re: #20 Bob Levin

That won’t work. I have a very difficult time believing that if Hanukkah didn’t fall in December that American Jews would invent some custom and call it “Jewish”. As Americans we already have other holidays, why do we need to invent a fake Muslim one?

Or maybe you could since Jewishness is also an ethnicity related to a specific people, a specific identity. Islam is not. Islamic “culture” is specifically tied to Islam as a religion. The other cultural parts, which are often mistaken for Islam, are not in fact Islamic—they’re Bosnian, Turkish, Berber, Egyptian, Somalian, Arab, Persian, Indian, etc. We are not one tribe or even 12 similar tribes, we are a bunch of disparate tribes tied together by Islam, therefore without Islam we have no common culture.

I don’t think non-Muslims fully understand the importance of that single bond that is so essential to uniting 1.5 billion people. My point is that if a custom were to be invented that was distinctly “American Muslim”, it would essentially be meaningless to us in terms of our (larger) Muslim identity. Gah! It’s confoundingly difficult to explain, so I’m going to stop trying.

Let me just say this: If, as you claim, selling my spirituality, my integrity, is the price of acceptance by non-Mulsims—and I don’t believe it is—then I’ll live without it.