After a long day at the office and a hectic job, when you get home, you go back to the family and kids, and you forget everything, so having a family and having a child is the greatest blessing in my opinion.
What we did was a demographic study of the Muslim population all around the world. We looked at how many Muslims live in each country today and how many Muslims lived in each country 20 years ago, and we projected forward using the best demographic techniques to try to estimate.
What we're seeing with the Muslim population in the United States is the pretty dramatic growth in absolute numbers, more than doubling from about 2.6 million to about 6.2 million, and roughly doubling in percentage terms, to put that in context.
That means that roughly speaking, Muslims by the year 2030 might be about as large in the United States as Episcopalians or Jews are in the US population today. That's an important doubling, but it's still a very small percentage of the population, still under 2%.
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When you're talking about such a small population, how is it going to retain its identity? I think the Islamophobia we're seeing is forcing these very ethnically, culturally, socially, and religiously different Muslims to come together.
Muhammad Ali would come up, and now if you ask people what they think of when they think of a Muslim, who are they going to name, and we're only talking about five decades? That shift has been incredibly traumatic for the American Muslim community because I think precisely when we stopped emphasizing the arts, culture, and heritage in all these different ways, we lost the ability to communicate.
Islam in a way that really makes sense to about 20% of the enslaved Africans that helped build this country was Muslim, so Muslims have a history in this country from before its founding; its founders served honorably in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. The only Muslims in the US Congress, for example, are African Americans; they're named Keith and Andre; they don't stick out in the way that people would assume that they would stick out as Muslims.
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It's not very easy to become French if being French means an ethnicity, a language, a history, and a culture; being an American, that's a very open definition; it's very easy to become an American. For me, America is the best place to live because here you have religious freedom, you have the choice, you have the right to say yes or no, and you have the right to protest.
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