Muslims in America

One of the most striking features of the British cemetery at Gallipoli is the attention given to honoring the diversity of the dead. Final farewells from loved ones carved upon stone plaques line the footpaths up the hillsides where the Ottomans rained down machine-gun and artillery fire. Fallen Muslim soldiers, children of the Raj, lie side by side with Christians who died for king and country. Arabic and Persian inscriptions often immortalize the grief and love of the Muslim families; Persian was the court language of the Moguls and the Indian Civil Service.

There is a long history of Muslims fighting for the British and the French against other Muslims. The Algerian wars—the rebellion against France and the following purge of Franco-Algerians—were so awful (perhaps the bloodiest internecine strife in the Middle East before the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's war against Syrian Sunnis) because so many Algerians allied with France against the rebels-cum-liberators. Albert Camus's plea in his Chroniques algériennes is heartrending because he urged France to embrace all the Muslims of Algeria as her children or risk a civil war that could poison Muslim-non-Muslim relations far beyond North Africa.

It's good to recall how intimate and complicated modern Muslim-Western interactions have been, given the widespread sentiments among American conservatives that something ought to be done to better screen, diminish, or even end the immigration of Muslims into the United States.

This unease with Muslims surely isn't just counterterrorist anxiety. The massive refugee influx into Europe, which has skyrocketed in the last year because of the Syrian war and the door opened by German chancellor Angela Merkel, spooked the American right, which has become since the early 1990s increasingly hostile to immigration. Although the United States isn't a Christian country, its still-dominant traditions are a Catholic-Protestant amalgam. Faithful Christians make up a big slice of the electorate. The Western Christian identity was in part forged through its profound struggle against Muslim power. Even for the ahistorical, history matters.

And anti-Western and anti-Christian sentiments are widespread among Muslims: It's often difficult even for highly secularized and integrated European Muslims to embrace fully their Western identities because of this lingering collision. As the historian Bernard Lewis spent a lifetime pointing out, Christian-Muslim animosity has often been so strong precisely because their religious cosmology is so close. The Muslim and Christian conceptions of good and evil aren't interchangeable but they are mutually comprehensible. Islam negates the divinity of Jesus and much of his teachings but recognizes him as a Muslim prophet, a forerunner to Muhammad.

The recurring violent controversies that arise from humorous and mocking depictions of the prophet Muhammad show that many Muslims in the West brought with them the ethics of their ancestral lands. The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten's cartoon of the prophet as terrorist also revealed how many Westerners are inclined to treat Muslims differently—more timidly—than they would treat Christians or Jews who might be aghast at the comedic harshness not infrequently aimed at their faiths. The brilliant Iranian-American comedian Maz Jobrani is able to use biting Muslim and ethnic stereotypes, but American humorists wouldn't dare do to Islam what Monty Python did to Christianity and Jesus. (The HBO political satirist Bill Maher is the exception that proves the rule.) Secularism, an abiding concern for religious tolerance, and political correctness make the public expression of the omnipresent, organic tension between Islam and Christianity socially unacceptable in the United States and Europe, at least among secularized Christian elites.

This existential unease may be even more acute between Muslims and Jews. The Islamic world is rife with antisemitism that seamlessly combines an old Islamic distrust of the Jews, who'd rejected the prophet Muhammad in Arabia, with modern European Jew-hatred. Anti-Zionism has become almost a tenet of the Muslim faith and its declaration often (barely) camouflages antisemitism. As Muslim populations have risen in Europe, so has antisemitism. Not long ago the antisemitic comedian Dieudonné M'bala M'bala would have been irretrievably ostracized in France and Belgium. Today he has become a cult hero among many on the left, by no means all of them Muslim. Affluent Parisian Jews are buying second homes in Tel Aviv and among themselves mordantly discuss how their secularized Catholic compatriots have failed to stop resurgent Jew-hatred. Jewish Americans understandably worry that such antisemitism could rise in the United States.

