As a candidate, Donald Trump promised to ban Muslim travel to the US. After being rebuffed by the courts, President Trump had to settle for a watered down ban on travel from a subset of Muslim countries. Nonetheless, the US Muslim population continues to grow rapidly, and has achieved a great deal of economic success as well. Here is The Economist:
The past 20 years have mostly been golden for America’s Muslims. The community has more than doubled in size, to 3.5m. And its prominence in American life has increased exponentially.Traverse the overpasses of any big city and you will see metallic domes sparkling below. The number of mosques has also more than doubled since 2001. The minority’s secular growth is even more striking. Muslims are one of America’s most educated religious groups. More than 15% of doctors in Michigan are Muslim, though less than 3% of the state’s population is. And Muslim artists, journalists and politicians are catching up.
While there remains substantial prejudice against Muslims, their upward mobility is likely to lead to interactions with non-Muslim Americans that reduces prejudice over time:
Half of Americans, including a large majority of Republicans, say Islam encourages violence. That is twice the number who held that view in early 2002. “Though we try to integrate, these are things we live with,” Ali Dabaja, an emergency-care doctor from Michigan, told your columnist. And then he sobbed down the phone as he recalled the time a trucker in Florida tried to run him and his two headscarf-wearing sisters (one a doctor, the other a lawyer) off the road. . . .The anti-vaxxer Trump voters who are now likeliest to be hospitalised with the disease tend to be the most anti-Muslim Americans. The doctors treating them are quite likely to be Muslim. The irony of this is not lost on Dr Dabaja. “But when people are coping with the reality of death or the death of their loved ones,” he says, “their political agendas tend to fade.”
READER COMMENTS
MikeP
Oct 15 2021 at 5:01pm
Nonetheless, the US Muslim population continues to grow rapidly…
Yeah. Maybe because Donald Trump’s Muslim ban somehow neglected to ban the travel of 1.6 billion of the 1.8 billion Muslims on the planet.
The last 19 months of deranged pandemic response has left me highly reactive to emotional applications of innumeracy.
Scott Sumner
Oct 15 2021 at 7:37pm
Sorry, where is the innumeracy in my post?
MikeP
Oct 15 2021 at 8:12pm
Just the “nevertheless” impression that Trump’s “Muslim ban” actually banned many Muslims.
There is also no outright innumeracy in, say, reporting that “…overall, kids are at a much lower risk for severe disease if they contract COVID-19 than adults are…”. But “much lower” simply does not capture the 4,500 times lower rate of death that children have than those over 65. The whole story is not being told, and one must wonder why the particular angle taken was taken.
When Trump’s “Muslim ban” banned the travel of 11% of Muslims, none from the six most populous Muslim nations, it is hard to call it a Muslim ban. Unless you want to call it a Muslim ban and obscure that the great majority of Muslims were not in fact banned by it.
I will grant that Trump is an awful demagogue who campaigned on banning Muslim immigration to excite his electorate and had to appease them with something. But I think focusing on that dynamic and the people wanting such a ban rather than on the purported ban itself would have been a stronger opening.
Scott Sumner
Oct 16 2021 at 7:11pm
You read way too much into that remark. I was referring to the fact that the Muslim population was growing fast despite Trump’s attempt to prevent that from occurring. I know quite well where most of the world’s Muslims live.
Brian
Oct 15 2021 at 5:33pm
A quote… “an emergency-care doctor from Michigan, told your columnist. And then he sobbed down the phone as he recalled the time a trucker in Florida tried to run him and his two headscarf-wearing sisters (one a doctor, the other a lawyer) off the road”.
Examples like this illustrate why there is no alternative to wokeness. Prove me wrong, please.
When I returned from abroad in 2015, I was wondering what was meant by terms like safe space, trigger warning, and woke, and whether marginalized people simply needed to toughen up. Telling people to just deal with it and adapt is appalling.
BC
Oct 15 2021 at 6:47pm
Under the rules of Wokeness, Muslims are 5X over-represented as doctors in Michigan. The Woke remedy would be for medical school admissions committees to deliberately characterize Muslim applicants as “unfriendly” as a means to reduce their numbers.
If you think that everyone should be treated equally, then you’re actually anti-Woke, as a cancelled speaker at MIT recently discovered.
Brian
Oct 15 2021 at 11:21pm
I’m not anti-woke when woke is defined as the text of the first paragraph of the Wikipedia definition. I think it can be summarized as essentially awareness of unfairness.
Scott Sumner
Oct 15 2021 at 7:36pm
I don’t know of anyone who objects to wokeness because they want to be able to be cruel to people. All the examples I’ve seen cited of wokeness run amok have involved innocent victims of woke bullies.
Mark Z
Oct 15 2021 at 10:36pm
I’m quite certain people can rationalize more traditional forms of prejudice based on sweeping generalizations, anecdotes, or personal experience as easily as you can rationalize wokeness based on them.
Kurt Schuler
Oct 15 2021 at 9:02pm
Okay, now look at Western European countries where Muslims are a far larger share of the population. To my knowledge, in all with significant numbers of Jews, Jews have been harassed, beaten, even killed by Muslims purely on the basis of religion. Islam has quite a few texts that justify violence against Jews, and other non-Muslims. Even though Muslims who perpetrate such violence may be a small minority, they can justify their actions by solid references to the most authoritative texts of their religion and to the example of Muhammad himself.
