ABSTRACT
Presence of Muslims in the West has profound significance for both civilizations involved, Western and Islamic, and it has a potential for both good and ill. This analysis focuses in on just one portion of Western Islam, namely those Muslims who live in the United States and who are either immigrants or their descendants. The first challenge in studying Muslim immigrants in the United States is counting them. Like most immigrant communities, Muslims are considerably younger than the national average and heavily weighted toward males. The modern history of Muslim immigration to the United States began a decade or so after the Civil War, consisting mostly of Levantines but also a few from Yemen, South Asia, Indonesia, and elsewhere. Immigrant Muslims tend to concentrate in the professional and entrepreneurial vocations, especially engineering and medicine, which jointly employ about one-third of Muslims in the United States.