It's a good guess that many on the American left, too, wouldn't be that upset to see Muslim immigration stay low, way below the levels that we see in Europe. Politically correct left-wingers tend to be better behaved when discussing third-worlders whom they esteem from a distance. Fear of Islamophobia is powerful even among Washington Democrats who really don't like the fundamentalist-friendly, Congress-lobbying Council on American-Islamic Relations and don't hesitate to speculate in private on the violent distemper within Islam. Yet Donald Trump's Muslim-suspicious histrionics and his exuberant love of maladroit invective, both on display in his remarks about the parents of the fallen American soldier Captain Humayun Khan, have made all conservatives who question Muslim immigration look like troglodytes.

The perverse fascination that the American right-wing blogosphere and even more respectable media, including Fox News, have had with Huma Abedin, the Muslim assistant/confidante to Hillary Clinton, shows that many conserv-atives have become unhinged. That so many could believe that Abedin, who married a prominent Jewish-American politician, had a child by him, and stayed in the marriage even after it became obvious that Anthony Weiner was a deeply troubled exhibitionist, could be a mole for sinister Islamic forces shows how criminally stupid a significant slice of the American right has become. (The sharia, the Muslim holy law, expressly forbids, on punishment of death, Muslim women marrying non-Muslim men.) Abedin ought to be seen as a Muslim-American success story. She is obviously a woman of heart and fortitude. She is a poster child for Islamic fundamentalists who incessantly warn against the ethical hazards that come with Westernization.

But do any of the conservative complaints about Muslims immigrating to America have sufficient justification to warrant a protracted debate that could put a ceiling on the numbers of Muslims welcomed into the United States? Even though Mr. Trump may be irremediably distasteful and destined for defeat in November, should we take his security concerns seriously? Others on the right who have been more thoughtful on national security more or less echo his views. Is Washington doing something wrong now that needs to be urgently improved? President Obama's overall counterterrorist strategy may be failing (using drones, airstrikes, special forces, and local surrogates against an ever-increasing number of terrorist safe-havens) while his administration's domestic defenses might remain sound.

VETTING MUSLIMS

As his debates with Hillary Clinton and Republicans revealed, Trump is strongly attached to the idea of the “extreme vetting” of Muslims. Many Republican members of Congress and conservative writers of some standing appear sympathetic; public opinion polls consistently show Republicans deeply unsettled by Muslim refugees coming to the United States. And although Democrats generally appear hostile to the idea of excluding Muslims from entry, it's not hard to imagine a Nice-like terrorist attack changing the disposition of congressional Democrats about enhanced standards for them. Such vetting would likely curtail admission for many, if not most, Muslims from the Middle East, the Caucasus, and Central and South Asia. It's unclear whether such screening would have separate standards for Muslims from Western Europe, where Islamic terrorism has been on the rise since the early 1990s. Given how dangerous European jihadists are since they can, in most cases, travel visa-less to the United States, supporters of enhanced vetting would have to implement new procedures to find and separate Muslim Europeans from their non-Muslim compatriots. How Washington would do this, beyond just using Islamic names, isn't clear. (Christian Middle Easterners could get snared in this process since their names can appear Islamic.) European converts to Islam—and there is a long history of European converts going rogue—would go undetected if they continued to use their original names on their passports. In France, for example, which runs neck-and-neck with Belgium for producing the most European holy warriors, approximately one-quarter of the jihadists who've struck are converts. Any system vetting European Muslims that didn't involve the end of visa-less travel for all Europeans to the United States—Europeans, once again, would have to submit their applications at American consulates—would require extraordinary assistance from European intelligence and internal-security services, who would need to separate Muslim and non-Muslim citizens for the Department of Homeland Security. This is, of course, politically impossible for Europeans to do.

Reality: It's not September 10, 2001. During the George W. Bush administration, the newly born Department of Homeland Security and the State Department adopted an intensely bureaucratic approach to assessing refugee, immigrant, and especially tourist visas. Once, consular officers had plenipotentiary authority to issue visas to all foreigners. Today, Homeland Security has the ultimate authority over problematic nationalities.