In its milder form in the United States, where about 1% of the population is Muslim, Jew-hatred surfaces within the political system in troubling but still fringe rantings of Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib. In Britain, where about 5% of the population is Muslim, one of the two major political parties is a hotbed of Jew-hatred.
Mark Z
Oct 15 2021 at 11:01pm
The last paragraph is kind of meta-ironic, in that while lamenting that some people judge him based on the actions of other people who happen to share his beliefs, he judges his patients based on the actions of someone else based on the fact that he happen to share their beliefs.
MikeP
Oct 16 2021 at 9:58am
I found this interesting. I doubted that this fraction went from 25% to 50% due to Trump or even immediately before Trump.
It turns out this entire jump happened by 2004. Due to Iraq? But that was a conflict against a person and a party, not a religion. Due to regression to a prior mean after post-9/11 messaging that separated extremists from the rest of Islam? It’s odd.
Mark Brophy
Oct 16 2021 at 3:27pm
Does the poll say that people believe that Islam encourages violence in the United States? Rational people believe that Islam encourages violence in the Middle East, Algeria and Europe but not in the United States, Canada, or Australia.
Thomas Lee Hutcheson
Oct 16 2021 at 5:01pm
Since most source countries for immigration are more socially conservative than the US and immigrants self select for hard work and gumption if poor and high skills. high income if not poor they ought to be prime candidates for right wing voting, and we see that among Cubans and some Chinese and Vietnamese immigrants. Republican’s are passing up a golden opportunity.
Scott Sumner
Oct 16 2021 at 7:17pm
Everyone: I don’t think it’s helpful to talk about various religions encouraging violence. Violent acts are committed by individuals. One can find offensive stuff in the literature of almost any major religion (stoning adulterers, etc.), but that doesn’t mean that modern adherents of the religion embrace those particular views. You can also find pleas for peace in almost any major religion. Religions are highly complex; don’t oversimplify the issue.
Mark Z
Oct 17 2021 at 10:20am
The article you cite uses as its main source of evidence for bigotry against Muslims a poll specifically asking whether Islam encourages violence, not whether Muslims are violent. You’re right we should separate religions from their adherents to some extent, but then dislike of religions – including Islam – is fair game, and this poll only tells us what people think of the religion, not it’s adherents.
Scott Sumner
Oct 17 2021 at 12:10pm
Sorry, but that’s just silly. Try polling Americans on whether Christianity encourages adulterers to be stoned to death. It’s in the Bible, but Jesus repudiated that view. It’s an oversimplification to talk about what “Islam” prescribes. Is this false?
“The ideal of peace therefore suffuses the religious concepts in the Qur’an. The revelation and the night on which it came down are peace. Peace is the pinnacle of the Muslim paradise. God is peace. While these verses treat spiritual ideals, they do have implications for the Qur’an’s view of proper human behavior. The Qur’an clearly sees its depiction of heaven, “in which there is no talk of sin,” as a model for how people should behave in this life. In that ideal community, both non-Muslims and Muslims greet each other with prayers for their peace and well-being. And in this world, even those who taunt and humiliate believers should receive prayers for peace. For those who quote the Qur’an partially or selectively to justify violence, it seems clear that they are leaving out some of the most important parts of the scripture.”
https://blogs.loc.gov/kluge/2016/08/the-idea-of-peace-in-the-quran/
Do you know more about Islam than the person who wrote that paragraph?
Sven
Oct 19 2021 at 10:39am
Prof. Sumner,
I’m convinced that like the monetary theory you are presupposing that it is feasible you have preconceived opinions on other concepts.
As I infer from your impressions on Islam, you actually have no idea what Islam actually is.
Mark Brophy
Oct 17 2021 at 12:20pm
Noubar Afeyan
was born to Armenian parents in Beirut, Lebanon in 1962.[1][3][2] His grandfather survived the Armenian genocide.[5][6] Talking about his background, Afeyan said: “One of the only unfortunate advantages Armenians have had by having gone through a genocide and having spread around the world is that we do have an experience of escaping and of immigrating and of constantly restarting.” His family fled Lebanon in 1975, during the civil war there. He graduated from Loyola High School in Montreal in 1978. He received his B.Eng. in chemical engineering from McGill University in 1983 and then moved to the US and earned a Ph.D. in biochemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1987. He was the first PhD graduate from MIT’s Center for Bioprocess Engineering, at the time the only institution with that degree program. He became a U.S. citizen in 2008.
Afeyan is married to Anna (née Gunnarson), a Swedish-born engineer who moved to the US in 1988. They have four children.
Afeyan has authored numerous scientific papers. He has patented over 100 inventions. Between 2000 and 2016 he was a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management and is currently (as of 2020) a lecturer at Harvard Business School.
Afeyan started his first biotechnology company in 1987, just a few days before Black Monday, and founded or co-founded five more companies within ten years. By 2020 Afeyan had co-founded and developed 41 start-ups. In total, he co-founded or helped build over 50 life science and technology startups.
Afeyan is the founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, a venture capital company focused on biotechnology, in 2000. The firm has “fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures, resulting in $20 billion in total value and over 500 patents.” According to the company website, Flagship Pioneering has “fostered the development of more than 100 scientific ventures resulting in $30 billion in aggregate value, thousands of patents and patent applications, and more than 50 drugs in clinical development.”
In 2009 Afeyan co-founded Moderna (formerly ModeRNA Therapeutics) and currently serves as its chairman. He owns over 2 million shares in the company; in 2018, Moderna had the biggest IPO in the biotech industry’s history.
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