American Muslims frustrated by the suspicions with which they are regarded

congregations to monitor for any sign of radicalization, but they have also complained bitterly about the use of informants, worried the innocent will be caught up in the net police have set for criminals.

Historians, and several Muslim leaders, see similarities to the prejudice Roman Catholics and Jews experienced as newcomers to America starting in the nineteenth century. The hierarchical Catholic church was denounced as a threat to the separation of church and state. Synagogues were banned in many states, and Jews were viewed as undermining the nation’s Christian character.

Mark Silk, director of the Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Connecticut, said the experience of Japanese Americans in the Second World War more closely parallels the current plight of Muslims. After the Pearl Harbor bombing, Silk said Americans asked, “Are our Japanese different from those Japanese?”

“I don’t think we’re about to round up all the Muslims and put them in concentration camps,” Silk said. “But I don’t think we’ve ever seen the degree of legitimacy given by people in positions of authority to straight-up, anti-Islamic expression.”

The Muslim Public Affairs Council, a Los Angeles-based advocacy group, blames bigotry on “a small cottage industry” that foments prejudice on the Web and elsewhere. These organizations have dramatically expanded their reach since 2001 through social media, and have made celebrities of Muslim converts to Christianity who disparage Islam as thoroughly violent.

“The reality is that there are very well-funded initiatives to spread misinformation about Islam,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America, an umbrella group for thousands of Muslims. “For the Muslim community, we are finding ourselves so stretched. We’re a young community.”

U.S. Muslim condemnations of terrorism have failed to persuade other Americans.

• This year, in response to recent cases of young Americans lured into jihadist movements by Internet preaching, nine prominent U.S. Muslim scholars made a YouTube video denouncing radicalism.
• Other American Islamic scholars have written edicts, or fatwas, saying violence is contrary to Islamic teaching.
• The Islamic Society of North America dedicated its 2005 annual convention, which draws tens of thousands of Muslims, to fighting terrorism and extremism.

Suspicion, however, persists among other Americans that Muslims say one thing in public and something different among themselves. U.S. Muslim

groups that still accept foreign funding are the most vulnerable to this charge.

“I think that part of the reason the general American public is not listening is the common human impulse to fear and mistrust what we don’t know or understand,” said Abdullahi An-Na’im, an expert in Islam and human rights at Emory University School of Law.

Throughout the recent anti-Muslim outburst, American Muslim leaders have taken pains to acknowledge that many in their community have prospered in the United States, and that Muslims have more freedom here than they would in many other countries. At the same time, fatigue is setting in. They wonder: How many more times will they have to condemn violent extremism before non-Muslim Americans believe them?