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notions of justice has been crucially de- cisive in producing the lively activism of this decade among American Muslims on matters of women and gender. It would be a very different story if this were America of a hundred years ago, when women did not have the right to vote, let alone the many other rights they have won since. It would be very different, too, if this were America of some fifty years ago, when it was legal to exclude blacks from “whites only” restau- rants, hotels, latrines, drinking fountains, libraries, and so on, as it would
    also be very different if this were America even of the 1980 s in relation to
    gays.
    In both traditions, Islamic and American, at different moments in their shifting histories both women and minorities were not among the groups included as entitled to equal justice. The emergence of this wave of Islamic activism in relation to issues of women and gender is thus the product of the convergence of key elements in the teachings of Islamism with the ideals and understanding of justice in America in these very spe- cific decades. Today evidently for a significant group among Islamist- influenced American Muslims who are living their lives at the confluence of those traditions—a group spanning the spectrum from Mattson to Kahf, Useem, Wadud, and Nomani—the justice they are working for is inclusive of women and minorities.
    This group includes people based in ISNA and the MSA, and peo- ple therefore who are by definition at the conservative end of the spec- trum of Islamic practice. Still, it would probably be accurate to describe
    ISNA- and MSA-based women concerned implicitly or explicitly with issues of justice for women as most distinctly at the liberal end of the conservative spectrum: for concern for equal justice for women does in- deed represent a departure from the Islamist blueprint where gender is- sues are seen as necessarily and properly grounded in gender separation and also typically in a notion of gender hierarchy.
    Consequently, it is important to note that it is not only in relation to gender issues that some Islamist-based American Muslims have re- vised and expanded their understanding of the meaning of justice in light of the American understanding of justice. In the home countries Is- lamists did not (and do not) espouse a notion of the equal rights of mi- norities any more than they espoused the notion of equal rights for women. But today in America, where Muslims are themselves a minor- ity, Islamists do emphatically embrace and support the idea of equal jus- tice for minorities. This is clearly the case with CAIR, a Muslim American organization with roots in Islamism that is playing a prominent role in supporting and defending the civil rights of Muslims. By definition and by virtue of its activities in defense of civil rights and equal rights for Muslim Americans, CAIR now, in a clear departure from Islamist views in the home countries, grounds itself and its activism and its very rai- son-d’être in the American definition of justice as inclusive of justice for minorities as fully equal citizens.
    In the confluence of histories that is unfolding now in America— a confluence signaled among other things by the growing commonness of the hijab, the phenomenon that I set out in the first place to explore
    —it is clearly the Islamist understanding of Islam which has not only come to gain institutional and public dominance but which also, ironi- cally, with its commitments to activism in the service of the poor and in pursuit of social justice, is now most easily and naturally merging with the American tradition of activism in the cause of justice and social change. This tradition arguably is the signature American tradition: rooted in the idea of America as a work-in-progress, a society always striving forward, in struggle after struggle, toward an ever fuller and greater realization of the goal of social justice for all, through the com- mitment of its