By Sulayman S. Nyang

“The public square is not only the physical space that holds us together outside our private homes, but also the metaphorical symbol that represents the actuality and potentiality of civil society”

The Muslim Americans seem to have to come of age in America. Finally, the nation’s leaders and media have added them to the list of ethnic and religious minorities whose problems and conditions warrant conversational or literary discourse. This growing interest and coverage in the media has led many scholars, journalists and ordinary citizens to ask: Who are these Muslims and how are they going to fit in the larger American political and cultural context? These questions are part of the larger focus of the Project MAPS: Muslims in the American Public Square, based at the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding in the School of Foreign Service of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. This study, funded by the Pew Charitable Trusts, is part of a larger Pew initiative: “Religion in the American Public Square” that will examine Muslim, Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical Christian, African American Christian, Hispanic Christian and Jewish communities. Each such study will be the work of researchers and scholars drawn primarily from that community.
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Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
Published 4:00 am, Tuesday, April 18, 2000
 
The census has caused anxiety — even anger in some quarters — with its questions about everything from income to plumbing. But there is one major aspect of American life it fails to cover: religion.
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Project MAPS: Muslims in American Public Square is presenting the results of the first ever
systematic poll of American Muslims. The Poll covers the following four areas:
1) Demographics: gender, generation and ethnicity, U.S. born and immigrants, income and
education levels, age and occupation.
2) Religious practices: relationship with the mosque, conversion to Islam, importance of religion
in their life and interaction between the mosque and politics.
3) Opinion and behavior on social and political issues, party affiliation, voting in the presidential
election, foreign policy and other domestic issues relating to religion and public life.
4) September 11th and its aftermath: reaction, backlash, President Bush’s handling of the crisis,
war against terrorism and military action in Afghanistan

American Muslim Poll 2001

September 11, 2001 led to a renewed interest in Islam and American Muslims, who have become the focus not only of law enforcement agencies but of the media and the scholarly community as well. One basic inquiry, which has acquired a political as well as a scholarly character, is the question of precisely how many American Muslims there are.

See “Demography, Identity, Space: Defining American Muslims” by Zahid Bukhari, Page 7.

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