As American As...

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The burning issues in the average Muslim-American household are far less likely to be political than fairly standard sitcom fodder. A child refuses to wear a hijab. A mother suddenly realizes that despite the prohibition on premarital dating in most Muslim households, her daughter's "good friend" is really a boyfriend. A married couple notes bemusedly that while they attend mosque only once a month, or possibly twice a year, their college-age son, like many of his peers, seems to be returning to religious observance. Meanwhile, in his dorm room, that son is plying the Web in service of a human-rights organization, protesting American policies regarding Kashmir or Palestine or even Kabul--from within the American system.

That is not to say there may not be a tiny minority of mosques in America whose congregants tilt toward the Taliban or even bin Laden. At the Hazrat-I-Abubakr Sadiq mosque in Queens, after the imam decried the World Trade attack to his 1,000-person congregation, members of the Taliban's Pashtun clan moved to the basement in apparent protest.

Omar Abdel Rahman, the jailed ringleader of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, used to preach at the Masjid al-Salaam mosque in Jersey City, N.J. The day after the recent terror, two men arrested on a train in Dallas with box cutters, hair dye and more than $5,000 in cash are reported to have worshiped there recently. Two cops now stand at the mosque door.

Two days before the attack, Moataz al-Hallak, the former imam at the Center Street mosque in Arlington, Texas, returned there to pray. It turns out that al-Hallak was close to Wadih el-Hage, bin Laden's secretary who was recently found guilty in the U.S. embassy bombings in East Africa. Al-Hallak's name also reportedly showed up on a list at a Brooklyn refugee center headed by several men convicted in the 1993 Trade Center bombing. Al-Hallak, who has not been charged in either World Trade plot, has denied connection to bin Laden and claims to have counseled el-Hage only on religious matters. Najam Khan, president of the group that runs the Arlington mosque, says it fired al-Hallak last year for neglecting his flock--before the bin Laden connections were known. "I don't think he was preaching violence per se," Khan says, looking mournful. "We feel this mosque is being targeted because of individuals who may have had shady business somewhere, but that has nothing to do with the mosque and the rest of the community." He says the imam never talked politics from the pulpit: "It doesn't make sense. No mosque wants that. It divides people."

When Muslim immigrant groups first started arriving in the '60s, says Professor Haddad, "they looked at each other and said, 'I have nothing to do with you.'" Today all that has changed. C.A.I.R.'s Mosque in America project reports that only 7% of the 12,000 mosques surveyed serve a single ethnic group. Almost 90% play host to a mix of African Americans, South Asian Americans and Arab Americans.

Think about that: the Arabic word for all those who affirm Islam is ummah. It implies a sense of oneness and community. Around the world and over the centuries, as Islamic empires have collided, it has often been difficult to discern. But here in America, the country where Sunday is the most segregated day of the week, it flourishes. Balbir Singh Sodhi's killer would probably not have appreciated that. But Sodhi would have, despite not being a Muslim. And maybe there is something here for all Americans to learn, if we can only catch our breath.