Ibrahim N. Abusharif: I flipped through that Baylor study on American religion, which you cited on your website, and was very disappointed to see that the
Muslim presence in America was reduced to anonymity, somenondescript part of the “other” in a pie chart. The word “Muslim” appears on a few other pages, as in a questionnaire asking whether or not a Muslim (among a list of candidates, like racists, atheists, and homosexuals) “should be allowed to teach at a high school.”

Now, I have a sense of method, and quite frankly I’m unable to respect this study that purports to focus “upon improving our understanding of American religion” that yet misses a point that many before have made, namely, the adherents to Islam are part of a growing religious phenomenon in the United States. Baylor’s survey sample is obviously too small, and some rigor alarms should have gone off when the sample respondents did not include a sufficient number of Muslims to have made a separate demographic treatment. So Muslims got shoved here: “Other: A collection of non-Christian and smaller Christian groups that do not fit in any other category. Representative groups include Buddhist, Christian Science, Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon), Hindu, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Muslim, Orthodox (Eastern, Russian, Greek), and Unitarian Universalist.”

I have no problem with “others”. I like them, in fact. I have “others” for friends, and my dentist is a devout “other”. And I’ve been published in an “other” newspaper of national repute. But there are numerous studies and polls and surveys elsewhere that put the Muslim population in the U.S. comparable to, if not greater than, the Jewish population. The point here is not about getting a piece of the pie, but about a survey undercounting or underestimating the Muslim portion of America’s religious experience and relegating them to a potential list of undesirables that Americans might object to teaching high school. This isn’t some, “Look how you treated them and how you treated us,” sort of thing. I mean, my relatives alone that I can count could earn a slice of that chart.

I’m no rigor-cop, but if my sample did not produce what is intuitively significant or what has been reproduced in other surveys, then it’s time to expand the sample to at least double the size, if not triple. It would have taken more time and, perhaps, more funding, but then you’d have a study that really does shed light on religion in America.

God bless the “others.”

Ibrahim N. Abusharif an editor at Starlatch Press and a freelance writer in the Chicago area.