The difficulties for Muslim Middle Easterners to obtain visas or refugee status have exponentially increased. We shouldn't be fooled by the president's politically correct vocabulary: The Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Homeland Security, and even State Department consular officers ruthlessly profile those seeking entry. For al Qaeda or the Islamic State to plan terrorism inside the United States using non-American, non-green-card-holding, and non-European Muslim agents would require enormous luck and patience.

Given the European refugee deluge from Syria, many Americans fear that admitted refugees could be used to establish terrorist cells. An encouraging fact: In America there are a little under 3.5 million Muslims; only an infinitesimal slice has gone jihadist. Many of America's Muslims came from troubled lands, where religious militancy has run deep for decades. What success Islamic terrorists have had using refugee cover in Europe has come through the unfiltered, rapid Middle Eastern exodus that the German chancellor encouraged. Refugee admission to the United States is usually a long and unpleasant process. Its vagaries—not knowing whether one will be admitted and the relentless boredom in inhospitable processing camps—would be tricky for a terrorist outfit trying to target young holy warriors. This is why, so far, there is no known case of such a refugee sleeper cell. It's been long-term residents and citizens, not refugees, who have gone rogue.

Even with good intelligence, discerning the catalysts for anti-American violence among Muslims who aren't already jihadists is extraordinarily difficult. European security services have tied themselves into knots trying to figure out predictive patterns that could be used to preempt militants-turned-holy warriors. One reason many European security and domestic-intelligence serv-ices—especially the French and the British—are so fond of intercept and “shotgun” bugging operations is that this information gives counterterrorist officials a better chance of spotting potential trouble. (Such an approach in the United States would be unacceptable since it would rightly be seen by the courts as fishing expeditions.)

The Europeans all confront the same problem: The percentage of Muslims, even in European states where Islamic radicals have most often gone violent, is so tiny that counterterrorist methods run by even the best officers are much more likely to err than to preempt. The FBI tore the Mafia apart in part because it was easy to spot individuals who were involved and might be turned. (Would anyone today, looking back, want to close the door to Italian Americans because the Mafia was a cottage industry among Sicilians?) The FBI's penchant to tempt Islamic militants into committing terrorist acts, and thereby sow fear among would-be jihadists, is a reflection of how hard it is to run good intelligence operations against the radical Muslim target.

Loyalty oaths and more detailed screening tests (“Sharia is bad; secularism is good”), which many Republicans seem to favor, aren't apt to catch would-be killers, who could just lie; they could snare conservative Muslims who might become incensed or flummoxed by questions about the holy law, which for even irreligious Muslims can still command respect. I have many completely secularized Muslim European and American friends whose immigrant parents might well have failed such questioning.

Much of the American right seems to believe that jihadists are born from the study of the Koran and the sharia or through association with the ardently religious. Reading the Muslim holy book and religious jurisprudence may encourage intolerance in Muslims as it highlights their exclusivity and legal preeminence. Muslim clerics are rarely avatars of interfaith friendship. Fastidious Iranian clerics, consumed with a particularly Shiite idea of purity, can be averse to even touching nonbelievers. Sunni Islamic puritanism springs from a monomaniacal focus on early Islam's pristine clarity, egalitarianism, and fraternity; it downgrades or ignores Islamic civilization's cultural curiosity, ethical adaptation, and imperial diversity as Islam expanded into a global faith.

But holy warriors aren't known for the Muslim equivalent of Bible study. Sunni clerics, who immerse themselves in sacred texts, don't blow themselves up; Shiite mullahs haven't committed their bodies and souls to violent struggle since Iraqi artillery chewed them up in the early years of the Iran-Iraq war (1980-1988). The young men, and increasingly young women, who live to die are far more familiar with Western pop culture than they are with the life of the prophet Muhammad and his companions. European recruits to the Islamic State are much more likely to retain a love of rebellious rap music than they are—in the footsteps of the “no-fun-in-Islam” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini—to abstain from the licentious beat of infidels. The Egyptian theorist of modern holy war Sayyid Qutb, the Indo-Pakistani Abul Ala Mawdudi, and Khomeini—to name the big three—all helped to create the intellectual environment that nourishes today's holy warriors. It's an excellent guess, however, that none of the Europeans and Americans who've answered the tocsin call of the Islamic State has any idea what Qutb wrote in his voluminous commentary on the Koran. A few might recognize the title, in English or French, of Qutb's most famous battle cry, Milestones. With no or limited Arabic, the more Westernized holy warriors use the other two global languages of Islamic radicalism—English and French. This diet is perforce more subject to Anglophone and Francophone culture.

