Homeland Insecurity: How Immigrant Muslims Naturalize America in Islam MUCAHIT BILICI John Jay College, City University of New York INTRODUCTION There are approximately six million Muslims in the United States. They come from a great variety of backgrounds. Among the few things they have in common are Islam as a religion and their American experience. The latter pro- duces some previously unencountered consequences, including the rise of English as the language of Muslim ummah (community) and the reality of being a “minority” in a non-Muslim society. The American experience also raises questions of citizenship, identity, and integration. Most studies of Muslims in America focus on the paths of immigration (Haddad and Esposito 2000; Haddad and Smith 2002) and the challenges of civic and political participation (Bukhari et al. 2004; Moore 1995; Cesari 2004; Bagby 2001). Rubrics under which the Muslim presence in America is typically studied include media and popular cultural representations of Islam and Muslims (Shaheen 2001; Bilici 2005), stereotypes and racialization (Jamal and Naber 2008), post-9/11 backlash and discrimination (Bakalian and Bozorgmehr 2009; Cainkar 2009, Howell and Jamal 2008), the broader question of Islamophobia (Shryock 2010), dynamics of community formation (Schmidt 2004; Abraham and Shryock 2000; Metcalf 1996), and gender issues (Read 2004). To these one can add works on Muslim slaves (Austin 1997; Diouf 1998), converts (Abdallah 2006), and the African American experience (Jackson 2005). As a result of 9/11, popular writing representing journalistic interest in American Muslims (Abdo 2006; Barrett 2007) shares the shelves with Muslim self-justification and apology (Safi 2003; El Fadl 2005). The existing literature on American Islam, however, seems stuck in the diasporic moment, still producing snapshots of individual ethnic communities. The post- diasporic moment and the process of cultural settlement remain to be explored. In other words, while attention has been paid to the ways in which Islam and Muslims are treated by American state and society as objects of securitization and exclusion, what has gone almost completely unnoticed is a parallel process taking place within the imagination of Muslims themselves: as important as the Comparative Studies in Society and History 2011;53(3):595–622. 0010-4175/11 $15.00 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2011 doi:10.1017/S0010417511000260 595