Religion as a Site of Boundary Construction: Islam and the Integration of Turkish Americans in the United States

The United States’ religious and ethnic landscape has dramatically changed since alterations to its immigration laws went into effect in 1965. Among the reasons for this change are the increasing number of Muslim immigrants and conversions to Islam in the U. S. (Eck 2001). Although no reliable figures exist regarding the size of the Muslim population in the U. S., it has been estimated that the number ranges between 7 and 8 million (Kaya, 2005). The United States has a larger Muslim population than the predominantly Muslim countries of Kuwait, Qatar, and Libya combined (Haddad and Esposito 1998). However, the U. S. has a more diverse Muslim population than any Muslim country, as Muslims of all nationalities and ethnic groups have been immigrating to the United States for decades. While this is the case, Muslim Americans are often represented as a monolithic group. Their cultural, national, social, and political differences are overlooked and their successes are frequently unrecognized. Muslim immigrants are one of the most highly educated immigrant groups in the United States, with a figure of forty-nine percent reportedly having at least a bachelor’s degree (Camarota 2002). Fifty-five percent of Middle Eastern immigrants hold American citizenship (Camarota 2002). This information indicates that Islam is no longer a distant or ‘foreign’ tradition in America; it is part of American social, cultural, and political life regardless of any efforts to represent it otherwise (Takim 2004).