Today I intend, as much as time permits, to highlight a few of the findings from the Pew Research Center poll of American Muslims. Here is the first: 47% of what Pew says are 2.35 million Muslims in America, or a little more than one million Muslims, consider themselves to be Muslims first, Americans second. The other bars in the graph above show that to be a much lower percentage than in Britain, Germany, and Spain: 81% of Muslims in Britain consider themselves to be Muslims first; 66% in Germany, and 69% in Spain. In France, as under fire as it is for not assimilating its Muslim immigrants (although they have resisted assimilation at every step), it’s 46%.
Anyway, all religions make absolute claims, so this is not really unusual or unexpected. Most serious Christians in America probably consider themselves Christians first and Americans second. But given the nature of Islam as a political and social system as well as a religious faith, this finding has important implications for whether these one million Muslims would like to see Islamic law, Sharia, in the United States, and will be working to that end. I haven’t read it all yet, but I doubt that the Pew poll asks pointed questions like that.