Would you want to be a Muslim in the US military?

One of the few complicated moments in Islam in America comes when the relentlessly upbeat Rageh Omar attempts to interview an Arab soldier in the US army. The whole scene is clumsily, defensively stage-managed by the Pentagon.

The interview has to be conducted anonymously, by phone. Little of substance is said, and even then the upshot is that the soldier reveals he is not happy and considering getting out.

Life for a Muslim in the US military remains tough and unfriendly, seems to be the message. The American Muslim soldier is trusted neither by the security establishment nor by his or her community.

This impression is only reinforced by the most depressing sequence in this generally optimistic documentary about the history of Islam in the United States: a conversation with James Yee, a former US Army captain and Muslim chaplain to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay.

Yee, for those who do not already know the story, was a Chinese American who converted to Islam in the early 1990s. He was initially commended for his work at Guantanamo then arrested on charges of spying and sedition. He was subjected to an intense investigation and reportedly held for 76 days in the very kind of solitary confinement he had witnessed at Guantanamo.

In the end, all charges were dropped. But, understandably, he was left with little fondness for resuming his military career.

The scenes with Yee and the nameless, faceless American Arab soldier make one reflect on what must presumably be the unusual courage and complex psychological motivations of such people. 

I am referring to the individuals from a minority community – and a minority treated with suspicion by many in their adopted country – who sign up to serve in the armed forces, whatever the consequences. (I have often wondered what my German great-granduncle was thinking when he joined the Australian army not long before the First World War; he ended up gassed by his former countrymen in the trenches of the Western Front.)

Yet it takes the pioneers of one such generation to build a truly representative national defence force for future generations – and to prove both the loyalty of their own communities and the multicultural character of the state to which they belong.

Well-meaning and liberal-minded governments can do all they like to make life in the armed forces a viable option for migrant and minority communities. Ultimately, individuals need to chance the first step and make the first, often terrible and very personal sacrifices.

But before we leap to condemn the United States for the lot of its perhaps 10,000-15,000 Muslim warriors, it is worth considering how representative are the militaries (or, for that matter, the parliaments) of other multiracial societies - Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, Australia - that might consider themselves more enlightened.

In this country, the government is desperate to build greater cultural diversity in the armed forces. There are good practical reasons for this, beyond the imperatives of political symbolism and multicultural resilience. But the going is slow.

This documentary presents an exceptionally positive (and who is to say inaccurate?) picture of the place of Islam in America, taking in such fascinating detours as Thomas Jefferson’s Koran, the respect for Islam as a pillar of civilization in the original decoration of the Library of Congress, and the deep origin of blues music in the Muezzin’s call to prayer among Muslim slaves. 

But until a community – any community – can comfortably play its part in the defence of a nation, has it truly been accepted? And with whom lies the onus for change?

Postscript: This post was written before the terrible killings at Fort Hood in early November 2009, by US army psychiatrist Major Nidal Hasan, and the attention and questions this tragedy has raised.