American Muslims in the Age of President Trump

Muslims, both within America and around the world, are the religious community that is most affected by the presidency of Donald J. Trump. I write this Spotlight reflection as both an American citizen—a Muslim from Los Angeles—and a scholar of Islam in North America. Wearing either or both hats, it is clear that the next three years of the Trump administration will continue to be difficult times to be an American Muslim. These difficulties were anticipated in the last century by John Carpenter in his 1996 film Escape from L.A. In the film, set in 2013, Los Angeles has become a penal colony for those who do not conform to the high moral standards of the American president. One of the residents is a young Iranian woman named Taslima, who tells the protagonist: “I was a Muslim. Then they made that illegal.”
In the last century, I used to think that that line was very funny. Now I’m not so sure. In the 2006 film V for Vendetta, set in a future neo-Fascist Britain, one of the characters (Dietrich) is taken away by the authorities for owning a copy of the Qur’an. As a presidential candidate, Mr. Trump said famously on CNN on March 9, 2016, that “I think Islam hates us,” and his first year as president has not been a good one for American Muslims.