Collective Community Engagement: Muslim Political Behavior

• In Event: Religion, Minorities, and Nationalism in the U.S.

Abstract

In the face of the current presidential administration, certain marginalized groups have had additional focus placed upon them, and Muslims are chief amongst them. Hate crimes targeting Muslims, government policies profiling Muslims, and anti-Muslim public sentiment have increased within the current presidential administration. Muslims in the U.S. comprise a wide range of communities and histories, but recent patterns have affected nearly all Muslims. This paper begins by looking at traditional measures of minority political behavior with a focus on group consciousness and extends the analysis by introducing an additional construct – ummah consciousness. This belief in collective community (ummah consciousness) is an important construct that taps into Muslim religious belief, but may also introduce an additional construct that other racialized minority groups may uphold as well.

In prior surveys of Muslims in the U.S., the metric utilized to explore Muslim belief was religious observance, specifically measurements of how often Muslims pray, attend the mosque or perform the annual Ramadan fasting ritual. What existing race and ethnic politics literature has not touched upon is how belief in a collective community is part of Muslim communal histories. I measure ummah consciousness by measuring the belief in the idea “that issues that affect Muslims in other countries, are ones that Muslims in the U.S. should care about as well”. As the paper’s discussion on the concept of ‘ummah’ reveals, belief in a collective community is a key element of the current Muslim imaginary that has not been explored in current literature on Muslim American political engagement.

As such, while racial group consciousness is meaningful, what may offer a more complete understanding of Muslims’ political behavior, is to include the dimension of ummah consciousness within the construct of group consciousness for Muslims in the United States. Is ummah consciousness associated with political participation for Muslims? This chapter draws on original data from a nationally representative online survey I conducted in 2019, which measures the opinions and attitudes of Muslims in the U.S. It examines whether the belief specifically in the notion of Muslim community (ummah consciousness) is associated with an increase in political behavior.

The data reveals important findings that contribute to our understanding of Muslim political behavior. First, I find that the type of political behavior we measure matters. I examine respondents’ likelihood to vote, and respondents’ likelihood to participate in a Muslim-specific type of participation. For traditional political participation, as measured by voting, I find the one traditional dimension of group consciousness, group commonality, as statistically significant in predicting likelihood to vote. Moreover, traditional resource-based variables, income and education, are positively correlated with voting in the first model. Turning to Muslim-specific participation, I then assess what predicts the likelihood to participate in a political protest in response to Donald Trump’s immigration ban. I find that ummah consciousness is a significant predictor for political participation. These findings offer an important revelation on what group-based resources Muslims may utilize. It also helps better explain their motivation to participate in the political arena and identify what conditions may make a specific type of political participation more persuasive for Muslims to engage within. Ummah consciousness is a dimension that may help better understand group-specific types of political participation and the findings help us better understand this relationship.

Commitment to collective community is important to understand, and may be a belief that increases in reaction to the current rise in authoritarian regimes that target the marginalized. This paper offers a new dimension to help us understand the consequences to the political behavior of racial and ethnic minorities, by focusing on the case of Muslims in the United States.

Author

• Nura Sediqe, Princeton University