The lines that connect contemporary jihadism to Islamic tradition are profound but circuitous and convoluted. Modern Islamic fundamentalism has injected anger and hatred into the Muslim body politic; so has Westernization, with its unrivaled power to bulldoze tradition and empower individuals with a sense of destiny. Conversion to jihadism can be a gradual process, involving face-to-face tutelage at a mosque or in prison. A long basting in Salafism and Wahhabism—both loathe modernity—can produce the required catalyst, although the vast majority of Salafis spurn an energetic politicization of the faith, preferring to withdraw from this ugly, Westernized world. And, so far as we know, not a single holy warrior who has struck the United States or Europe was a member of al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian-born Islamist movement that had, since its founding in 1928 to the 1980s, been the mothership of Sunni fundamentalism. (Saudi Arabia's massive Wahhabi missionary effort, which once included considerable support to the Brotherhood, became the primary driver of fundamentalism in the 1980s.)

Much of the American right appears to believe that the Brotherhood remains evil incarnate, hence the widespread approval among Republicans of Egyptian general Abdel Fattah el-Sissi's coup against the democratically elected Muslim Brotherhood president and parliament. If the Brotherhood were so instrumental in the generation of contemporary jihadism—and there is no denying the organ-ization's historical role in making Islamism, with all its anti-Western, anti-Jewish, and anti-Christian bigotry, mainstream—why haven't members of the Brotherhood been in the frontline of taking the war to the West?

Islamist movements like the Ikhwan are stone-and-mortar outfits attempting to build Islamic societies, one neighborhood at a time. Its stance toward violence, especially by the young unsanctioned by the Brotherhood's hierarchy, has oscillated since the 1970s between ambiguous to profoundly hostile. Its decision to embrace electoral politics in Egypt, as was even more the case with the reclusive Salafis, shows how the idea of democracy convulsed fundamentalists' historic understanding that a good Muslim society would be born through the conversion of the lower classes, the civilian ruling elite, and, most important, the officer corps. As is still the case with the Brotherhood's Tunisian offshoot, Al-Nahda, the faithful are trying to wrestle with deeply unsettling questions about how good Muslims create a moral public square subject to popular sovereignty. The Ikhwan's often diverse views may be vile, and are always illiberal, but in the Middle East today the organization is, or at least was before Sissi's coup, a conservative force trying to construct democratically more religious countries. Intellectually, that's the polar opposite of the jihadism that has drawn Westernized Muslims to wage war against the Occident.

THE HOLY-WARRIOR MATRIX

In Europe and the United States, counterterrorist officials spend little time tracking the followers of established fundamentalist movements, especially the Brotherhood. Above all else, they are trying to figure out how to spot young men and women who have shown no or few signs of accelerating radicalism but then, in a flash, go jihadist. Youth who have been overcome with a fascination for death and destruction, with killing and martyrdom, are much more likely to come from households where religious traditions and paternal authority have weakened and identities are in flux. A case like Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood killer, whose gradual radicalization really should have drawn closer attention from the FBI and military counterintelligence, isn't common. France's internal security services, unquestionably the best counterterrorist forces in Europe, had several Islamic militants under surveillance who later became terrorists. This is true for both jihadists who returned from Syria and “homegrown” terrorists. Without seeing the case files, it's difficult to assess whether the decisions to drop surveillance were reasonable, but it is entirely understandable how officers, who are constrained by finite resources, must pick and choose among militants who might go rogue. As a German interior-ministry official once remarked to me, the vast majority of the hundreds of German Muslims who've returned from Syria have come home for the right reasons: The Islamic State wasn't what they expected; in the rear-view mirror, they realized Germany was their home. This pattern has surely been true for most of the returnees, regardless of their European origins. Internal security and intelligence services, however, can't be 100 percent sure about their personality profiles, hence the need to deploy surveillance assets widely and the need to move those assets to new targets frequently. Good intelligence will sometimes preempt; often, it just won't matter.

