{"id":6013,"date":"2026-04-09T00:41:26","date_gmt":"2026-04-09T00:41:26","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/09\/washington-post-columnist-argues-muslims-shouldnt-have-to-assimilate-in-america\/"},"modified":"2026-04-09T00:41:26","modified_gmt":"2026-04-09T00:41:26","slug":"washington-post-columnist-argues-muslims-shouldnt-have-to-assimilate-in-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/09\/washington-post-columnist-argues-muslims-shouldnt-have-to-assimilate-in-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Washington Post columnist argues Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate in America"},"content":{"rendered":"
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NEW<\/span>You can now listen to Fox News articles!\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid is making the case that Muslims<\/a> don’t need to assimilate in America.<\/p>\n

“The assimilation defense \u2014 look how well we\u2019ve integrated<\/i> \u2014 is satisfying to make. But it concedes a premise I no longer accept: that a minority community\u2019s right to be in the United States depends on its willingness to converge with the cultural mainstream. It shouldn\u2019t depend on that. It shouldn\u2019t depend on anything,” Hamid wrote<\/a> Wednesday.<\/p>\n

Hamid, who is Muslim, titled his piece “I\u2019m tired of proving I belong in America,” responding to rhetoric from GOP lawmakers like Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., who last month wrote on X, “Muslims don\u2019t belong in American society<\/a>,” and Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who recently said, “I\u2019m ready to get rid of the Muslims.”<\/p>\n

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Rep. Andy Ogles, R-Tenn., made headlines last month when he declared “Muslims don’t belong in American society.”<\/span> (Heather Diehl\/Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

“Over the past decade, surveys have shown that American Muslims are patriotic<\/u><\/a>, civically engaged<\/u><\/a> and more likely<\/u><\/a> than the U.S. general public to say that political violence is never justified. You\u2019d think that would be enough. Except it shouldn\u2019t have to be. And this is where it gets uncomfortable \u2014 for me, at least,” Hamid told readers, citing various data.<\/p>\n

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“Muslims are<\/i> different in certain ways. How could they not be?” he later wrote. “Islam shapes how its adherents think about family, sexuality and what it means to live a good life. Simply put, Islam is also a more public religion than Christianity. Muslim prayer is visually striking and often communal. If a Muslim doesn\u2019t drink alcohol or fasts during Ramadan, that will be more noticeable to others.”<\/p>\n

“Moreover, practicing Muslims \u2014 despite being repeatedly asked to \u2014 can\u2019t disavow ‘sharia’ even if they wanted to. Sharia, roughly translated as Islamic law, includes guidelines on how to pray, fast and otherwise observe what it means to submit to God in daily practice,” Hamid continued.<\/p>\n

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Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid argued Muslims shouldn’t have to assimilate in America.\u00a0<\/span> (Serhat Cagdas\/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

The Post columnist insisted Muslims have “increasingly integrated into American civic life” while maintaining their religious commitments versus other minority groups, which he says begs the question “Why do Muslims need to be like everyone else?” He went on to cite data showing rates of Catholics<\/a> among the Latino community have drastically fallen and “American acceptance” led to the decline of the Jewish population in the U.S. and the rise of their intermarriage rates.<\/p>\n

“What strikes me about these stories is how much they resemble each other,” Hamid wrote. “The deal is always the same: You can stay, but you have to become less yourself. Less distinctively Muslim, less traditionally Jewish, less recognizably Latino. The specifics of your faith and culture \u2014 the things that make your community a community rather than a collection of individuals \u2014 are treated as obstacles on the path to real Americanness. The left and the right enforce this expectation. The right says: Assimilate or get out. The left, more gently: Assimilate and we\u2019ll celebrate you. But the endpoint is the same.”<\/p>\n

CLICK HERE FOR THE LATEST MEDIA AND CULTURE NEWS<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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Hamid called Islam a “more public religion than Christianity” and that Muslim prayer is “visually striking and often communal.”<\/span> (Andrew Lichtenstein\/Corbis via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Hamid went on to suggest that Muslim Americans are “more resistant to the secular pull of American culture” and their defense “should not rest on how ‘mainstream'” they become.<\/p>\n

“A Muslim who prays five times a day and believes homosexuality is sinful is not less American than a Muslim who drinks alcohol and hasn\u2019t been to a mosque in years. An evangelical Christian who believes marriage is between a man and a woman and home-schools his children is not less American than a mainline Protestant who marches in Pride parades. These are deep disagreements about how to live, and a country that is serious about pluralism shouldn\u2019t treat them as problems to be solved,” he wrote.<\/p>\n

He added, “America was not founded on the assumption that its citizens would eventually come to agree on foundational questions. It was founded on the more radical proposition that they wouldn\u2019t \u2014 that people who disagree about God, religion and the good life could share a country anyway. Not because they would converge over time, but because convergence was beside the point. The question isn\u2019t whether Muslims, Jews or Latinos will change. They will. The question is whether America will let them do it on their own terms.”<\/p>\n

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

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Joseph A. Wulfsohn is a media reporter for Fox News Digital. Story tips can be sent to joseph.wulfsohn@fox.com and on Twitter: @JosephWulfsohn.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NEWYou can now listen to Fox News articles! Washington Post columnist Shadi Hamid is making the case that Muslims don’t need to assimilate in America. “The assimilation defense \u2014 look how well we\u2019ve integrated \u2014 is satisfying to make. But it concedes a premise I no longer accept: that a minority community\u2019s right to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6014,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-6013","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-conservative-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/conservative-politics.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}