How can Muslims fit into Western society? Should they? Youshaa Patel, a professor of religious studies at Lafayette College in Pennsylvania, takes those as personal questions and examines them in the light of history. He considers how Muslims have decided to differentiate themselves from non-Muslims over the centuries, but the issue is also contemporary. The West is faced with a growing Muslim population. At the same time, Muslims in the West are faced with the emergence of a new Islam, one that differs significantly from traditional thinking about and practice of the religion. Who is a Muslim, and who isn’t? How do Muslims interact with those who aren’t? For Muslims in the West today, the answers to these questions entail a position on the relationship between religion and state. Can a pious Muslim be a loyal citizen of a state that is not Islamic?

Patel begins with anecdotes from his childhood in the U.K. and then the U.S. When he was in primary school in Scotland, a teacher set him, the only non-white student in the class, apart from his classmates during lessons. His mother was appalled. She objected that the teacher was impeding his ability to socialize and fit in, essential for every child (and perhaps more so if he looks different from his peers). Years later, in 2002, as a recent college graduate in Chicago, he listened as the preacher at a mosque emphasized that pious Muslims should dress differently and in general be noticeably different from non-Muslims. The two anecdotes represent two extremes of a contentious debate: Should Muslims conform to the prevailing culture even in a non-Muslim country? Or should they distinguish themselves from it?

“Whoever imitates a people becomes one of them,” according to a hadith, a saying of Mohammed. Many scholars understand that to be an admonition against assimilation into non-Muslim societies. Ibn Taymiyya, a 14th-century scholar who continues to inspire jihadists, taught that imitation of Arabs was a path to holiness for non-Arab Muslims. “Arabs are more inclined to good works than other people,” he wrote. “When the sharia prohibited Muslims from imitating non-Arabs, it meant to include all old or new practices of the non-Arab unbelievers and also those of the non-Arab Muslims which were not in vogue among the early converts.”

Patel contrasts Ibn Taymiyya’s hard-line views with the relative tolerance that has had a place in Islam throughout its history. He focuses on Najm al-Din al-Ghazzi, a scholar from Damascus in the early 17th century. Patel writes that al-Ghazzi’s work The Virtue of Awakening to What Has Been Transmitted about Imitation has been overlooked in both Western and Islamic scholarship. Al-Ghazzi argues that the hadith about imitation is prescriptive, not proscriptive, not an admonition against imitating peoples who might lead Muslims astray. It is rather an encouragement to imitate those who are worthy of imitation.

Al-Ghazzi made an important point that even Patel, however, overlooks. In a passage not mentioned by Patel, al-Ghazzi cites a hadith in which Mohammed chastises a follower for having a Christian scribe. Al-Ghazzi then criticizes contemporary Muslim leaders who have hired Christians or Jews in their administrations. “When the princes of this day went against this principle and hired Christians or Jews as scribes and workers, Muslims by necessity honor them or pay them money to be served by them, and that is a humiliation to Muslims. And if this is the case when putting them in a position of administration, what to make of imitating them if it stems from approval of their ways?” While al-Ghazzi takes a broader approach to the imitation hadith, it is clear from his treatise The Virtue of Awakening that those to be imitated for their good works are necessarily Muslims. Even when taken in the context of its era, it is hardly a vision of pluralism.

Nonetheless, al-Ghazzi was a harbinger of the nahda, or Arab Renaissance, as it is sometimes called, a 19th-century efflorescence of Muslim thought. Patel offers a corrective to the common narrative that a progressive shift had occurred in Arab thought before European colonialism led to a regression in the 20th century. As Patel points out, Muhammad Abduh, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, and other 19th-century reformist thinkers faced fierce resistance to their desire to move Arab and Muslim society in a decidedly more liberal direction. Patel mentions their opinion that Muslims could dress according to the social norms of the societies they lived in. That opinion is not shared by all Muslims in the 21st century, as the sermon that Patel heard in Chicago demonstrated.

The reason for allowing adoption of the appearance and practices of non-Muslims may be less a respect for the principle of tolerance than a shrewd calculation of self-interest. Patel points out that Rashid Rida (1865–1935), a disciple of Muhammad Abduh’s from what is now northern Lebanon, “defends the practice of Muslims imitating non-Muslims (that is, Europeans) when it strategically benefits the community of believers; these include matters of political economy such as strengthening the nation’s defense and increasing its wealth.” Patel continues that, in Rida’s view, “imitation in this context is not merely permissible, but may even be necessary, according to the shari’a. Alternatively, it is better for Muslims to discard foreign practices that are inconsequential to the community, but if they cannot avoid adopting them, they should at least block out their foreign origins from their minds.” Imitation of non-Muslims is not a good in itself but may be a means of advancing the interests of the Muslim community.

“Recent scholarship has thus shown that there are ample scriptural, ethical, and theological resources within Islam to reimagine the religious Other,” Patel concludes. His is a noble effort to find a way for Islam to negotiate being a minority religion in pluralistic societies and to see non-Muslims as equals. The balance of Islamic history and thought is against him, and discrimination against non-Muslims remains the norm in most of the Islamic world. It is important for Western Muslims to decide whether the future of Islam in their countries is represented by the religion’s traditional vision of itself or by Patel’s. Their decision, whatever it may be, will for generations to come be crucial to our attitudes toward immigration and the assimilation of immigrants.