Unlike the United States, Europe is having difficulty absorbing its Muslim denizens in great part because the numbers in some countries are so large, European culture is so heavy, and Christian themes are so deeply ingrained in society. It has not helped that Western Europe's overtaxed societies have generated little economic growth for decades and are especially stingy in producing low-skilled jobs, where poorly educated immigrants can start to work their way up. The religious radicalization of Muslim criminals in Europe, either in prison or in street gangs, is also a serious problem.

Homegrown Islamic terrorism surely springs forth, to an extent, from these troubles, but it is up in the air how much emphasis to give to these factors. The external factors, especially the rise of a charismatic, militarily successful Islamic movement that has explicitly created a modern version of early Islam's conquest society, have been significant in inspiring a few thousand Westernized Muslims to dream of self-sacrifice and holy war. The Islamic State, and the ongoing war between Shiites and aggrieved Sunnis, has captured the imagination of Westernized Sunni Muslims much more effectively than al Qaeda, with its overriding anti-Americanism, has so far done.

We have no idea now how many of the West's Muslims who have gone to fight in Syria actually want to become anti-Western holy warriors. If the experience of the Soviet-Afghan war (1979-1989) and the second Iraq war (2003-2011) offers lessons, the number who volunteer to fight in a hot war against infidels is exponentially greater than those who transition into a terrorist war against the West. Syria may be different. The Sunni rebellion against the Shiite Alawite dictatorship in Syria has obviously echoed among Sunni Muslims in the West more powerfully than any previous affront to Sunni pride. The carnage has been unparalleled. Nonradical Sunni Muslims, especially Arab Sunni Muslims, might seek to fight the Assad regime and its allies in the same way that American and European leftists went to fight alongside deplorable Communists against Francisco Franco and his fascist allies.

It has become a common view among Arab Sunnis that the United States and Europe have aligned themselves with Iran and its Iraqi and Syrian Shiite allies. (Given the Iranian nuclear deal, Barack Obama's retreat from his chemical-weapons red line in 2013, and Secretary of State John Kerry's Syrian diplomacy, that view isn't without foundation.) The pro-Shiite American conspiracy theories, which now drive so many Sunni Muslim conversations, depict the United States as an eager enabler of Iranian imperialism.

This toxic brew, which is destined to get worse if Assad pushes beyond Aleppo deeper into Sunni territory, could continue to galvanize Sunni Muslims in Europe and the United States even if the Islamic State's Syrian capital Raqqa and its Iraqi stronghold in Mosul fall. The Islamic State could implode, collapsing into an organization like al Qaeda, a more tight-knit group whose preeminent aspiration is to kill Americans. Some of its fractured parts could even rejoin al Qaeda. Chastened and chased, its Iraqi core could refocus its effort to rally Iraqi Sunnis to hold fast against the Iraqi Shiite-Iranian-American assault. A guerre à outrance between Sunnis and Shiites is the likely future in Syria, barring Western intervention. Continuing sectarian war in Iraq is a certainty if Iran maintains its Iraqi militias. Revolutionary ecumenicalism, which used to be the guiding faith of Iran's ruling clergy, has evolved into cold-blooded sectarianism, which has so far successfully exploited the 50-50 population split between Sunnis and Shiites in the Near East. Could the Islamic State collapse, the Sunni-Shiite struggle intensify, and the jihad among Western Muslims against the United States and Europe relent? Possibly. But when Sunni-Shiite antagonism superheats, virulently anti-Western propaganda on both sides rises. The odds are decent that the collapse of the Islamic State—the fall of Raqqa and Mosul, and the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the new “caliph”—won't cripple the appeal of anti-Western terrorism among militants who live to kill. The death of Osama bin Laden has had no lasting effect on al Qaeda's efforts to rebuild its forces in Afghanistan and Pakistan and form alliances with radical groups throughout the Greater Middle East.

