Shadi Hamid Makes Outlandish Claims About Islam, Assimilation, And America

Ordinarily, when a man affirms that American culture and Islam are mutually exclusive, that Muslims cannot assimilate because their allegiance to Sharia law trumps everything else, and that their religion will “make people feel uncomfortable,” you can assume he’s making a case for immigration restrictions.

Then along comes Shadi Hamid, a Muslim Washington Post columnist who happily asserts all these things in an ostensible effort to make the opposite case: reassure Americans that these are qualities they should embrace.

In reality, of course, Hamid’s arguments are likely to have the opposite effect, repel even those who harbored hopes that Muslim immigrants and their descendants would be assimilable. Indeed, he spent a great part of Wednesday dealing with the hornet’s nest that his op-ed kicked off online.

But there is a clue that Hamid must have known he was being disingenuous. He made sure to throw in a caveat: his co-religionists are American now, at least in what he claims is a vague “constitutional” sense, and aren’t going anywhere anyway.

Hamid, it is important to add, is not just anyone. He is a bona fide member of the establishment.

He is not just a columnist at the Post, where he published the piece; he is also a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, a former fellow at Stanford University, a former senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and the director of research at its Doha Center.

In other words, Hamid has shaped the thinking on Islam’s place in America from the highest of ivory towers and now popularizes it through a regular gig at one of the country’s most prominent newspapers.

And yet, rebutting his claims is not hard. Some are untrue (he wrote that most American Muslims were “born and raised here,” earning an X community note showing that 58% are actually immigrants), other claims are only partly so, and still others are just downright specious.

Among the main arguments were the following: America no longer has a unifying culture to conserve; assimilation means secularization, and thus degradation; and Republicans should ally themselves with unassimilated Muslims because they have anti-gay views (yes, he really makes this argument).

In his piece, Hamid writes that “America was not founded on the assumption that its citizens would eventually come to agree on foundational questions.”

The Founders would like to have a word. They created the new country precisely on the premise that, if it took in immigrants, they would have to, as Alexander Hamilton put it, “get rid of foreign and acquire American attachments.”

Not for nothing did they make E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — the country’s motto. The evidence is far too large to go through in a piece of this size, but numerous quotes from many of the Founders to this effect can be found in this comprehensive study I authored more than a decade ago.

But let’s quote at least George Washington, who wrote to John Adams that his hope with immigrants was that “by an intermixture with our people, they, or their descendants, get assimilated to our customs, measures, and laws: in a word, soon become one people.”

On the question of Sharia, Hamid avers that “practicing Muslims — despite being repeatedly asked to — can’t disavow ‘sharia’ even if they wanted to,” because it “includes guidelines on how to pray, fast and otherwise observe what it means to submit to God.”

But Sharia is a large system derived from Muslim sacred texts and their interpretation.

Many Muslim countries and clerics have interpreted things in ways that severely disadvantage more than 50% of society, women. Sharia is invoked to impose oppressive rules from dress codes to rules on inheritance, testimony, mobility, etc. I dare Hamid to show any evidence of conservative support for any of this.

Sharia is even invoked by some Muslim states in the punishment of homosexuality. Some American conservatives will rail against LGBTQ ideology when pushed on minors. But all conservatives would find the notion of throwing gays off buildings stomach-churning.

Thus, though Hamid is disingenuous throughout his arguments, he is particularly so when he says that “You’d think Republicans would sense an electoral opportunity.”

I don’t know about Republicans, but the conservative “crusade” as I understand it — and as President Donald Trump has pursued it, with universities, museums, etc. — is to conserve the unified American culture that Hamid not only repudiates but claims no longer exists (he writes in a tweet “There is no longer any unified culture or set of supreme values that enjoy a consensus. We can lament this, but it’s a fact”).

First, as the X poster Noah Smith pointed out, there is plenty of evidence that “we actually agree on a lot more than politics suggests.”

But it is the Left — which denigrates this culture as much as Hamid — that has made a wartime alliance with political Islam. They sense that they both seek to deconstruct Western culture. In Europe, this is called “the Red-Green Alliance.”

To be sure, each side senses they will fall out with each other as soon as they destroy the unified culture. But medium-term alliances win wars, as World War II attests. (My money is on the Islamists crushing the silly Leftists if this dystopia ever came to pass).

The fight to save the West — against secularism, family breakdown, and the atomized individual — is real. But it presupposes that we save the unifying culture, which may be on life support yet still redeemable.

And for that I can quote evidence from one Shadi Hamid, who left no doubt in a 2016 Atlantic piece on the Ottoman Empire that he understands that “spiritual unity” was foundational if there is a hope of establishing a legitimate political order.

That is why assimilation remains an indispensable condition in any land that takes in immigrants. Islam is one of the world’s great religions, but its practitioners don’t get a pass.

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Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo Senior Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. His book “BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution” is now available.