a company wants to fire its employees, it sanitises the procedure by referring to it as “downsizing”.
- When one is complicit in arguable genocide and ethnic cleansing abroad, and the demolishing of family values and promotion of the morally repugnant closer to home, believing oneself to be the lesser of two evils similarly serves to sanitise evil.
Both instances serve not much more than to assuage the guilt of their perpetrators, but the fact remains the same: downsizing is firing, and the lesser of two evils? Well, it’s still evil.
Questioning the very assumption itself
Certainly, the domestic loss of family values and the promotion of heterodox ideologies by the left — both religious and social — is not the lesser of two evils for Muslims.
And in the context of foreign policy, could the situation really deteriorate any further without universal condemnation that would force even Western nations into abandoning the Israeli cause?
Gaza has driven a political awakening
While that latter question remains yet to be answered, and only the coming days will reveal what lies ahead, it cannot be doubted that Gaza has forced many American Muslims to wake up to this cognitive dissonance, and to abandon the doublespeak rhetoric to which they had clung on so dearly before.
In fact, Gaza has caused perhaps the greatest shift in how American Muslims prioritise their political identity since 9/11.
As more on the right start to embrace Islam, or at least find that the faith offers shared values quickly vanishing under the extremist social discourse of the left and, as a result, an opportunity to ally with its adherents, the tides are shifting.
Muslims in America are in search for a new political home
They are acutely aware that their physiological needs and their sense of safety and security can never come at the expense of their faith and all it represents.
Chief among them are the physiological needs and the safety and security of their brothers and sisters across the globe, and especially in its sacred lands.
Alongside having grown more observant of their faith in the last year, many Muslims have also developed further reliance upon Allah and their faith when speaking to their political calculations.
An erosion of trust in swing states
This political divorce has left the Democrats bitter and confused, especially in crucial swing states where they depend on the Muslim vote.
They have found themselves in a crisis, and are blasting selective advertisements speaking to Muslims and sending astroturf organisations to guilt them into voting blue as damage control.
But for many Muslims, what was once presumed to be a symbiotic relationship has now proven parasitic.
It is now apparent to many that the Democrats and the left in general were always self-serving, answering to lobbying interests whose agenda rests diametrically opposed to their Muslim constituents.
And when push comes to shove, it is the Muslims who find themselves alone and left out to dry.
Toward a politically independent future?
For many American Muslims voting today, alliance with the left has proven cancerous and Gaza has been the year-long devastating chemotherapy dissolving these parasitic cells, and cleansing the Muslim conscience of its political complacency.
What lies ahead is less certain, but Muslims should utilise this newfound wakefulness to not fall back into a repetitive cycle of political habituation.
They should not abandon their cause to any party or to any political spectrum that only sees them as pawns in the cyclical chess match of the two-party system.
In fact, they should choose to be politically active, or to abstain, strategically.
Finally, they should organise under religiously informed and politically astute leadership to avoid the pitfalls of the past.
One may be forgiven for lacking foresight, but those who cannot learn from experience cannot learn at all.
As the Prophet ﷺ said,
“A believer is not stung from the same hole twice.” [1]
And Allah knows best.
Source: Islam21c
Notes
[1] Sahīh al-Bukhārī, 6,133; https://sunnah.com/bukhari:6133