With this in mind, an Islamic State-Soviet parallel may not work. When the Soviet Union lost its appeal, when the Soviets themselves started to have serious doubts, leftist-inspired terrorism in Europe ran out of gas. The USSR's collapse was the last shovel of earth on violent socialism in the West. Mutatis mutandis: The radical Sunni Islamic war against the West has no homeland (the radical Shiite struggle against the West does: Iran). Destroying the Islamic State, the reified dream of a reborn conquering umma, is certainly an unalloyed good, but it may not offer deliverance.

We do know that violent radicalism among Europe's disenchanted young has a long history. In Europe are today's Muslim disenchanted—those willing to kill and die—more numerous than the hard-left, violent European youth of yesteryear? Muslim families, with their hitherto resilient patriarchal structure, have weakened in Europe. They have weakened in the Middle East, if not collapsed in lands destroyed by decades of pulverizing authoritarian rule, rebellion, and war. Young Muslim men now act in ways that would have been unthinkable—unspeakable—for their grandfathers. In Europe this volatility has been made worse by Merkel's decision to allow in more than a million refugees without regard to gender: Many more young men have come to Europe than women. Integrating young men shorn from families and culturally adrift, men who will find it difficult to find European women willing to become their partners, will prove challenging. A new wave of mail-order wives from the Middle East seems unavoidable. Creating stable family structures for the new immigrants, especially in a Europe where marriage is declining, may prove daunting.

Given Europe's manifest problems, Europeans rarely highlight their successes. Yet nearly one-third of the victims at the massacre on Nice's beaches were Muslim. We don't know how they felt about France or Bastille Day, but it's a good bet that they partook of the holiday with some happiness and fraternity with their non-Muslim compatriots. Ten percent of France's armed forces are Muslim; Muslim officers in the country's internal security services, whom non-Muslim officers often describe as crucial against the Islamic terrorist target, are common. The Western European political and business elites rarely have Muslims among them; however, working-class and middle-class Muslims and non-Muslims do intermarry, especially in France, which is the most important laboratory in Europe for Muslim integration. Surely one of the reasons that the incidence of anti-Muslim violence in France has been low is because most Frenchmen aren't really scared of Muslims.

The presence of Muslim women wearing head-to-ankle spandex on French beaches—the “burkini” controversy that so roiled Frenchmen who see their national identity intertwined with a lightly clad femininity—is unquestionably a sign that Western aspirations have penetrated into traditional Muslim families where women once did not swim, let alone swim amongst male nonbelievers. As with the critics of Abedin in the United States, the anti-Muslim crowd in France can't see victory before them. And it's an excellent bet that many more French Muslim girls opt for bikinis each year than choose the burkini. Islamic terrorism and a widespread anxiety about declining national identity, in great part brought on by the European Union's homogenizing zeal, often prevents Europeans from seeing how magnetic their cultures remain to Muslim immigrants. A possible Muslim failure in Europe—the dream of Muslim fundamentalists like Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular Muslim Brotherhood preacher, who happily envision the failure of integration and the growth of militant religion among the faithful in the West—would be probably more a failure of European imagination and patience than a failure of European culture or a victory of a steadfast, indigestible Islamic identity.

MUSLIM AMERICANIZATION

Americans, who seldom know Europe well, are much more likely to see the dark side of the Muslim experience in the Old World. It's a decent guess that Trump has never had protracted contact with Muslim Americans. Ditto probably for most right-wing Republicans who so fear Muslim refugees. Roughly a quarter of America's Muslims are black Americans whose immediate ancestors were native-born Christians. They have proven nearly impervious to jihadism. Assessing the character of their faith is difficult because “Black Islam” began as a highly heterodox, antiwhite movement and has become more orthodox and less racist as it has aged. Given how bigoted and conspiratorial Black Islam has been, how easily some of its members have thought the worst of America, one might have thought that they would have been on the cutting edge of the holy war against the United States.

