Ali's America

Anyone know what happened to a podcast called "Ali's America"? This was done by a rather conservative American from the heartland who happened to be Muslim, happened to be a Bush supporter in fact, and had an interesting, quirky sense of humor.

I've long been interested in the interaction of Islam and the United States, the way each poses challenges to the ohter, and just the general way they interact. America is a challenge to the Islamic tradition of religious states. Muslims who want to be Muslim in America will have to be Muslim on their own. The state neither enforces Islam nor persecutes it. They also have no normative Islam to reference. All the various immigrant and convert groups have different conceptions of Islam and none of them dominates. Pan-Islam can't be romantic anymore.

Islam challenges the US not only by having a stronger tradition of ties to the state than any other major religion, but in other ways as well. I'm not just talking about the al-Qa'ida challenge here, but the communitarian nature of Islam, it's close family values, and the potential it has (as Malcolm X pointed out) for being anti-racist.

Not that Muslims are necessarily more racist than other immigrants. The largest group of converts is African Americans, yet most immigrants are whites, not always anxious to associate with blacks. That's another challenge the US poses for Muslims. Can they really live up to their ideals on their own? America might be better if they did.