And in that surprise we should take hope. The upside of Americanization has held its own against Islamic militancy, the rare toxic combination of factors that turn nonjihadist radicals into killers. There are good reasons to believe that Americanization will eventually extinguish the potential for domestic jihadism. In Europe we are waiting to see whether bloody Islamic extremism can jump from the second to third generation—perhaps the biggest familial-cum-national hurdle in maintaining radicalism. If it doesn't, then Europe's absorption problems and unnerving domestic Islamic terrorism have an end in sight, as the French scholar Olivier Roy writes in his just-published book Le Djihad et la mort, even if a new wave of immigration resets the clock. And we don't know whether the most recent wave of refugees, and their children, will prove less, more, or similarly susceptible to Islamic militancy. Europe's absorptive capacity may actually be as great as Merkel thinks it is. If jihadism jumps from the second to third generation, even after the Islamic State's geographic and theological pretensions have been felled, then we can downgrade the influence of external factors on the generation of Western holy warriors.

There are certainly disturbing elements in the Muslim-American experience. Many American mosques have Saudi funds flowing into them, and that is never good. But the milieus created by these mosques usually don't radiate the infidel hostility that one finds frequently around their Western European counterparts. Although one can find Muslim communities in the United States that have self-ghettoized, it's trivial compared with what one sees in Europe (and in Canada). My son's first and most beloved nanny isn't probably atypical for devout Muslims who enter America's cultural blender. Born in the Philippines, after years in Saudi Arabia, she eventually made her way to America and evolved. Married to a working-class Republican, she had no qualms and abundant, affectionate curiosity about caring for a Jewish-American family.

One of the lasting side-effects of Trump's obnoxious campaign is that he has likely guaranteed Muslim Americans and Muslim immigrants, when they become citizens, will vote Democratic. The familial and personal ethics of faithful Muslims, similar to the mores of orthodox Christians and Jews, don't incline them to vote for a political party that champions gay marriage, transgenderism, and other expressions of sexual liberation. Anti-Muslim sentiment, perhaps more so than even anti-Hispanic anger, is the canary-in-the-coal-mine of conservative American self-confidence. It's an important part of the Small America mentality that will mean the electoral irrelevance of the Republican party if it persists.

The United States could absorb hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Muslim immigrants and refugees, without challenging the country's ability to homogenize even the most refractory, sharia-loving newcomers. Would it increase the chance of Islamic terrorism? Yes. More Muslims in the United States mean more possible targets for recruiters, more chances for a radicalized Muslim to go rogue. America, unlike many European countries that made their choice decades ago by allowing large-scale Muslim immigration, can still choose to turn off the spigot by making family reunification more difficult, raising the bar on skills sought (higher education seems to degrade, if not eliminate, the appeal of becoming a suicidal jihadist), and just saying no to refugees. Washington has, of course, been quietly taking a polite variation of this approach since 9/11.

Beyond the unavoidable cruelties involved here, this more stringent approach perpetuates an illusion, however: that the West isn't intimately involved in the Muslim world's problems, that it can insulate itself behind reinforced borders. Islam and the West are in a globe-altering civilizational struggle, which the Muslim world has been losing for over two hundred years. Islamic terrorism has become so savage in part because hundreds of millions of Muslims, faithful Muslims, have adopted so many Western values and habits. The principal enemy, as radical Muslims always warn, is within.

Muslims in the West are on the cutting edge of this tumultuous transformation, as Muslims everywhere come to terms with their identities in a modernity that has shredded accepted norms, fractured families, and often brutalized politics. The millions of Muslims who have and will seek sanctuary in the West are overwhelmingly on our side of the divide—between those who loathe and fear the West's unstoppable individualism and those who are willing to admit, however reluctantly, that infidels have created a better world in which to raise children. These Muslims may not be our friends, but they are not our enemies. They may well be key to a victory over jihadism. We should have the confidence in our civilization that they do.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.